A500 mini is here

A500 mini Review - Part 1

It has been 1 week now since it’s official release which has given a lot of people a lot of time to review the A500 mini. We have seen a lot of very professional YouTube video makers in their offices, workrooms and studios make exceedingly good videos containing a great deal of content, I have watched Dan Wood, Retro Recipes just to name 2 and read a lot of very good blogs, now it is my turn.

What type of technology is this, a computer, a console or a toy? Well you can attach a working keyboard therefore it must be a computer however you can attach Xbox or PlayStation controllers therefore it must be a console or you could say it is light enough to be taken round to a friends house to play with for a while in which case it’s a toy. Whatever label you give it it will surely offend someone but delight many.

I see the word “Amiga” attached to this in so many searches online but can we really call it that? I’m not going to try and make my way through trying to guess who owns the name at this moment but I run emulation of many types a lot on one of my laptops, Amiga Forever, AmiKit and recently a PS3 emulator, none of this makes my laptop an Amiga or a PS3 or does it? I have another laptop, E.M.M.A. (Emulated Machine, My Amiga). which boots directly into Amiga OS4.1fe and I call this my Amiga laptop.

Whether it’s an officially licensed Amiga product or not I believe most can agree that it will always be called an Amiga mini.

I can say I was very excited to open the nice package that I received and was very eager to review, however life got in the way as usually does with this sort of thing, not to worry though here it is now with many photos including, what seems to have become a very important photo, the one of the serial number underneath.

I can honestly say I have not played with it endlessly and tried to get Workbench and Deluxe Paint working, I have just played some of the games and downloaded over 200 WHDLoad games to see how they played.

But first, lets start with what’s in the box, once out of the brown paper I found a bold and nicely printed box closely resembling the “Cartoon Classics” bundle from 1992, could this be a nod to a 30 year anniversary? On opening the box the machine is immediately visible covered with a nice transparent, moulded piece of plastic. My heart is now racing and I want to dig deeper.

Lifting the keyboard out and the tray that it sits on I find two red boxes one with a outline of a tank mouse and one with an outline of a joypad, each box contains that which is printed, one mouse and one joypad, I also found an HDMI lead and a USB to USB-C lead. I also had a lovely flash drive in the shape of a floppy disc.

I can't wait to spend more time with this beautiful machine and play more with the 263 WHDLoad games I've already downloaded. My short time using it I have already found that I am not keen on a controller with a D-Pad and much prefer a thumb stick or a joystick so I need to find an appropriate controller or a joystick.

More to follow once I have spent more time with the right controller that suits me. Also plenty of pictures to add.

Michael Holmes