Amiga99 Show
This year's Amiga99 show, held in St. Louis, Missouri on 12-14 March, was a tremendous success that was well enjoyed by all. You can read a full report on the show at the Amiga Web Directory site.

The new Amiga President, Jim Collas, was present at the show and gave a speech to the attendees outlining future plans for the platform. He announced that the new OS would be known as AmigaSoft, with version 4 being released late in the year. A beta version for developers should be available in September, but version 5 will not be available until the second quarter of 2000. He also gave the expected motivational speech to keep everyone's morale high, which he must have done well as it resulted in a standing ovation from the attendees present.

Another interesting event, which took place at the show was an unscheduled meeting between Jim Collas, a number of other Amiga Inc. people and user group representatives. This resulted in almost one and a half hours of discussion on the subject of improving the relationship between Amiga "the company" and Amiga "the community." You can read a full report of this on the Amiga Flame site.

Open Letter to the Amiga Community
Petro Tyschtschenko has written an open letter to the Amiga community to update us on the news of current Amiga development plans. You can read this letter by clicking here.

Euro Font
Johan Björnson has made what is probably the world's first Amiga font with the Euro currency sign, used in place of the "general" currency sign. The font is called FlodisEuro, and can be downloaded from www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/7937/fl-euro.html for use in your applications.

Amiga Announces New President and Fast-track Development Plans
Representatives from Amiga Inc. and Amiga International met recently in a series of meetings in San Diego to affirm details for technical, strategic and marketing plans toward launching the new range of Amiga computers for the next millennium. The result of this was a move to San Diego for the company's headquarters and a new president of Amiga as a whole.

Jim Collas, a former senior vice president for Gateway, is the man who has been chosen to take on this role. His job will be to run Amiga as a wholly independent subsidiary operation, integrating Amiga Inc. and Amiga International under the new Amiga corporate structure. His leadership will also allow a fast-track development program to begin, meaning we will get new Amigas before the end of the year (expected to be November).

The products currently planned are the eagerly-awaited development system, an Internet appliance and a low cost home computer, which will be every bit as revolutionary now as the A500 was in the late eighties. The development system will be available with a software development suite, which will allow low cost development for the platform. This is good news as the PlayStation 2, we've reliably been told, will be very expensive to develop for. More firm details of the new Amigas will be announced in the summer, by which time OS3.5 should be on sale.

This is very exciting news, which we really needed to hear. Keep an eye on the progress at www.amiga.com (Amiga Inc.) and www.amiga.de (Amiga International).

Haage & Partner Updates
Updates for some of Haage & Partner's products are now available from their website at www.haage-partner.com/e.htm. The updates are Tornado3D v 2.1, Genesis 1.04 and NetConnect 2.3. A new demo of Genesis is now available for download also.

Napalm Out Now
Napalm (not The Crimson Crisis any more, just Napalm) is finally available! The Command & Conquer style game is set in the near future, where highly intelligent, man-made robots are attempting to take over the world. As well as one player games, you can make use of serial, modem or Internet links to play the game two-player.

You will need 16Mb of RAM and a CD drive to play Napalm, which costs £29.99 from http://clickboom.com.

Atéo Concepts Makes Ordering Easier
If you want to purchase any of Atéo Concepts' range of products you can now do so online from their website. From April 1999 they will also accept payment by credit card using the Euro (they already accept Euro payment by French cheque or bank transfer).

Atéo have now developed the Pixel64 scandoubler, but need 150 pre-orders to go to manufacture. The device, which also acts as a flicker fixer, will be available in versions for Pixel64, A1200, A2000, A3000 and A4000. The Pixel64 version will have a pass-thru allowing all modes to be used on the same monitor.

To get more information on these products, as well as their new AtéoBus ethernet card, which is now be available, have a look at www.ateo-concepts.com/amiga/. You should also contact them if you've been having problems with their keyfiles, as they have a fixed version available now. And there are new versions of ateoser.device and atepar.device ready for you to download.

Vulcan Ends Amiga Service
In a brief email to subscribers of their Amiga news mailing service, Vulcan Software announced the termination of the service due to "non Vulcan activity in the Amiga market." They asked anyone who also wrote for the PC to re-register their publication. So it seems as though we won't be seeing any more Amiga products from the publishers of the Genetic Species and Uropa 2. The eagerly-awaited Wasted Dreams is said to be on hold. You can check Vulcan's website at www.vulcan.co.uk.

If you have any news that would interest Amiga owners please send it to amithyst_mag@yahoo.com