Wednesday, March 27

The A500 Mini Review: Retro Fever Spreads With Commodore’s Excellent 16-Bit Amiga Replica


Younger gamers won’t remember (they aren’t the target audience for this replica either), but back in the late 1980s, the microcomputer market was beginning to show signs of exhaustion when 8-bit technically no longer gave more than Yes. 16-bit computers – the next evolutionary ladder of video games – were then perceived as a true technological typhoon. The Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, often -but not always- sharing catalog and graphic featurescame as a visual and sound revolution of what we had seen in Commodore, MSX, Amstrad, Spectrum and others.

The A500 Mini is Retro Games’ scaled-down replica of a new 1980s microcomputer (in this case, the Amiga 500), following the excellent results achieved with its ready-to-play versions of classic computers like the Commodore 64 (in both Mini and 1:1 scale formats) or the Vic20. The A500 Mini shares many of its virtues and almost none of the problems of all its predecessors, in another step in the evolution of these nostalgic devices, which have reached a very attractive level of simplicity and comfort. We have tested The A500 Mini and these are our impressions.

The A500 Mini, technical specifications

features

SIZE

10″ x 7″ x 3″

RESOLUTION

720p at 50/60Hz

controllers

USB mouse (Tank Mouse)

USB pad (CD32 pad)

processor

All Winner H6 ARM

memory

512mb DDR3 RAM

ports

3xUSB2.0

1xHDMI

1x USB-C (to plug into power)

PRICE

€129.95

The A500 Mini - Hardware

Why the Amiga 500

The Amiga 500 was, after the triumphant success of the Commodore 64, the North American company’s commitment to an affordable but powerful computer. It had the same power as the extraordinary Amiga 1000 -with its Motorola 68000 as the belly of the beast- but the casing was smaller, which allowed its price to be more affordable, which made it more popular. Commodore introduced it in 1987 alongside the even more ambitious and much more powerful Amiga 2000.

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Amiga 500 was the perfect marriage of affordable home computer and professional options that made it a genuine workhorse. That is why it was sold, like the Commodore 64, in stores of all kinds, and unlike the latter, it sold extraordinarily well in Europe (the triumphal zone of the C64 was the United States), which led to the creation of a version reviewed, the Amiga 500 Plus. And where all these models stood out was in games, spectacular adventures of otherworldly color and sound, at a time when PCs were still behind in this regard.

Amiga 500 was the perfect marriage of affordable home computer and professional options

Amiga 500 was the perfect marriage of affordable home computer and professional options

So, this The A500 Mini comes with 25 pre-installed games. They are the following:

  • Alien Breed 3D
  • Alien Breed: Special Edition 92
  • Another World
  • Arcade Pool
  • ATR: All Terrain Racing
  • battle chess
  • Corpse
  • California Games
  • Dragon’s Breath
  • F-16 Fighter Pilot
  • kick off 2
  • android 90
  • Pinball Dreams
  • Project-X: Special Edition 93
  • qwak
  • Simon the Sorcerer
  • Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
  • Stunt Car Racer
  • Super Cars II
  • The Chaos Engine
  • Lost Patrol
  • The Sentinel
  • Titus the Fox
  • Worms: The Director’s Cut
  • Zool: Ninja Of The ”Nth” Dimension
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Regardless of the quality of the replica, which we will talk about now, it is worth noting the remarkable selection of games, above that made with the C64 Mini, full of notable games, but also with a lot of padding. In this selection there indisputable classics such as ‘The Chaos Engine’, various installments of ‘Worms’, ‘Alien Breed’, ‘Another World’ or ‘Speedball 2’ among a long list of great games. But there are also essential rarities such as the unusual ‘The Sentinel’ -a prodigy of polygonal worlds at the top of the essential games of the time-, the crazy adventure ‘Cadaver’ or the memorable violent chess of ‘Battle Chess’. There is some filler title, but they are the least.

And of course, with only 25 games included, there are a few absences: the mythical ‘Cannon Fodder’, LucasArts graphic adventures, ‘Syndicate’, ‘Settlers’, ‘Dune II’, ‘Rainbow Island’, Cinemaware games , ‘Gods’, ‘Lemmings’, the ‘Turrican’ trilogy and a long etcetera. But this selection is perfect to whet your appetite and, as we will see, the absences can be solved.

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A replica in mini version

There are no major technical or operational novelties of this The A500 Mini with respect to the previous proposals of Retro Games. We are facing a reduction in the size of the original casing, which makes the keys become a mere decoration: easier to keep if you have space problems, but it is still a piece of junk with no use beyond housing in your inside a handful of ROMs. Yes indeed, the miniaturization of the original case is a wonder: especially the colors are very successfuland there are delightful touches like the floppy slot.

More interesting is the fact that the box includes not only a pad that feels totally like one of the time (it is a very faithful replica of the one that came with the Amiga CD32 console), but also a mouse that allows you to play titles like ‘Simon the Sorcerer’ in complete comfort. It is indisputable that in genres such as graphic adventures, strategy games (‘Last Patrol’) or flight simulators (‘F-16 Combat Pilot’) the mouse is of indisputable utility. And it goes without saying that games like ‘Battle Chess’ have life multiplied thanks to the mouse: it would be very tedious to control them with the pad.

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As always, there is little to comment on in terms of the menus and accessibility of the games: these are presented with a description that gives a fairly accurate idea of ​​what we can find in each title, a control scheme for each of the games and an icon system that makes it clear how many players it allows and which controller(s) it is played with. There is game saving at any point, screen filters imitating monitors from the eighties and the possibility of rating the games to locate our favorites. That is to say, an improved and adjusted version of The C64 interface to which it only lacks, perhaps, some video for each of the games, to obtain an immediate impression of how they work.

All games run flawlessly with no jerks or controller responsiveness issues

Finally, the best possible comment on the emulation of the games: there is nothing to comment on. They all work flawlessly, with no jerks or responsiveness from the controls. They are microcomputer games from the eighties, yes: far from the magical accessibility of an NES, a Mega Drive or a Super NES. Visually brilliant titles but with mechanics that are sometimes difficult to get used to, just as it happened with 8-bit computers or PCs that booted into MS-DOS. But they are also the history of the medium, overflowing with fascinating visual and technical solutions, and some with proposals as advanced as the aforementioned ‘The Sentinel’.

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As we mentioned above, these games are far from covering the Amiga 500’s catalog. Fortunately, Retro Games knows what the user is looking for in their artifacts, and their emulator is open for us to introduce (from a legal point of view, it can only be done if you own the original games) ROMS of the games. It is not as simple a process as in TheC64, where simply a USB with the ROMS was easily read and executed, but it does not have any complications, and all you need is a downloadable file from the official Retro Games website and format the USB in a certain way. Our colleagues at Vida Extra explain it perfectly.

Some details: presentation and price

Although it is certainly not the characteristic that inclines for or against a purchase like this, the presentation of The A500 Mini is very remarkable, without a doubt the most notable of all Retro Games products so far (although the air box vintage of The C64 stays very close). Inside the small box of the console there are two boxes in turn, one for the pad and the other for the mouse, differentiated with some schematic icons of the controllers. The design in red and with the clearly visible Amiga logo rounds off the outfit.

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Perhaps the only but is the absence of a power adapter with a USB-A port that allows you to connect the console immediately, but it is a lesser evil and we all have one of these adapters at home. Otherwise, the usual bittersweet feeling: would a functional keyboard like the one on The C64 have been more attractive? Yes, but the price would have skyrocketed and the use we would have given the console would have been practically identical. Luckily, any USB keyboard can be connected to it, which will come in handy with games like ‘Simon the Sorcerer’

129.95 euros is almost double what The C64 Mini cost, but The A500 Mini includes a pad and a mouse

The price for all this, in short, is not particularly cheap: 129.95 euros is almost double what The C64 Mini cost, and despite the fact that it includes a pad and a mouse, and that only a joystick (and of very improvable quality, unlike these new controllers), it is a substantial difference. In fact, the price of this The A500 Mini is closer to that of TheC64, which was already for all intents and purposes a Commodore 64 emulator with a keyboard that perfectly mimicked the original hardware. Still, is it still a reasonably affordable price for 25 classic games and fancy packaging? If you are interested in retrocomputing, without a doubt.

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The A500 Mini: Xataka’s opinion

Possibly at this point, and knowing that everything is where it should be (the quality of the drivers, the precision of the emulation, the accuracy of the game catalog, the ease of including new titles), you already have a very rough idea of ​​what that this The A500 Mini offers if you tried the previous Retro Games products. The decision to approach him will largely depend on your interest in retrocomputing and the memorabilia of the time.

The A500 Mini lacks the showiness of an Evercade VS, which despite emulating retro games, had its own paraphernalia, with independent cartridges organized by companies and updated controls. The A500 Mini is rather a nice trip to the past via an emulator, with an attractive price and very interesting details (the exquisiteness of the replica, the mouse, the selection of games) that give this Retro Games proposal a very special charm.

More information | Retro Games

The device has been loaned for testing by Koch Media. Can inquire our policy of relationships with enterprises.

The A500 Mini - Hardware

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