Welcome back to the 8-Bit Guy. In the past, I’ve done reviews of the C64 Mini and
the full sized version. And today, I’m going to review the A500 Mini, which is made by the
same company. Of course this product is focused on the Amiga instead of the Commodore 8-Bit systems.
The box is pretty high quality. And on the back it shows all of the built in games. We’ll talk
more about that later. And for some reason I was sent this spiral bound manual. I don’t
think this is included in the regular box, but it was nice of them to send it to me.
Anyway, let’s get to unboxing this thing. And well, there it is! If that isn’t the
cutest thing I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is. Now for those that are going ask,
NO the keyboard doesn’t work. It’s just cosmetic. But the attention to detail here
is really impressive. They have captured every line and detail of the Amiga 500 case, which
by the way I think is one of the most beautiful products Commodore ever made.
Of course the rear ports look different, which is unavoidable. It almost looks
like you could put a tiny disk in the drive here, but you can’t. Oh and look at that,
I have serial number 8. I think Perifractic has serial number 1. I wonder who has 2 through 7.
So, let’s compare this to the real thing, so you can see exactly what the size difference is.
You know, even if the keys did work, you’d have to use like a pencil or something to type on it.
My finger is larger than most of these keys.
So,I was looking at this logo here that they’re using. And I notice it’s also here on the manual.
I was trying to figure out, you know, what that logo is. I know they’re not allowed to
use the Commodore or Amiga logos because that’s owned by some other company these days. And,
I know they say they have the Cloanto on here, which they own the ROMs. So that make sense
for that. But yeah, so what’s this logo? Well, I have a theory where they got this.
So there was this demo that Commodore used at CES in 1984 with this bouncing ball to show off the
Amiga prototype. Most people refer to it as the Boing Ball. This was originally intended to be
the official logo for Amiga before Commodore decided to go with the colored check mark.
However, this ball has always been associated with the Amiga.
So, I think what they’ve done here is taken the ball, and cut a small
portion of it out like so. Then inverted the colors.
And so yeah, here it is. I think that’s, I think that’s what we’re looking at. And
that explains the entire red color scheme of this product. I think it’s pretty cool because
that gives some heritage to the amiga logos and stuff without actually using the Amiga logos.
Anyway, let’s finish unboxing this thing. So this box must have a controller. And I’m
guessing this is the mouse. Look at that! It looks exactly like the original commodore Tank mouse.
Of course this one is optical. No surprise there. Although it does seem maybe a bit
smaller than the original, so let’s compare. Yep, the original mouse is just a bit larger.
And here we have some various cables. And of course, the controller. Now, this thing feels nice
and solid. What I mean is, it doesn’t feel like a $2 Chinese knockoff controller you find on eBay
or something. This thing feels well made and is surprisingly heavy. And I mean that in a good way.
OK, well lets get this thing hooked up to a TV. By the time it’s all plugged in,
you’ll have at least 4 wires. That’s a controller, a mouse, an HDMI cable,
and a power cable, which leaves one port open for a USB flash drive, which we’ll try out later.
Now I’ll press the power button. And oh look. Even the little power LED lights
up. You can’t see it really great on camera. But if I turn the light out, you can see it!
And so here we are at the language selection screen. Now it looks like Amiga workbench,
but the mouse doesn’t actually do anything at this point. But that’s fine you can use
the controller. I’ll pick 60 hz since I’m in the USA. And so here we are at the main menu.
So, let’s talk about these included games for a moment. Now, I’ve gotten some criticism in the
past when reviewing the C64 Mini when I talked about the included games and
which ones I was familiar with and whether I thought it was a good selection.
Of course, it was pointed out to me that many of the games that were popular in the USA were not
popular in Europe and vice-versa. And keep in mind that I only had an Amiga for about a year
during my teenage years. So my experience is more limited than for example with the 8-bit systems.
That being said, here is a list of the games that are included on the device from the factory. So,
I thought first we’d just have a look at what games I actually had as a teenager.
I did have Another World. That was one of my favorites. I also had Battle Chess,
even though I was never any good at it. I had F16 Combat Pilot. I had Pinball Dreams,
another one of my favorites. And last, Stunt Car Racer. So there we go. Not many.
But what about games I at least knew of from the time? Well,
I knew of California Games. I had that on my C64. But was never a big fan,
probably why I didn’t get it on the Amiga. And likewise, I knew of Paradroid from the C64.
OK. Well, what about games that I’ve learned about later in my Adult life? OK, So I know about the
Alien Breed games, Supercars II, Worms, and Zool. So that’s 12 games that I’m personally familiar
with. That’s about half of them. It’s not bad. But I suppose I’m disappointed that it doesn’t include
Lemmings. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like that was the killer app, so to speak, for the Amiga.
So let’s try a few games out. I’ll start with one I know, which is pinball dreams.
I was disappointed that the title sequence was
missing because I really loved the music for that. But anyway, here’s the game.
And it plays just like you’d expect. So, moving along.
Let’s try Another World. Now here they did include the title sequence,
which makes me very happy. It goes on for several minutes so I won’t show it all.
You know, I used to play this game a lot back in the day, but I never did win it.
OK, let’s try Zool. I have to admit, I’ve never actually played this before.
I must say, it’s quite colorful. In fact, the high contrast is just a little bit distracting.
Anyway, moving along I wanted to find something that worked with the mouse. So I tried battle
chess. And it works with the mouse just like you’d expect. So not a lot to comment on there.
Of course, what games it comes with from the factory probably doesn’t even matter to most of
my audience. That’s because like previous devices, they’ve made this one very easy to install your
own games. Just stick in a USB stick in the extra USB slot. And then if you keep scrolling through
the list of games, you’ll find the USB option. As you can see, I have added a few games here.
And one of the things you can do is configure the behavior of this game on screen. In this case,
you can see I’ve already configured the size and placement of the game on the screen. And I’ve told
it this is an NTSC game. You can also pick what sort of controller is in each slot. And you can
even confiture what each button on the game pad does for a specific game, which is very handy.
And so here is Lemmings. You get the full intro and everything. You know, I first played lemmings
on a friend’s MS-DOS computer. And later I got it for my Amiga and found it had this cool intro
that the DOS version lacked for some reason. And here it is. Of course I’m using the included mouse
for this. I think this may possibly be the only commercial product of this nature that is capable
of playing Lemmings with a mouse. I am sure you could rig up a raspberry pi or something, but
you know what I mean. By the way, I just love the sound the lemmings make on the Amiga version when
they fall to their death. Hahah. Sometimes I just have to let a few fall just to hear that sound!
Here’s another iconic game I placed on the USB drive. Of course,
it seems to be running in PAL speed, so the music is slower than I’m accustomed to,
but probably the correct speed for at least half of the players of this out there.
And, of course, I have to try out Petscii Robots. Now what you’re going to want to do
with this game is configure port number two as a CD-32 Pad. This is the more advanced controller
that Commodore shipped with the CD-32, but some Amiga games support it as well. And we decided to
support it here in the game because we needed the extra buttons. Of course, once you start the game,
you’ll need to go to the menu here under controls and switch it to CD32 Pad.
At this point, the game plays exactly like you’d expect. Although there are two things
I should tell you about. If you compare the layout of the A500 controller to a CD-32 pad,
it’s clearly very similar. Except that it has one extra button. Now, intuitively you’d think
this button here would be the button you’d use. However, this button is dedicated to bringing you
back to the Home Screen of the console. In fact, as you can see on the programming screen, you
aren’t even allowed to modify the behavior of this one button. Which means, if you need to use this
button here on the CD-32 controller, it actually maps over here to the menu button. Which is a
little inconvenient. Mainly because if you keep your left thumb on the D-Pad, then you have to
stretch your right thumb a bit far to press this button. It’s not the end of the world, though.
I should also tell you about something that is not in the Petscii Robots manual.
As you can see, I did label all of the buttons on the controller of what they do. But, I left a few
things off because I figured you could still use the keyboard for things like bringing up the map,
toggling the music, or exiting the game back to the menu. But these features
are available on the controller, they are just undocumented. So, let me show you how those work.
If you press menu and left, it will bring up the map. To toggle the robots on the map, use menu and
down. To toggle the music, it is menu-A, and to exit the game, it is menu-B. So, this game is
completely playable without the keyboard, and I’m thrilled to see it working on this little console!
Oh and by the way. I wanted to see if this mouse would work on a regular Windows PC. And well,
sure enough. It does. In fact, it’s a pretty nice mouse to use. I could see myself using
this as a daily driver if it weren’t for the fact that I’m spoiled with a scroll-wheel.
Likewise, I wanted to try the controller. And sure enough, it works great as a standard controller
on most everything I tried and even has enough buttons to player Super Nintendo games as well.
So, are we going to take this one apart? You bet we are.
So there’s one screw here. But I suspect there are more hiding under these rubber feet. And sure
enough, there they are. So I think I’m ready to pull it apart, but it doesn’t seem to want to come
apart in the front. And I have a suspicion they’ve also hidden a screw under the label here. I hate
to mess this label up, but I guess I’ll mess mine up so that you guys don’t have to mess yours up.
OK, here we are. It’s a pretty small little board, as I suspected. It looks like the fake keyboard is
actually a separately molded piece of plastic, as usual. That’s certainly part of that attention to
detail. Also I noticed they added metal weights to the bottom, which helps it be heavy enough
to stay in one place on a surface. And let’s look at the PCB. Well. There’s not much here.
I see what appears to be a couple of RAM chips and a flash ROM chip. I suspect there is some sort of
system-on-a-chip behind that heatsink. But I’m not sure what kind. It looks like they left off
4 capacitors that the original design must have had. And there’s also a small button of some kind
here that I don’t know what does. And two missing pin headers here. I wonder what those were for.
Oh,I also wanted to have a look at the power LED. And it does appear they have two LEDs,
so there is one for the floppy drive, but I have not yet observed that light flashing.
Overall, I’m really impressed with the build quality of this product, especially
the thought that went into the design of this product. Now, I know, it’s going to be $139
as a projected price and a lot of people are going to say that is a little bit expensive for a toy.
And you know, maybe it is. But I don’t know. Being that you’re getting a fully functional
mouse and controller that you can use on your regular computer along with it, I don’t know,
I think that helps justify, you know maybe just a little bit. I’m also told this is going
to go on sale in the USA probably around May 31, so we still have a ways to wait.
But, if you are in Europe, you’re going to be getting it a lot sooner. I’ve been told April
8th is when this will be hitting store shelves. I wasn’t able to do any particular type of latency
testing on this like I did on the previous models. But I didn’t notice any particular latency when I
was playing any of the games. I suspect they’re using that more powerful processor that they
used in the X64 Maxi. And so they’re probably. It’s probably up to the job, I think. Anyway,
that about wraps it up for this episode. I know I’ve got a lot of Amiga stuff that both has been
coming out and is about to be coming out, and it’s actually just a happy coincidence that this
product is coming out right in the middle of it. So I’m not trying to flood my channel with
Amiga video its just ending up being kind of a coincidence. But yeah, I’ve got several more
Amiga related stuff coming out soon, so anyway. That’s about it, so I’ll see you guys next time!