Attending were: Charlie and Chris Boas, Don Kassebaum,
Keith Sterzing, Mark Thomas, and George Wyche. John
Herron was out hiking in Colorado. We forgave (and envied) him.
As George promised in the boosterism email for this evening's meeting, he brought a copy of the 25 questions answered this week by Bill McEwen, the CEO of Amiga Inc. Its way too much to review here. Its available on the web in many places and has been added to by an MP3 of his guest appearance at a very recent European Amiga show.
George also brought his AmigaOne and 19" monitor, and Mark brought a high end AMD based dual processor PC from work along with a wide screen LCD monitor that ran with a resolution of 1960 x 1200, which is the most I have ever seen in a single device.
We ate Pizza and commiserated with George and Don on the work-for-pay bit. George got a paycheck (but declined to buy a round for everyone) this month. We all had pizza, Chris downed 9 slices (those teenagers!) and I had a Shiner Bock. Sated, we sat down to action. Chris monopolized the AmigaOne while the rest of us oohed and awed at Mark's hardware running Colantro's Amiga emulator software. It had more options for picking the precise Amiga hardware version to be emulated than I knew Amiga even had!
Mark demonstrated that the emulation was multitasking with the regular XP operating system. We had fun playing with letting the dual processor do its thing and then forcing one or the other to our express bidding.
One of the cutest features was the sound made while the hard disk based floppy images were dutifully loaded into memory -- the completely authentic sound of an Amiga floppy drive clicking and whirring. In the picture above we see one of the numerous times Mark brought up an Amiga boot window.
If nostalgia wears thin, you can set the emulator parameters to load and perform as fast as your current hardware can manage. For Mark's machine that meant lickety-split.
In a tour-de-force Mark brought the machine being emulated up the very latest in designs with an overlay called Ami-Kit which had the workbench and icons looking thoroughly current complete with transparency, rounded edges, gradients, and subtle shading.
Near the end of the evening we kicked Chris off the AmigaOne and George showed the very latest Beta version of YAM2.5, the YAM.OS4 version. It worked with out crashing and was everybit as solid as YAM2.4 for those features. This new one gracefully supports international languages and affords easy modifications for new MIME types and popular mailer features. The only feature I was unable to get it to duplicate was downloading ONLY the headers from a POP3 server and allow decisions to be made based on them.
Time ran out. We scooped up our equipment a lit out without making any suggestions about a program for October. Would someone please come up with one?
