A movie of the resulting fight.

It was very very busy. A long queue had formed of
about 100 people before the doors opened at 10am.
First off was a walk around the stalls. Interesting people like Castle, etc were there. But there was no appearance of RiscOS Ltd or Microdigital. I renewed a couple of mag subs. But there was nothing that caught my eye to buy that I had not already bought. No new games or network apps. The universal printer driver was available but I already ordered mine a few days ago.
Next up I started queuing for the Castle Presentation at about 10:30 and by 11:05 almost the entire building tried to pour into the theater. I got middle front row. The talk was facinating and they showed a working and super fast Iyonics PC as well as talking about the hardware and software.

The Iyonics comes with RISC OS 5 which is 32 bit and no VIDC requirements. The cpu is a 600Mhz xscale which is soldered to the motherboard. When questioned about upgrading the MD said that we've all seen the problems with cpus on cards and he wanted the reliability. When asked about newer motherboards he seemed to suggest that whole new machines would be needed but I think it was a slip of the grammar.

The Iyonics PC itself looked like a boring 5 year old micro tower. It screams out for modding and painting. It has 2 USB at the front and a soft power. 2 floppy bays, 2 CD bays and 1 HD bay. At the back are pci slots 2 EASI 32-bit slots, 2 USB, 2 serial, mic, line in, sound out, video on a card (GeForce 2MX PCI on display), but no paralell port. The MD said 'USB all the way'. USB 1 is done, but USB 2 support is coming.

I saw no NIC or mb NIC, but he did say that it works with Gigabit cards which is nice :)

All old apps should work on it with some clever software that emulates 26 bit mode. (Artworks was being shown working on a stand on an Iyonics for example).
They would not say when it was available or the price, but 'soon'.

Boot up time was just as quick as a clean SA RPC. Apps loaded at an incredible speed. Double click and its loaded. So fast that you don't notice.

The graphics were very impressive. Superbly quick and high resolution. The sound quality was good as as we walking in we were greeted with some thumping music playing from an Iyonics and medium speakers.
1920 by 1440 IIRC at 16M. Bascially the same as the
graphics card at the time.

Iyonics car stickers were given away.

No word on Select. When asked on the stand Jack was a little tetchy about it (understandably). During the presentation there was little hint about select on RISC OS 5. RISC OS 5 is basically like RISC OS 4.02 but with hardware indepenance of VIDC and is fully 32-bit. What we now need is Select on RISC OS 5 - puleeeez!

RISC OS 5 was in flash rom and copied to RAM during bootup just like the kinetic.

RISC OS 5 is copyright pace.

I would have bought one or preordered but they won't set a price or take orders until its ready.

Nothing doing at the RiscStation stand.

I did not see the faster WXL.

I saw Peter Naulls which was nice to put a face to the name I've been sending money to.

Most of the people there were under 30 or over 60.

That's all I can remember was interesting....

Tak - nope. My mate, "Get", was in my car.

--
(Jeez gimme a break, I wrote that after less than 5 hours kip).

Show stuff I forgot:

On the back of the case is the power socket and an on/off switch like most PCs. The PSU is a 250W unit with a special silent mode where when the case temperature is under 35 degrees C the fan goes into whisper mode making the whole machine very quiet. In normal operation they have never seen the temp over 35 and only managed to test it by putting the whole machine into a heated cupboard due to the super cool cpu. The cpu I saw had no fan.

Virtual Acorn had a stand. My friend bought a copy so he could secretly put it on the PC of the director at B***** to remind him what an Acorn was like. He also wanted it to play Twinworld and Stunt Racer.

I would have definately bought a copy but no networking support is provided yet.

Castle have apparently done no benchmarking as a whole but were able to give various nugets such as:

200Mhz RAM, not 16Mhz like the Risc PC.
32Mb/sec ide not 2Mb/sec.
1 Gb RAM max vs 258. (kinetic blah blah ;))
AC98 sound.
Plus the faster cpu and better graphics.

They're modding application space (I think he meant dynamic areas) so that they can go to 1Gb.

Oregano 2 was a sore point he skipped over jokingly and as fast as possible.

(Red shirt, lots of hair)

Castle have also suggested that all the Select components could be made to work with ROS 5.

Just wait and see I guess.

7S: ROL have said that all of the select work has been 32-bit so patching it into RO5 should be quite simple. If ROL don't produce select for RO5 I will be dissapointed. Alternatively, if castle add all the select features themselves.... however in such a small market it would be silly to duplicate work.

jmb: What do you mean a 26 bit version will be available? The whole point of the 32-bit versions is that they work on *both*. There is no need for different versions of apps. 32-bit only means it uses no dodgy PC+flag R15 stuff (ok very simplified).

Is RO5 Xscale dependent or will it run on any ARM like the new Samsung 1.2 Ghz ? No dependence on the Intel graphic features of Xscale ?

Ernst Dinkla