Since 2006, Amiga Kit has been attending Amiwest, an annual Amiga event held in Sacramento, California.
It is hosted by Sacramento Amiga Computer Club. This was the twenty ninth show so next year is going to be quite a milestone in their show’s history. It is a testament to the hard work of their club members, headed by Brian Deneen, club president.
This year was a wonderful coming together of the North American community and quite a few international attendees. We once again met many of our customers and long standing friends. Many of which have been supporting us since 2004.
The event is spread over a weekend, with the Saturday being the main day.
Trevor Dickinson gave the opening presentation on the Saturday morning. It revealed the notable progress that had been made by Steven Solie and his group of developers on implementing SMP in ExecSG. On the show floor were X5000 systems demonstrating the new ExecSG in the real world with multicore working- it was very impressive.
A1200 GS
The AmigaKit presentation was given on the forthcoming A1200 GS system. The A1200 GS is five times faster than it’s predecessor. Once again it will ship with the latest AmiBench pre-installed.
The specifications for the A1200 GS were revealed:
- A733 ARM CPU: 2Ghz Octa-core
- 4GB LPDDR5 Memory
- WiFi internet connectivity
- Bluetooth
- 3x Rear USB
- Audio chip added with analogue stereo 3.5mm jack
- HDMI 1080P
We are hoping to commence sales of this exciting product by the end of the year.
The other exciting product revealed was the Arcade Evolution A1200 joystick. This was demonstrated to the Amiwest attendees. There was a joystick on display that they could try out. The feedback we received was positive as they remarked about the solid construction and quality microswitch contacts.
Amiwest Banquet
Amiwest always has a banquet on the Saturday evening. For the second year running this was in Burgers and Brew in West Sacramento.
The banquet speaker this year was Rob Gemmell. He is an award-winning industrial designer and former creative director who famously served as the Director of Product Design for Commodore-Amiga, where he helped design the look and feel of the iconic Commodore-Amiga 500 ands led design efforts on several unreleased Commodore-Amiga projects. His extensive career also includes working with George Lucas’s Star Wars special effects unit, working alongside Steve Jobs at Apple, and advising tech giants like Sony and Google. His presentation was fascinating and gave an insight into the design decisions that created the computer design aesthetics we all have grown fond of.
Check out Back and Beyond’s video of the banquet.
xSYSInfo
xSYSInfo is a comprehensive system information utility. It provides detailed insights into your system’s hardware and software configuration, along with benchmarking capabilities. We had the pleasure of meeting the author, Stefan Reinauer who gave us a free copy on floppy disk.
