The Amiga A500 Mini.

[Chako]

A bit of history is in store, and I am sorry if I bore you all with this, but I am quite stoked.

Here is a bit of my background history with computers, and I was lucky to be of an age where home computers came about and I was able to witness and partake in it.

My first experience with anything electronic and game wise was in 1978 with a Radio Shack Pong Machine. This got my father really into computers and by 1980, we had an Atari 800, which I recall was very expensive at the time. By 1982, he could not resist buying a Timex Sinclair 1000 because he couldn't believe the price, which at the time was around a hundred dollars. This plucky little device he upgraded with the memory pack which gave him 16K in total. I remember he got into programing for fun and made a few simple games but never did anything with them. He just enjoyed programming on the Timex. By 1985, we upgraded to an Atari 130XE which came with 128K of RAM. Soon thereafter, we noticed that Atari was losing the software war and it was increasingly harder to find games locally for it. We then got a Commadore 64 and soon thereafter, a Commadore 128 simply because of the extra memory. Plenty of games and software choice for the Commadore products during those years. When I hit High school, I was drooling over the Commadore Amigas but could not afford one at the time. I came across one on sale during the Christmas of 1989 and was able to talk my father into buying it for me. Wow, what a great computer. It blew away everything I had and introduced me into the world of hardware upgrades. Before long, I was adding a sidecar with bigger hard drives, playing around with SCSI chains, even adding a fatter Angus chip. The Amiga also introduced me to one of my favourite games of all times Dune II. This was my first real time strategy game, and I have been hooked since. It wasn't long before I was able to buy an Amiga 1000 with a 286 daughter card...my first foray into PC DOS. I also added an Amiga CD32, my first experience with a CD ROM, and also my first console of sorts. The Amiga was much bigger in Europe than it was in Canada, but that didn't bother me much as it was truly an awesome computer system. This system kept me going through my senior years in High School as well as my first few years in University. Eventually, software was harder to come by, and I was somewhat forced to buy a PC...a Pentium 1 sometime around 1995. The games for it were not as good as for the Amiga, but at least it was what I was using at University, but that is another story. I wish I had the foresight to keep all of my Amiga stuff, but I ended up giving it away to a local pawn shop just to make room for the PC. I now know that the Amiga CD32 was a rare bird on this side of the Atlantic and is worth a few bucks now.

Well being an avid Amiga nut during the late 80s and early 90s, I was very happy to hear that there was going to be a retro mini Amiga console that would come out in 2022. What I didn't imagine was nobody carrying it locally, and it being a bear to find online. Well I finally got myself one ordered off of Amazon.ca and it came to my door in less than a week. This little guy does bring back memories. I just got it in my door and I haven't hooked it up yet, which will have to wait for another day, but they got the computer looking exactly like the real deal. A lot of details. The mouse brings back many good memories, and the game pad is somewhat reminiscent of the controller that came with the CD32. It looks really good...giving me good nostalgic vibes. 25 games are included, and you can add more down the road.

The box, front and back.
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I keep forgetting how small these mini consoles are. Yes, that is exactly how I remember the 500 looks.
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For size comparison, here is a Wenger Fly fisherman 85mm knife in comparison.
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On the backside, you get a power button, a USB-C power port, HDMI, and 3 USB.
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Included is a user quick guide, a mouse, and joy pad.
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The power cable and HDMI cable are in Commodore Amiga Gray...a nice touch. The mouse appears to be slightly smaller than the original. On the plus side, no more mouse ball to clean as this one is optical.
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I also recently ordered a USB 5 controller pack for retro gaming.
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So I am fairly pumped that I finally got my hands on one. I was amazed that Wal-Mart did not carry them. A few years ago, they carried a lot of Retro Games mini consoles such as the C64 mini, and the Play Station 1 mini.

[Old Boy]

Pretty cool man. I have never even heard of this console before and I’m big on video games. Are you able to do cheat codes with it?

[Chako]

I believe you can.

Here is how to add games down the road.

[aicolainen]

Interesting.
I was never as deep into this as you appear to have been, but I'm born just early enough to experience the tail end of the micro computer revolution and as such I have a fair bit of nostalgia attached to these devices.
My first computer was the C64. I wasn't really interested in computers yet, but my parents were curious enough to buy one. It was the dominant home computer/gaming platform at the time, so even if I was lacking a general interest in computer tech, there was a social side to it and we played quite a lot and copied games between us.
Since I only used it for games, I eventually sold the C64 to get myself a NES.
It was fun for a while.
Then one day my step brother, who didn't live with us, announced that he was selling his Amiga 2500 with all the accessories and software he had gathered over the years he had it. And the family discount was too generous to dismiss.
That was a really fun and capable machine, and probably the one that ignited the first spark of interest in the underlying tech.
After some years with the Amiga, I too realized that a Windows computer was hard to avoid and bought a Cyrix 5x86 based PC with Win95 in 95.
I kept the Amiga around for fun until the early 2000's when, for lack of space in my tiny apartment, I gave it away to a friend.
I have really good memories attached to that computer and the opportunity to revisit that in the form of this mini A500 is intriguing, but I also fear it will quickly become another dust collector once the initial excitement has passed. I'll do a little search to see how obtainable it is in my area and make up my mind from there.
Thanks for sharing!

[Chako]

 

Well I jury rigged something quick to try out this little guy. There is a built in keyboard shown in one of the photos. You can add a physical keyboard which is probably the route I will be taking. I found out I can also get Amiga Workbench which is the operating system. I would love to play with it once again.

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[Chako]

Update time. Someone told me of a file I could download that would have most if not all of the Amiga games in LHA format. Furthermore, to access this, I would have to also install WHDLoader onto a FAT32 formatted USB stick that can be no bigger than 32GB (anything higher and you wouldn't be given the option of formatting in FAT32).

I installed 7-Zip so that I could decompress these files. I downloaded the files and attempted to use 7-ZIP. It wasn't working as expected...so I downloaded the files again and attempted to extract them. I did this several times and gave up in frustration and had to do a bit of research once again.

During my readings, I found out that you can upgrade the firmware. I read this several times and attempted to this again but with the upgrade file taken directly from Retro Games support web site. Nothing. Apparently, all I had to do was download the file unto a properly formatted USB stick, plug the USB drive into the back of the Mini Amiga, go to options, scroll down to information, and if all went well, I should have a upgrade button for the firmware once the little Amiga console detected the right file. This stumped me several times until I noticed that the way I was doing file management, Windows 11 would add a (#) to each additional duplicate file I downloaded. I erased that extra from the file name, and it worked.

Once I figured out what was going on, I went back to my Downloads and erased everything, including all the duplicates. I once again downloaded the files individually once and extracted them to the USB stick. This included that WHDLoader and the games repository in LHA format. It all worked.

This took me a better part of a night and my eureka moment happened the next day early in the morning. I feel a bit dumb about this, but then again, I am not in the habit of using ZIP files. Lesson learned...the hard way lol!

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I was using a relatively cheap cell phone wall charger adapter to power the Mini Amiga. This caused its own issues as the USB stick icon would strobe and nothing seemed to work. Someone told me I would have to get a better power adapter. I did have a better more powerful fast charger one, and once I installed this, things started to look up.

So my issues were two fold. One of not having enough power, and the other of poor file management on my part. It all works now.

[Chako]

Now that I sort of figured out a few things, it was time to move it up to my small games room upstairs.

20230125_170200A by Chako, on Flickr

[pfrsantos]

Just found a recent version of Another World and have been playing it again. It's just wow, even with the poligon graphics.

 

[Millhouse]

Had an Amiga 1200 back in the day and this is so tempting.

How do the games look on a modern hi res monitor or TV?

[Chako]

Beautifully authentic. You can even add scan lines to make it CRT like.