The Mini Amiga 500 has arrived!

[Music] welcome back to the 8-bit guy in the past i've done reviews of the c64 mini and the full size 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 and 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 it is now for all those that are going to ask no the keyboard doesn't work it's just cosmetic but the attention to detail here is really impressive they've 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 disc in the drive here but you can't oh and uh look at that i have serial number eight i think perifractic has serial number one i wonder who has two through seven 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 uh it's also here on the manual and 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 a cloanto on here which they own the roms so that makes sense um 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 now most people refer to it as the boeing ball this was originally intended to be the official logo for the 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 then cut a small portion of it out like so and then inverted the colors and so yeah here it is i think that's uh i think that's what we're looking at and that explains the entire red color scheme of this product which i think is pretty cool because that's uh gives some heritage to the uh to the amiga logos and stuff without actually using the amiga logos anyway let's finish unboxing this 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 and no surprises there uh although it does seem to be 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 now what i mean is it doesn't feel like a two dollar chinese knockoff controller that you'll find on ebay or something this thing feels well made and surprisingly heavy and i mean that in a good way okay let's get this thing hooked up to a tv now by the time it's all plugged in you'll have at least four wires there'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 hertz 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 so um 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's a list of the games that are included on the device from the factory so i thought we'd first 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 good at it i had f-16 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 i was never a big fan probably why i didn't get it on the amiga and likewise i knew of paradroid from the c64 okay well what about games i've learned about later in my adult life okay so i know about the alien breed games uh supercars 2 worms and zuul so that's 12 games that i'm personally familiar with and that's about half of them so 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 what 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 then it plays just like you'd expect so uh moving along uh let's try another world now here they did include the title sequence which makes me very happy um 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 okay uh let's try zuul now i have to admit i've never actually played this before and let's say it is 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 and 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 you keep scrolling through the list of games and you'll find the usb option and as you can see i've 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 that it's an ntsc game you can also pick what sort of controller is in each slot and you can even configure what each button on the gamepad does for a specific game which is very handy and so here's lemmings you get the full intro and everything you know i first played livings on a friend's ms-dos computer and then i later got it for amiga and found that 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's capable of playing lemmings with a mouse i'm sure you could rig up a raspberry pi or something but you know what i mean by the way i just i love the sound that the lemmings make on the amiga version when they fall to their death sometimes i just have to let a few fall just to hear that sound and here's another iconic game i placed on the usb drive um of course it seems to be running at 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 pet ski robots now um what you're going to want to do with this game is configure port number two as a cd32 pad um this is a more advanced controller that commodore shipped with the cd32 but some amiga games support it as well and we decided to sport it here in the game because we needed the extra buttons of course once you start the game you'll need to go in the menu here under controls and switch it to cd32 pad now 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 cd32 pad it's clearly very similar except that it has this one extra button now intuitively you'd think that 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 cd32 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 petsky robots manual as you can see i did label all 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 or toggling the music or exiting the game back to the menu but these features are available on the controller they're just undocumented so let me show you how those work if you press menu and left it will bring up the map and to toggle the robots in the map use menu and down to toggle the music it's menu a and to exit the game it's 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 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 it even has enough buttons to play 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 i have a suspicion they've also hidden the screw under the label here i hate to mess this label up but i guess i guess i'll mess mine up so that you guys don't have to mess yours up okay here we are um it's a pretty small little board as i suspected it looks like the fake keyboard is actually a separate molded piece of plastic as usual and that's certainly part of the attention to detail also i noticed they added metal weights to the bottom which helps it to be uh 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's some sort of system on a chip behind that heatsink but i'm not sure what kind it looks like they left off four 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 are for oh and i also wanted to have a look at the power led it does appear that 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 is the projected price and a lot of people are going to say that's 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 uh controller that you can use on your regular computer along with it i don't know i hope i think that helps um justify the price you know maybe just a little bit i'm also told this is going to go on sale in the usa probably around may 31st so we still have a ways to wait but if you're 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 c64 maxi and so they're probably it's probably up to the job i think anyway um that about wraps it up for this episode uh 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 maybe 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 videos it's just ending up being kind of a coincidence but yeah i've got several more amiga related stuff coming out soon so uh anyway uh that's about it so i'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 626,898

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Id: igEpW8QJFQ4

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022