The Walker is temperamental but can be made to work.

When first powered up the Walker goes into a boot cycle which it cannot complete, it either stops on a blank screen or just keeps rebooting. There is no obvious way beyond this.

But it can be done...
The problems seems one of initialisation. To get beyond this stage you need to press a key, this causes the system to give a guru (i.e. crash warning) but this seems to send it into another direction whereupon the ROM starts into the proper boot sequence. This Beta warning will usually appear:

Evidently not completed.

Normally it will not get anywhere and will go back to endless re-booting. But sometimes you'll see some form of disc error message, possibly something like this:

The Walker refusing to boot properly

It will generally freeze here so you need to reboot. The Walker does not respond to Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga so you need to power cycle it (switch off and on again). If you are really lucky it will boot straight to the Beta message then this will happen:

Walker Workbench. Note the copyright is attributed to ESCOM AG.

After this the Walker seems to boot happily when the system is rebooted or power cycled.
It looks like something isn't initialised properly (I assume the IDE hardware) but recovery from the right sort of crash will fix this. It usually takes quite a number of tries before it will work.

Does it work?

The Walker is clearly in a beta stage with some things working, some not.

The floppy disc does try to mount any disc inserted but will not read anything I've tried so far.
Attempting to format a PC floppy produced an error.

The CD-ROM appears to do nothing but I've only tried a few PC CD-ROMs so far.

The Hard Disc is 1GByte partitioned into Workbench: and Work:
The OS looks like a fairly standard OS install on the Workbench partition.
Everything is in German but I switched Workbench over to English.
The system does seem rather slow even in 8 colour mode.

Software Versions

About gives:
HWG Beta ROM
KS 43.1
WB 40.42
Copyrighted to ESCOM AG

Showconfig gives:
Kickstart 43.1
Exec 43.4
Disk 40.42
16 MB Fast
2 MB Chip

There are a number of applications on the Work partition.
These seem to be for testing or show (one says Cebit96 preview 96).
The following seem to work fine if somewhat slowly:
DataStore
Organiser
TurboCalc
Wordworth 4SE

Organiser - as you see this copy is for showing at CeBit.

Datastore

TurboCalc

Some Applications are a bit troublesome:
Scala MM300 works but timing seems a bit messed up timing wise.
Photogenics 1.2SE - requires a registration code so I couldn't test it.

Scala MM300 works as well but I think timing is to fast for animation and mod playback.

Some Applications however don't work at all:
PPaint locks the machine solid.
Pinball Mania causes a reboot.

Photogenics 1.2SE - requires a registration code so I couldn't test it.

Amiga Walker Front Page.