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Hi Velcro, I almost missed this post with your question, so sorry for the late reply. I don't know if there is a write up of the game competition in any of the reports of the AmiWest 2009 Show. There were prizes for the top three scores and a T-Shirt prize for the lowest score too. I did not keep a copy of the prize winners, but Bill Bosari was the first place winner and Chris Chapman was the last place T-Shirt winner. I had received donations of prizes from AmiKit, Red's Retro Computing, and DiscreetFX, plus I added a few Amiga hardware items from my own collection and at the last minute, Bill Bosari handed me several T-Shirts he had gotten from the guest speaker at the show, the guy from the Vintage Computer Museum.

The release of MOS2.4 just a few days before the AmiWest 2009 Show threw me for a loop as I spent so much time getting it installed the way I wanted it, so I could dual boot to MOS2.4, or to MacOSX Tiger, plus installing a few MOS programs and games ate up so much time I was rushed at the end and did not get some of the game competition preparations finished and had to do last minute stuff after I arrived at the AmiWest Show. Then, at 10pm on Saturday night I got a call just as I got to my hotel room for the night saying that I needed to come back down to move all our gear to another room because the hotel had double-booked the room the AmiWest Show was in. It took us almost 2 hours to move everything and reroute the ethernet wiring so there would be access the next day. Everything was moved, but it was not setup, so the next morning, after I got up early to do a conference call with the Amiga Roundtable #43 guys during the recording of their podcast, I hurried to the show floor to put all the Amiga Game Competition computers back together and setup, tested again and ready for the competition to start. We had 5 computers set up to use, all a different type of Amiga experience, but I was having trouble with choosing which game to use on the Classic Amiga game station, which was my A600 w/hard drive installed and 2.05 KS ROMs. I had forgotten how many of the type of arcade games that I was trying to run would only run on KS 1.3 and below, so we were limited to very few games to run on that station. We ended up choosing Lemmings and decided to just have each contestant run through one level and record their time to use as the score from that station. The competition had each contestant move from one station to the next as we recorded their scores at each station then totaled them at the end and presented the winners with their prizes. It was fun, but next year I promise I will be better prepared and it will be even more fun for everyone. This year we ended up dropping the Lemmings station, as we were running from floppy disks and it took too long to reload the game each time and get it to the right level we wanted to use. I might take my A500 or A1000 next year to use as the Classic Amiga as they have ROM switchers installed in them and I can run KS 1.3 games. Next year I will also have better games running on the MorphOS game station, and I will spend more time testing each game to make sure I know how each one works and which part of the game we will use for the competition.

It is a lot of work to organize and set up all the computer stations, plus the effort to acquire the prizes, but it was worth every minute of it and I look forward to going to the show again next year. The SACC guys have promised that it will be in a better hotel next year, as the one they have been using for the last several has changed owners and gone downhill rapidly the last few years. The hotel manager that used to be there has moved to another new hotel just down the road and has already contacted the SACC group about moving the show. There was even some discussion about moving the AmiWest Show to a popular convention location, like Reno, Nevada. I don't know if that is possible from a cost perspective, or if enough of the SACC members will agree on such a move. Would that location appeal to any of the members here? Would it make anyone here change their mind about attending next year's AmiWest 2010 Show? The distance from my house to Reno is not too much farther than I already drive to the show when it is in Sacramento, so the distance does not matter to me, but there is a lot more entertainment opportunities in Reno than there is in Sacramento, so it would be a more attractive location to have the show for people coming a long distance, as they could combine it with a vacation plan and see other parts of Reno and the surrounding areas, like Lake Tahoe, so the travel costs would be more worthwhile, if used for the AmiWest Show and other entertainment plans.