The third quarter meeting was held on Saturday September 13, 2003. I actually got there before anyone else this time. Michael showed up first, and soon Jack called for a ride from the train station. I was attempting to get the A1000 to boot from the newly created (literally just before leaving the house) Kickstart disk, while Michael picked Jack up from the station.

Shortly thereafter, Cameron arrived with his Amiga4000T and we connected it to a VGA-splitter that allowed us to view it on both his monitor and on the big overhead projection unit. The 4000T was a nice unit, equipped with 128MB ram, X-surf ethernet, I/O Blix card, Implant Deluxe, Picasso IV, CSPPC/233MHz with 50MHz/060, and it was running OS3.9. It was, to say the least, a very nice system.

Loran and his dad arrived next, and Doug came in around 12:30 or so, bringing his Amithlon system to show. It was a cool system as well. I think most of us have never seen or used Amithlon, so it was a surprise how nice it really is as a whole package. The boot time was quick (love that animated boing ball during boot), and the system really did feel like using an Amiga.

There were several things going on simultaneously. Cameron was showing different applications on the A4000T. Deluxe Galaga made a few rounds on the big screen, as did Napalm, Shadow of the Beast II, and eventually Quake. I've got to say that QuakePPC ran very fast on the A4000. I was pleasantly surprised.

Doug demoed Amithlon getting on the web and such. But the real eyecatcher (for me at least), was his self written thumbnailer application. It used a very smart algorithm to thumbnail and tile the images, keeping them both vertically and horizontally centered as the indexing occurred. Not only was it very quick, it included a progress indicator for each image, and when multiple pages were indexed, it could be "paged back" or "paged forward" with a single keystroke, with no slow down, and without ever interrupting the indexing progress. I was amazed that the hard disk LED only made occasional blinks as it worked. This is simply one fantastic piece of software...now if we could just get him to market it!

I never got the Amiga1000 to boot on the Kickstart disk I created. It tried but never completed (turned to a grey screen and stopped). We settled for just turning it on and looking at the screen. I discovered, however that I still have all of the original warranty cards and such that were packed in with my A1000 when I bought it. Maybe I'll scan those and put the pics up somewhere one day.

Over all, I think a good time was had by everyone. And to those who couldn't make it this time, I hope to see you next meeting.