Impressions:
Sacramento Atari Computer Exposition '94
      Jim Hood

    The second Sacramento Atari Computer Exposition was held on March 12 and 13 at the Towe Ford Museum in Sacramento, California.
    The event is sponsored by STAR, the Sacramento 16/32-bit Atari user group, and focuses on Atari TOS based computers.
    There has been good support for the fair from Atari and the western portion of the 16/32-bit development community both years.
    Last year Atari showcased the Falcon030; this year the Jaguar.
    They donated both a Jaguar and Falcon030 for this year's raffle. There were also hourly door prizes donated by Atari, the developers and the participating retail dealers.
    All the northern California clubs that support 16/32-bit Atari computers appeared to have tables at the fair. Bob Woolley, Peter Chen and I represented the San Leandro Computer Club.
    Bob decided to try flushing out any 8-bit users at the fair by demonstrating his 1200XL with the built in IDE hard drive. He set out the 1200XL with the top casing removed, letting people see the hard drive as graphics flashed from it to a monitor.
    It was an effective mouse trap. People who had no interest in 8-bits didn't understand the significance of the hard drive and went on about their business. A lot of those that did understand asked about it. Bob met quite a few Sacramento area 8-bitters that way.
    People attending the fair seemed enthusiastic and we enjoyed having a chance to talk with many of them.
    We hope the STAR user group found their work rewarding enough to do it again next year.
    It was a rewarding experience for Peter Chen. Mike Fulton, from Atari, drew Peter's name in the Falcon030 raffle.
    The president of STAR won the Jaguar. A committee is being formed to appoint a special prosecutor to look into allegations of wrongdoing.
    Darek Mihocka, of Branch Always Software, was in attendance. He was selling his Gemulator board for running ST software on PC clones and demonstrating his PC Xformer software. He is still polishing up the PC Xformer package, improving some of the existing routines and adding a couple of others to expand compatability.
    Bob Woolley had been luke warm to the 8-bit emulator concept before the fair, but after some lengthly practice using the Xformer while talking with Darek, he is sold. The only thing that really disappointed him was Darek's refusal to sell him a copy of the existing version of the software.
    The Xformer looks like it will be a good, clean piece of software that will run most 8-bit programs. Overly copy protected programs and those that break too many rules might make it stumble, but the sampling that we saw was impressive. Speed is good and text looks great on an SVGA monitor.