The A500 Mini Amiga 500 Console – In Depth Review

This article is a companion piece to our recent video review of the A500 Mini. They are separate in that they have unique information, so be sure to check out the video as well as reading the article.

For people who played video games in the UK in the mid-80s through to mid-90s, one of the best computer systems to have was the Amiga 500.

Released by Commodore, the Amiga line of computers were a big hit in the UK in particular, and were great as home computing devices as well as being brilliant to play video games on. The graphics and software support for the Amiga did for some time beat out PCs and rival computers form the likes of Amstrad and Atari.

Unfortunately Commodore fell upon difficult times and with the increased popularity of PCs and the era of Windows, the Amiga wouldn’t progress much beyond the fantastic Amiga 1200. There was also the Amiga CD32, which was the first 32-bit CD based home console which was based on the A1200, but with rivals in Nintendo and Sega, the CD32 failed to become a big enough hit to save the Amiga.

But despite the Amiga range of computers and consoles coming to an end in the mid-90s, the fanbase of the Amiga has never gone away. The Amiga community have kept it alive for decades, and finally the Amiga fanbase is being rewarded with the release of the A500 Mini from Retro Games.

Retro Games previously released the C64 Mini a few years ago, and have since released a larger version of the Commodore 64 as well as the VIC20 with working keyboards. Whilst these systems will forever hold a special place in many a computer user and gamer’s hearts, the Amiga 500 and 1200 being reborn in the form of the A500 Mini is much more exciting for this player.

The Amiga 500, and later the Amiga 1200 were home to many games which are still loved and requested franchises. The likes of Lemmings, Monkey Island and Worms all started life on the Amiga.

The A500 Mini comes packed with 25 games built in, and of the previously mentioned titles, only Worms is represented in the box you’ll get from the shop. But one of the best features of the A500 Mini is that Retro Games have completely embraced the idea of sideloading roms onto the console. It even says on the box that you can load your own WHDLoad-packaged games via USB.

What this means is that with just the addition of a USB memory stick you can access the full library of Amiga software from the past.

Of course, we must note that it clarifies on the box that games must be legally obtained, and that many will ignore this. However, if you’ve bought a game in the past and your original Amiga is dead, then you have paid the license to be able to play the game in emulated form.

Also, from a game preservation point of view, it should be noted that many of the companies that made Amiga games back in the day no longer exist and its incredibly unlikely that you will be able to find a way to buy some of the games that you may have missed or been to young to get back when they were available in the shops. Heck, I’d love to get my hands on a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn, but that’s near impossible and that’s Sega who are a huge company not making past games easy to obtain!

But we’ll circle back to adding games to the system yourself soon, and for now, let’s look at the games that come pre-loaded. Everyone will have their personal favourites but highlights for me include Another World, Zool, Worms the Directors Cut, Simon the Sorcerer, Alien Breed 3D and The Chaos Engine!

The variety of games on the system is great with Zool, Titus the Fox and Quak being cartoon platformer games, Stunt Car Racer, Super Cars 2 and ART being racing games, Kick Off 2, Arcade Pool and California Games being sports titles and it even features Alien Breed 3D which is a first person shooter!

Not every game is to my personal taste and if I didn’t have personal nostalgia for a game, it perhaps isn’t going to be a hit with me, but it has to be said that if these 25 games were the only games you got with the system and you could add no more,  then this is still an incredible line up.

The machine itself is a near perfect miniature recreation of the original Amiga 500. Compared in size to other mini consoles like the NES or PlayStation the A500 Mini is a fair big larger, but that is obviously to accommodate the size of the original machine which included a built in keyboard.

The keyboard on the A500 Mini is purely cosmetic, just as on the C64 Mini, and the same goes for the floppy disc drive on the side. The same was true for the cartridge slots on other mini consoles like the Mega Drive/Genesis.

The biggest difference comes in that the machine says The A500 instead of saying Amiga and that is for copyright related rights issues. For the same reason the Commodore logo is replaced with an Amiga like ball logo.

The A500 Mini features 3 USB ports on the back and also an HDMI port and a USB type-C port to plug the console in.

That the machine has 3 USB ports is to accommodate that most players will need to plug in the included Gamepad and Mouse, and then you have one more port for adding a USB memory stick to add your own games, or if you needed to plug in a USB keyboard. A forth USB port would have made this all possible at once, but you can use a USB hub to add additional gamepads etc.

The gamepad is a homage to the Amiga CD32 gamepad, but isn’t exactly the same. The ABXY buttons are now more diamond shaped in their layout and the grips are shorter. Some Amiga users will be more used to playing these games with a joystick, but I’m happy with the pad they gave us. You can always get and use the C64 joystick, and this is the best chance if there ever was one, to revisit the Amiga CD32 on new hardware.

Being a call back to the Amiga CD32 pad, truthfully, this isn’t the greatest joypad in the world by a long shot.  The split buttons on the D-Pad aren’t the most comfortable, and the upwards facing grips was weird even back in the day.

My biggest point of concern was that the Home button feels like it is positioned where most players would expect it to be a Start/Pause button and as a result I kept exiting  a game instead of pausing it. I’ll get used to it, but feel this should have been seen as something many players would do.

Thankfully, you can use other gamepads with the machine.

If you’ve checked out the YouTube video review we did on the Geek Battle Gaming channel, you’ll see we tried a variety of other gamepads with the A500 Mini. We found that the PlayStation 3 and 4 controllers worked fine, although the PS5 controller did not.

The Evercade VS controller also works, but the Atari VCS Classic Joystick didn’t work. None of the Xbox One or Series X controllers that we tried worked either. I would recommend using a PS4 controller as the most comfortable way to play, but there is one major issue.

When exiting a game, the non A500 Mini controllers seemed to stop functioning to control the menu to select games.  This is odd and a bit of a pain, but hopefully will get fixed in a future update. I actually did stumble on a fix, and that was that I pressed the power button on the machine and it seemed to bring the controller back to life, but for all I know it was just a time related thing.  The machine does tell you to shut down the console, so this may not be the best way to do it.

The mouse that comes with it is a very slightly smaller version of the original Amiga 500 mouse, and it has two buttons and no scroll wheel which is a shame if you wanted to use this on your PC. In terms of nostalgia, they got it just right.

The menu for selecting games is great and everything is clear with info and box art of each game, and the handy ability to quickly access save states and save and load your game to help overcome those tricky older game mechanics of yesteryear.

I did find that I accidently messed up the controls for a game I loaded via USB and then I didn’t see a way to put it back to the default which is a shame, but again a future update may make this possible.

I’ve already seen that users of the A500 Mini are adding Workbench, which was the Amiga OS and in many ways was Windows before Windows was a thing. I’m not so keen to use older operating systems as I mainly want this to play games, but if it opens up people making new Amiga software I’m all for it. I’ve not done so yet, but I’m excited to get Deluxe Paint on this, as it was my favourite art programme before jumping to Photoshop on the PC.

In terms of other games to add, I’ll do another article and video to show some of my favourite games which I think all Amiga users should play, but as some quick recommendations I’d say to play Lemmings 2 the Tribes (best in that series), Cannon Fodder, Gloom and The Secret of Monkey Island.

Conclusion

The Amiga 500 and 1200 were so rich with great games and the fact that the A500 Mini does give you the ability to play any and all of them makes this an absolute must have for retro game fans. The included games are a great line up as it is, and the way the games just work and look great on an HD TV and load fast is just magic!

The only downsides I can really point to is that I think the gamepad isn’t the greatest, but more than does the job and I understand that it’s only lacking just so it matches the Amiga pad it is recreating. Also I found having to jump out of a game to access the save states took me out of the game experience slightly, and that the position of the Menu and especially the Home button feel like they should be Start/Pause buttons.

Other than these points I can’t really fault this device. It’s a brilliant piece of hardware and will certainly bring back the nostalgia for the Amiga for many fans around the world and should lead to more Amiga fans. It may even lead to some of the franchises and games featured getting back into people’s mind spaces and one can dream that modern remakes or sequels could even emerge if there is lots of new interest.

For now, I’m going to have a blast playing Worms and later some All New World of Lemmings!

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