The A500 Mini
I have been wanting one of these since they were first announced, but was waiting for one to come up at a decent price like my C64 Mini and with my Christmas money I finally bought myself one, at full retail price!
My Amiga 500+ was my favourite machine from back in the day, unfortunately I never thought to remove the battery prior to putting it into storage, and the inevitable happened, so I have replaced it with an Amiga 500, but the case got smashed while in transit with UPS, so I had to use the case from the 500+ to house the 500's motherboard, but it all works, so that's good
However the Amiga 500 is MASSIVE and I don't have the room on my desk anymore, so I've been using Retropie to get my Amiga fix
The box is quite colourful and smaller than you would imagine
It's multi language
The text is quite small and my eyes aren't that good anymore
It's so tiny, but seems accurate, I don't have my A500 to hand to compare it to
You get a quick start guide in the box, you can download the full manual from the Retro Games website, while underneath the A500 Mini tray there are the boxes for the control pad and mouse
The box for the control pad contains the USB control pad itself, and the USB type C power lead, note there is no PSU, but I've been using an old charger for a Samsung Galaxy, one of those from before adaptive fast charging was a thing
The mouse box contains the USB tank mouse, which is now optical and a bit smaller than the original, and the HDMI lead, which is quite a bit longer than the lead that came with the C64 Mini. I used a third party mouse with my Amiga
A faithful recreation of the original, although much smaller
Charlie the fat cat for scale, he was supervising the whole unboxing
Close up of the disk drive, which you can get 3D printed disks to stick out of, The A500 logo badge and LED's, which work as a power light and USB drive access. There's no expansion slot detail on the left side though
Top and bottom of the A500 Mini
The rear panel, you get a momentary power button, USB-C power socket, HDMI, and three USB sockets, one more than the C64 Mini
The multi language quick start guide
Close ups of the keyboard, it doesn't have the two extra blank keys of the European A500+
On powering up the unit, it doesn't turn on automatically when power is connected like the C64 Mini does which was annoying. There is a short set up procedure to complete then it boots to the carousel, I need to update the software on mine, which I will do soon
The 25 games which are included are...Alien Breed 3D, Alien Breed: Special Edition 92, Another World, Arcade Pool, ATR: All Terrain Racing, Battle Chess, Cadaver, California Games, Dragon’s Breath, F-16 Combat Pilot, Kick Off 2, Paradroid 90, Pinball Dreams, Project-X: Special Edition 93, Qwak, Simon the Sorcerer, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, Stunt Car Racer, Super Cars II, The Chaos Engine, The Lost Patrol, The Sentinel, Titus the Fox, Worms: The Director’s Cut, Zool: Ninja Of The ”Nth” Dimension
They all seem to play well enough, some of the controls within the games seem to have been modified to work better with the control pad which plays havoc with muscle memory
Also I need to get a wireless controller as the controller leads are too short to get to the sofa, any recommendations?
Both the A500 Mini and C64 Mini now live within my TV stand, along with a Nintendo Wii and my Retropie build which is a Pi3B+ in a NES style case, although I am planning to swap it for my Pi400 soon
For more retro hardware check out my online museum here
