The third phase of the Assembly was held in Finnish capital, Helsinki, in the first weekend of August. New limits were set. PC's unveiled as an expensive game console. The icehockey hall, Jaahalli, reminded of everything else than winter when Assembly '94 was held at outside temperatures near 30 degress. The place seemed perfect to hold a party with a hall surrounded by seats and plenty of space and toilets around that. Only air condition was a terrible lack and in the outer areas the big windows couldn't be openned while the sun was burning merciless. In the centre of the hall a tower was hanging with screens in three directions which was a big plus since you had a good view of a screen at nearly all places in the hall and especially at the many high level seats. Over each screen were a display screen which could tell the name and number of production while it was showed. Really nice though it took some time (= the whole graphics competition) for the organizers to realize that the display shouldn't be turned all the time since the light disturbed the screen a lot. And the screens where already not at all good. The party place was good to make the right atmosphere and there seemed to be no power problems. Some however thought they were sitting a bit too close at the tabletops of loose-lying and not too stable chip-plates. Insufficient organisation In general the organisation of the party was rather messed, maybe due to too many organizers or focus on the money they could earn when people first had entered. At least there wasn't enough control of what was going on. That resulted in 12 disks with competition graphics disappearing so a couple of pictures had to be shown much later when they where finally found. Since you didn't need to register when entering the arrangers could only guess who and how people who were present. Some predicted between 3000 and 4000. When considering the size of the hall, around 2000 visitors is probably a good guess. But it was hard to judge since a lot of the groups didn't bring their computers. They just walked around and talked to people or were in the city. At all big parties the list of results is normally released shortly after the winners have been awarded. But not here. "It will be released in a couple days", one of the PC organizers said. Disappointingly there was no competition climax. Instead of having a speaker saying the results from the buttom to the top it was just displayed on the screen. There was no stage where the winners could get their prizes. Instead they should just go to the organizer centre and pick it up. Some deadlines for e.g. graphics were very early so you would miss it if you came the second day. The invitation most people had, and which had been published, said nothing about that (and some other rules). But worst was that this invitation didn't say WHERE in Helsinki the party was to be held which gave quite a lot of people problems getting there. There was no laserdisc room as promised. Instead you could hunt around and shoot at your friends in the Quazar room. The Doomed PC More than 2/3 of the computers at the party were PC's Most of them seemed to be hit by a very strong virus called Doom. At least you could constantly see a lot of screens running with the popular game. Though a few work serious it is obvious that most of the PC scene is no good for more than promoting the PC as a game console, and a quite expensive one if you want the game to run smoothly. New limits, no limits? When comparing with the demos from last year the overall quality was rather high and several of the demos were near to the limit of 4 disks. Some could only run from harddisk. The coders had big advantage at this competition since the rules allowed them to use 2 Mb of fastmem apart from 2 Mb chip. The benefit of that is not so much the bigger workspace but the fact that fastmemory makes the A1200 twice as fast. The big disadvantage is that only a minority of the scene has the hardware to see those demos. One thing is taking advantage of fastmem when it's there (like Complex' Real), another thing is needing it to run the demo at all. Several of the demos did that - even the winning 40kb! Stellar's winning demo also needed the extra memory but it was clearly needed for e.g. a Doom-routine so great that even the PC-guys gave it a hand. Actually most of Mindflow was made in only two and a half weeks. Both Finnish routines and brains run fast... Upcomers Parallax released Drool This which was quite interesting inspite some "A4000 needing" routines. But the 2.5 Mb LHA packed demo was also fed up with quite a lot of raytracings. No swiss comeback succes The people behind Alcatraz' classic Odyssey, Hornet and PGCS, tried a comeback but didn't get a top placement. The demo had scenes similar to Odyssey with bombastic sound and design but what was shown on the screen looked more like the intro part and ended all of a sudden. Like Virtual Dreams' demo, Breathtaker, it was first released a little week after the party, probably due to some "low-memory" and loader fixing. When shown on the screen Breathtaker most looked like a video demo but the thing was squeezed down to four disks. The introcompetition was won by the 17-year old coder, Silver Eagle, who had made the most beautiful gouraud shaded and animated objects seen on Amiga yet. When asked how he had handled the maths he admitted that he had been helped a little by his big brother, who won the democompetition for Pygmy last year! Lizardking/Razor 1911 (and Triton, PC) must have had one of his best days in his scene career. He won the 4-channel music competition and was third in the multichannel comp. What the invitation said nothing about was the extra entertainment caused by the European championship in athletics taking place right outside the windows of the hall. Therefore you could have perfect view to the final of the womens marathon run Saturday. Unfortunately the sports event had a quite negative effect on the parking facilities which were brought down to a minimum so some had to carry their computers a very long way after finally finding a place to park their car. To sum up you can say that The Assembly '94 had interesting releases, but most people thought the organizing was disappointing. Refering to a certain Easter arrangement in Norway, it seems to be hard to organize a party with success three times though you have experience.