Amiga A500 Mini Review

I’m a sucker for these mini consoles. I have then all from the NES classic to the terrible PS1 mini.

However as much as I love console gaming. my first love was home computer games on the Commodore Amiga. As a child I had an NES which I liked, but getting 2 new games a year for birthday’s and Christmas couldn’t compete with my Dad coming home from work every night with handfuls of copied floppy discs full of games for his Amiga.

So when the A500 mini was announced, I obviously couldn’t miss out on this blast of nostalgia!

The bundle contains a mini replica of the classic Amiga A500, a USB controller and mouse. The build quality and detail of the computer is really nice. Obviously due to the size, the keyboard’s non-functional, but you can plug in any standard USB keyboard to one of the three available UBS ports if you want, but I found the onscreen keyboard was perfectly fine for the few times I needed to use it.

The mouse is the classic Amiga ‘tank mouse’ design which I always liked. It’s slightly small than the original, about the size of an Apple Magic Mouse. I did actually try plugging it into my Mac and PC and it works fine as a generic USB mouse and actually feels really nice! If it wasn’t for the lack of scroll wheel I’d be tempted to use this as my daily mouse just to be a hipster.

The control pad however was my first real disappointment. It’s based on the design of the controller that came with the Amiga CD32 from back in the day, but even having owned that abomination of a console for a short time, I have no nostalgia for that controller. It would have been better to include a more authentic joystick, like a Speed King or a Bug. These are what most people played on back in the day and despite the build quality of the controller included being fine, it still doesn’t feel natural.

Amiga’s only had one fire button which often meant pressing up to jump which sucks trying to play like that today. Having the extra buttons on the controller allowed the developers to map things like ‘up’ to a separate button along with any other frequently used key commands which is a nice quality of life improvement but I can help but think there could have been another way to implement this on a more tradition joystick design.

The A500 mini comes with 25 games included which for me where another disappointment. Obviously there is a lot of personal preference and nostalgia with things like this but the only games that interested me where Zool, Alien Breed, Chaos Engine and of course arguably the game that could justify buying the machine for alone, the mighty Speedball 2!!!

This is very much a non-issue though due to the systems killer feature, the support of WHD Load packages via the spare USB port.

You’ll have to bare with me if some of my technical descriptions aren’t accurate, but to the best of my understanding WHD Load a wrapper for Amiga games and programs in which an Amiga emulator will see the file as a hard disk contenting the completely installed game. Traditional Amiga emulators use the .ADF file formate which is simply an image of an amiga floppy disk. This works well but can be a bit of a pain having to jump in and out of the emulators to load disc images into virtual drives. Especially for games with multiple disks. The WHD Load format works a lot more like loading a ROM with a console emulator. You just select the file and the game loads.

Obviously with piracy being a crime I resisted the urge to download a torrent full of every amiga game ever released in the WHD Load format and manually converted every Amiga game every release from my personally owned collection….

Simply download some system files from the Retro Games website and pop them on a USB stick along with your completely legal WHD Load files and you instantly have access to the entire Amiga games library.

This then gave me the opportunity to play some of my favourite child hood games on the system such as Xenon 2, Robocod, Operation Wolf, Monkey Island 2, Lemmings, Lotus Turbo Challenge, Marble Madness, Agony, Shadow of the Beast, and many, many more

I found almost every game I have tried worked perfectly first time. You have the option to crop the screen to avoid letterboxing, but with the games being designed to be played on smaller monitors not a 50 inch TV’s, sometimes the games looked better and felt more playable with a smaller screen area. There are also options to adjust the CPU Jitter and Blitter Mode settings if you are having any compatibility problems but so far I have only had one issue with Jaguar XJ220, and playing with these setting did get the game running as expected.

For playing games, the A500 mini is a simple and convenient way to get your nostalgia fix, and to be clear, the makers RetroGames are only marketing this as a gaming console. But the Amiga was more than just a console, it was a home computer. Many Amiga enthusiasts will miss the computer features such as Workbench, the Amiga operating system, and generally being able to fiddle under the hood as you would with a Raspberry pie build for example. This has already been addressed by the community. I found a user online who had uploaded a WHD Load image of workbench called AMINIMIGA configured for the A500 mini. A simple click of this and you are dropped into his configuration of Workbench filled with popular games, apps and demos with the ability to add your own programs via a folder structure on the same USB stick. This then gave me the ability to run some of my favourite demos from the demo scene which I was unable to get to work via the default WHD Loader. LSD’s Jesus on E’s is just as good as I remember!

In addition to the user created solutions, there are rumours of the official developers adding .ADF file support in the future too which will only expand the abilities of this mini computer further.

One of my ambitions with the A500 mini is to get the oldskool music production app Octimed running on the system which I have as yet been unable to do. This might actually be possible via workbench now, but then there is the issue of being able to load in any samples. ADF disk image support would solve this problem, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time to be honest.

Overall, the A500 mini is quite pricey at £120 RRP. There are various alternatives for free via emulation on your existing modern computer. You could make a Raspberry Pi build for cheaper that might be more functional. But in both cases you will lose out on the slick and convenient plug and play nature of A500 mini and the nostalgia of the hardware. My only real gripe is the control pad. I need to look into other more traditional USB joysticks on the market and see if any would be compatible. Hopefully the system continues to evolve in functionality, but at a base level I think I will get the most use from it when simply plugging it into the TV and playing games via the default WHD Loader and that system is already a highly compatible, very polished and simple interface to relive your childhood!