Having returned from the Midlands show, I thought I'd just put up a very short rundown of what I saw and did.  I didn't go prepared to write a report and didn't even take a camera, as I had rather a lot of other stuff with me upon arrival, although less upon leaving - I know that doesn't sound right, but it was for good reason.

First up, having viewed the venue on Satellite images the night before, I decided it was difficult to miss and very easy to get to, although I do admit that I had to check with a couple of guys at one end of the main car park as to where exactly the show entrance was. It would have been nice if the show directions had said that we needed to go around the back to the Conference Centre entrance, but anyway not a big problem.

The show was in a nice modern clean room which seemed about the right size for the exhibitors in attendance - although looking closely some space had been deliberately lost for two vendors not able to make it at the last minute, Archive and APDL.

Once inside, I randomly wandered about and noticed a show surprise - that of an A9Home based Laptop no less!

This was a home engineered project by Paul Stewart and I have to admit, it looked pretty good. Paul had managed to build up the courage to void his warranty and rehouse his A9Home in a cut-down sliver Flight Case, complete with screen (sprayed silver encasing), and mini keyboard with integral touch pad (about the size of the Acer laptop, I'm writing this on). The machine was running a slide show of photographs of itself and its internals, which included some kind of Battery setup and power conversion gizmo for changing voltages, as well as cables routing USB, Ethernet and Video sockets to external holes / ports in the case. The internal screen was driven via analogue VGA, but Paul had fitted a Y-Cable for the ability to have an external monitor connected.

Most of the usual suspects were at the show, although I didn't end up investigating everything present at the show. One of my reasons for attending the show was to deliver some equipment (hence luggage) to the Midlands User Group, another was that I'd made an offer to Paul Vigay to have a stab at getting some of his USB devices going on his A9Home. The final reason, was to have a general look round and catch up with everything, being a smaller show than some, it seems to lend itself to a more relaxing atmostphere somehow.

I made my way around to see Paul and waited whilst he was chatting with some other visitors, so I spent some time chatting with Louie and a couple of others. Louie had a number of issues of RISC OS Now available, having found a way of getting these printed in-house with the purchase of a large Xerox postscript colour printer (think roughly six foot long, by four foot wide and four foot tall from the description I was given).

Once I got talking to Paul V. we took over the A9Home which Louie was using to manage her customer database (Datapower I think) and started looking at the USB devices. Fairly quickly, I determined one device was incompatible with the currently available drivers on the A9 because it was using the Floppy Disc Class rather than the SCSI transparent Command Set that most USB Memory devices use.

Next up were a couple of mobile phones, which I got working quite quickly (flags available on www.riscos.info). Finally, we tried a USB Hard drive, more for my curiosity than practical reasons. I managed to get the hard drive recognised by MassFS, although didn't quite get to the point of moving data because it had been formatted as Filecore on the Iyonix and was therefore larger than 2Gb - I decided not to mess too much as the device had Paul's backup on it but I think I may have been able to get a bit further on my A9Home beta machine given more time and a more suitable working environment than a corner of a table at a RISC OS show. I've not published the flags for the Hard drive, because I'm not satisfied that I gave it enough testing to be useful.

Moving on, RISCOS Ltd. were showing their usual selection of hardware running RISC OS 4.39 Adjust and RISC OS 6.06, but just released to the market and available at this show for the first time, they were also selling the new PRM, entitled "The Window Manager". These were seemed to be very popular and quite a number were sold at the show. Whilst having a play on one of the RISC OS 6 Risc PCs, I coincidentally ended up demonstrating some of the new features to someone who'd not seen RISC OS 4 in action and was there to find out how things had progressed whilst they'd been away from the market. It was nice to see people returning to the RISC OS scene, as we only generally hear about the negatives.

My visit to the show was quite a social visit rather than spending loads of money (having already been to Guildford and done that), so I was much more relaxed and just chatted with various people, discussing Virtual Risc PC with Aaron Timbrell and chatting with Martin Würthner about his plans.

Around the room, although I didn't specifically investigate all of them, were Icon Technology, selling the latest version of Easiwriter / Techwriter, Martin Würthner was selling Artworks, CJE were selling everything and I noticed at least one USB hamster wheel leaving with a customer. Qercus had the latest and previous magazines on sale as well as taking subscriptions etc. Castle and RISC OS Open were both present, Castle selling the Iyonix and software, ROOL had their mouse mat / coasters for sale. R-Comp seemed fairly busy, although I managed to have a short conversation with Alan Rawnsley - the room was one of those that seemed to bounce noise around so it was a little difficult to have conversations with all the other noise bouncing around.

The venue had a welcome (if a tad expensive) cafe around the corner from the room the show was held in, and I had a nice baked potato and gold plated (or at least it should have been at that price!) bottle of coke.

Overall, I think it was a good show and although one of the smaller RISC OS shows, my thanks and congratulations go to the organisers for a good choice of venue and well run show.

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