It’s Friday 8th April (at least it was at the time I originally wrote this) and the A500 Mini is finally released in the UK. So I waved my magic plastic at Amazon, and as if by mag… er… “transaction carried out over the Internet”, it arrived. Now I was never much of a gamer back in the day, and even now my gaming skills are best described as “numpty.” But when has that ever stopped me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The A500 Mini is a “compact reimagining” of the Amiga 500. It comes from the same company (Retro Games<\/a>) that brought us The C64 (mini & maxi), TheVic20, and others. Inside is an emulator running on custom Arm hardware (ie not a Raspberry Pi), and it supports not just the base A500, but also the expanded A1200 with its extra memory and AGA graphics. There are 25 games included, several of which I’ve actually heard of (but see the paragraph above). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond these 25, it’s possible to add other games via a USB stick, and even enable the Workbench interface (although that takes some level 3 juju). I hope to explore this in a future video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n