Why get an Amiga 500 Mini

We’re hearing reports of people in the US ordering from Amazon UK, rather than waiting until the May release date, and receiving their Mini’s in around 4 days.

As of May 20th, here is a round up of some suppliers and prices:

We highly recommend getting the novelty USB floppy style memory stick from Smyths if you can though Amazon delivery is hard to beat.

If you are completely new to the Amiga, it was a highly popular series of computers for games. There were around 5 million Amiga computers sold over 30 years ago and it had around 5,000 commercial games. The Amiga 500 Mini emulates some of the Amiga series (not just the Amiga 500 but also the more advanced Amiga 1200) and comes with 25 games and controllers so you can quickly start playing.

There are alternatives. The chip inside the Amiga 500 Mini is the All Winner H6 chip which is also found in a Raspberry Pi 3 and runs Amiberry software to emulate an Amiga. The Raspberry Pi is very popular for retro gaming and Pimiga is a project to provide a great way to emulate an Amiga however it is optimized for a Raspberry Pi 400 which, at the time of writing, is hard to get and is not far off the price of an Amiga Mini. It does not come with licensed Amiga software and as it is not Amiga themed, you don't get an Amiga tank mouse or Amiga CD32 styled joypad.

To skip emulation altogether, you could the real thing – an Amiga 500! However these require floppy disks or a gotek floppy drive emulator to run software. A better alternative would be to use an Amiga 1200 (which the Amiga 500 Mini can emulate) with a card reader adapter to act as a hard drive. However to run games using a popular software loader, whdload, you would really need an 8mb memory expansion. If HDMI output is required, another adapter would be needed. You would also want an Amiga 1200 to be "recapped" to avoid faults. The total outlay for this setup (even with the computer being second hand and around 30 years old) could easily be around 3 times the price of an Amiga 500 Mini.

Unlike with a Raspberry Pi, you won't have to worry about getting ROM files - the Amiga Mini is fully legal and licensed with all the files you need. It is easy to purchase and easy to get up and running playing great in-built games very quickly on modern televisions. The small footprint makes it very cute and it has gathered a keen group of hackers and enthusiasts. According to the manufacturer, Retro Remakes, the A500 Mini is the fastest selling home computer remake. In our opinion, avoid the hassle of the alternaives and just have some fun on a very portable mini.

The keyboard is cosmetic and does not work (only a virtual keyboard built in to the software). As with many emulated systems, there can be issues with some games.