Acorn World 1997
Peter Bondar and Chris Cox

^{Chris Cox & Peter Bondar played Cat's Cradle and pointed at some slides}

A much-heralded part of the Acorn World show was Chris Cox's and Peter Bondar's late afternoon talks on both Saturday and Sunday entitled "The Future". Other web pages already give the full story (try the Archive website for details, or the text/articles area of TopixWEB for a transcript), so I won't repeat it all here. But I will, however, include a completely gratuitous set of pictures...

The presentation started with Chris Cox setting up the presentation package:

Thrilling stuff, huh? But nothing prepared me for him actually saying "Hello" to the audience:

Next came a quick introduction to the human form:

^{Chris teaches everyone how to fly (left) and how to protect themself from harm (right)}

^{Chris discusses the appeal of Lara Croft (left) and then gets hot under the collar (right)}

^{Chris poses for photos}

^{And then gets down to business}

Next came Peter Bondar:

Who started his talk by making shadow animals on the projector:

They did actually talk directly about games on two occasion. They said first that Samsung will be releasing a games machine designed by Acorn, called Tinko, although this will be an educational toy for young children aged from three to seven years old, rather than a rival for the Sony Playstation or some such. Also announced was that a games emulator will soon be available, allowing you to run lots of famous games natively on the Acorn platform. More details were provided by the Show Guide and copies of "Acorn Times" on the Acorn stand, which stated that "over 1500 games written for one of the market-leading games machines" would be playable, and that this would mean "you will soon be able to run the world's leading 16-bit games on Acorn platforms, at speeds you've never seen before". This last "at speeds..." bit must surely be marketing waffle, for why would you want to run an arcade game faster than it was supposed to run? Since this announcement several people have pointed the finger at a Sega Megadrive emulator, although this alone would not come near a total of 1500 games, so it is possible that the reference is to the emulation of more than one games machine. In fact, a SNES emulator is also thought to be in development. An official announcement on emulators may come from Acorn soon.

Acorn have been known to be interested in various games machine emulators for some time as a means of providing a ready catalogue of games for use on the NetStation, and it has been said that they have arranged some deal with Sega, although whether such a license would extend to desktop RISC OS computers remains to be seen. Other NetStation technology has spilt over onto the desktop, however - perhaps the most recent example being Java - so it may yet happen, and Acorn's announcement at Acorn World would appear to suggest that they think it will.

...this page last updated: 11/1/97...
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