Amiga 500 Mini (Review) - Is this the best Retro Mini yet?

2/5/2022

Blog post by: Gemma @ Juicy Game Reviews / TheGebs24

The Amiga 500 Mini in 2022

The Amiga 500 Mini has taken 90’s gamers by storm! The A500 Mini:

“A compact reimagining of the Amiga 500 home computer, featuring perfect emulation of not only the original A500 but also the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) of the A1200.
Play one of the included 25 classic Amiga games, selected from a simple to use carousel, including all-time greats like Alien Breed, Another World, Chaos Engine, Simon the Sorcerer and Worms. Or play the games you own from USB stick.
Plus save and resume your game at any time to help you finish those punishingly difficult classics!” (Retro Games Biz)

What’s in the box?

The A500 Mini
X1 HDMI Cable
X1 Gamepad
X1 USB power cable (USB to USB C)
X1 Classic Amiga USB mouse
The manual is available as a PDF direct from the dev teams website here

What are the bundled 25 Amiga Games?

Alien Breed 3D
Alien Breed: Special Edition’92
Another World
Arcade Pool
ATR: All Terrain Racing
Battle Chess
Cadaver
California Games
The Chaos Engine
Dragons Breath
F-16 Combat Pilot
Kick Off 2
The Lost Patrol
Paradroid 90
Pinball Dreams
Project-X: Special Edition 93
Qwak
The Sentinel
Simon the Sorcerer
Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
Stunt Car Racer
Super Cars II
Titus The Fox: To Marrakech And Back
Worms: The Director’s Cut
Zool: Ninja Of The “Nth” Dimension

Scroll your game library with the Amiga 500 Mini Carousel

We were also lucky enough to have a secret game, Citadel, that is available for download straight from the support page. You can watch this video to find out how to add it. Providing you own the games, you can additional Amiga files to a USB stick and launch the games direct from your launcher. Be mindful that some of the additional games can run far too fast and as of yet the official work around is to keep updated with the WHD load package on your USB stick. There are other guides online that are not support ed by the dev team so ultimately, you need to decide which method you want to utilise should you come across this issue.

Attention to detail is not lacking in the A500 Mini. The colours of the cables, home computer, mouse and gamepad all remain true to the original beige colour of the Amiga 500 itself. Nice!

Straight out of the box and back to 1987
The Amiga 500 Mini really took me back to my childhood. I forgot how important this home computer was in defining the British Gaming scene. In a world that is shrouded by Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox, we can easily forget where it truly started. I played an Amiga 500 before I ever played the Super Nintendo (my favourite games console) so diving back in to the Amiga 500 Mini in 2022 has rekindled my love affair to a lost part of my retro gaming childhood. I’m pretty confident that you will love it too. Whether you’re a Lemmings fan, a Speedball fan, a Sensible Soccer fan, you can relive your inner Amiga passion through the Mini. For me, this is the best Mini retro piece of kit on the market for this reason.

Check out my full unboxing and testing go every game in this video along with all of my other Amiga content.