The A500 Mini

Overview

There have been Amiga emulators for some while now so in a sense The A500 Mini isn't doing anything new, in fact it's using the existing Amiberry Amiga emulator (based on WinUAE) which is optimized for ARM-based SoC systems. However, what The A500 Mini does well is present a ready to use system perfect for those wanting to take a trip down memory lane but don't have the time to set up an emulator on a computer. The other advantages of The A500 Mini is that it's officially licensed (Amiga ROMs licensed from Cloanto Corporation), can perform better than a Raspberry Pi (popular choice for emulation), and comes with new versions of the classic Amiga mouse and CD32 joypad.

Before going into further detail here is the official trailer:

Additional trailer:

The A500 Mini comes in a box with artwork showcasing the system, a few of the characters that feature in three of the built-in games as well as the mouse and controller, packaging reminiscent of a cartoon classics Amiga bundle:

The box's underside shows off the 25 built-in games as well as mentioning that additional games can be played via WHDLoad:

In the box in the top tray you get the The A500 Mini (model RGL009) with the quick start guide underneath:

The attention to detail of The A500 Mini case, as seen below, is very good and you could almost be tempted to try to insert a floppy disk into the side where the floppy drive would be on an actual Amiga 500.

There is a power LED which lights red when on but through a system option the LED can be made to mimic real Amiga behaviour, that is, be under control of the game that is running (so likely you will see the LED turn off while a game is running). There is also a drive LED which flashes green when loading games off a USB flash drive but not while using any of the built-in games possibly because they load so fast You won't find any Commodore or Amiga branding anywhere on The A500 Mini or its accessories since those trademarks are not licensed to Retro Games but as much as I would have liked to have seen 'Amiga' written on top of The A500 Mini's case the lack of doesn't spoil how much it resembles an Amiga 500 in very small form.

On the bottom of The A500 Mini we have a sticker showing the age rating due to the built-in games, the power rating (5VDC 1A), the model number (RGL009), website address (retrogames.biz) and the serial (523):

At the back of The A500 Mini, where you would expect most of the I/O on a real Amiga 500, you will find the push button power switch, USB-C connector for power, HDMI, and three USB ports for accessories:

Three USB ports for peripherals is convenient to accommodate a keyboard, mouse and controller but not when using a flash drive also, however, a powered USB hub is supported (best avoid connecting a USB drive to a hub, though) and you can hot swap peripherals. Under the top tray containing The A500 Mini are two boxes; In one of the boxes with a joypad image on top is the CD32-like controller (model RGL010) and a USB-C to type-A cable. As for the other box, which has a mouse picture on top, contains a HDMI cable and Amiga-like 'tank' mouse (model RGL011). The controller and mouse can be seen in the following photos:

Both the mouse and joypad, officially called THEMOUSE and THEGAMEPAD respectively, are much smaller than the original peripherals they are based on while being an improvement; the controller has better buttons and the mouse is optical instead of the ball type Amiga fans likely will be familiar with. The mouse and controller are also sold separately for £19.99 each but the controller is black, matching the colour of the joypad that shipped with the CD32, as opposed to the beige one that ships with The A500 Mini.

The A500 Mini mouse and joypad can also be used on a PC and The C64/The C64 Mini (requires firmware update 1.6.1) and in turn THEJOYSTICK from The C64 Maxi is compatible with the The A500 Mini, as are some third party USB mice and controllers. From some quick testing I found the official Raspberry Pi mouse and a USB SNES-like joypad worked without issues on The A500 Mini. A USB keyboard can also be connected as The A500 Mini doesn't have a functioning keyboard but you can also bring up a virtual keyboard by pressing the Home button of an attached controller while playing a game.

Of course, most emulators inherently introduce lag and YouTuber Retro Recipes performed an input latency test which showed there to be approximately 44ms lag (three frames), which is not bad at all and likely won't be noticeable when playing games. Please see toward the end of this section for the video.

A power supply isn't provided with The A500 Mini but a phone charger or similar USB power brick should work, 5V/1A recommended. I did do some measurements and found that The A500 Mini draws 10mA in standby and with the system powered on and a joypad and mouse connected The A500 Mini draws 520mA so advising a 1A supply was likely to give some headroom for connected peripherals.

The A500 Mini emulates A500, A600, A1200, CDTV and CD32 games and has 25 games built-in, many of which are the AGA graphics chipset edition, providing for better looking graphics.

The included games are as follows:

Alien Breed 3D

Alien Breed: Special Edition 92

Another World

Arcade Pool

ATR: All Terrain Racing

Battle Chess

Cadaver

California Games

Dragon's Breath

F-16 Combat Pilot

Kick Off 2

Paradroid 90

Pinball Dreams

Project X: Special Edition 93

Qwak

Simon The Sorcerer (AGA Version)

Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe

Stunt Car Racer

Super Cars 2

The Chaos Engine

The Lost Patrol

The Sentinel

Titus the Fox

Worms: The Director’s Cut

Zool: Ninja Of The ”Nth” Dimension (AGA Version)

You can also follow this link for a list of the games on Retro Games' site in which you can click on each game thumbnail to get more information about the game and screenshots:

https://retrogames.biz/games/thea500-mini/

Due to the included games The A500 Mini is rated 12 in the Europe and Teen in North America.

No doubt there will be games that would have seemed an obvious choice but are missing, and indeed for me Lemmings is a good example but attempting to license certain games was not fruitful. Fortunately, Retro Games Ltd. provided a mechanism to play additional games from a USB flash drive, which will be talked about in greater detail later on.

There is also a bonus USB Games Pack which currently contains a 2022 enhanced release of Citadel from 1995:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/bonus-games/

To power on The A500 Mini press the power button for a few seconds and after about 10 seconds the splash screen will show with sound and an animation that looks to be inspired by the Amiga bouncing ball demo:

When The A500 Mini first boots you are presented first with language selection (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Polish) and then frame rate options (50/60Hz) in a Workbench-like style screen before being taken to the games carousel as below:

Games can be scrolled through with the controller and for each game the box art is shown, an in-game screenshot along with indicators of the number of players, the supported control methods and star rating (press X to add a star). D-pad up on the controller shows the controls for the selected game which can be hidden by pressing D-pad down or B:

Unfortunately the controller mapping for the built-in games cannot be altered, however, as can be seen in the example of Zool in the screenshot above the extra buttons of the controller have been taken advantage of and in this case Zool can be made to jump with a button other than d-pad up, which I always found annoying.

Press A to start the selected game. Compared to playing games on a real Amiga, games on The A500 Mini start immediately, an advantage of using modern storage technology.

When playing a game you can press the Home button to return to the game carousel with the game suspended and a thumbnail of the game will appear in the upper right of the screen as a reminder the game is suspended and pressing Home again will continue the game where you left off. When a game is suspended it can be saved to 1 of 4 save slots by pressing d-pad down, then select a save slot using d-pad left/right and A to write to the selected save slot:

The following screenshots show off three of the built-in games in action, Project-X, Stunt Car Racer and Zool which all look crisp thanks to the accurate emulation and HDMI output of The A500 Mini:

As briefly mentioned earlier games can also be played from a flash drive and this is possibly through a mechanism called WHDLoad which originally was developed so that floppy disk software could be loaded from a hard drive even if the game spanned multiple floppy disks.

For The A500 Mini you need a USB flash drive formatted as FAT32; best to use a drive 32GB or lower. Then do the following:

Download the WHDLoad Package from:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/whdload/

Unzip it to the root directory of the flash drive you want to use.

You may also want to download the bonus game from:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/bonus-games/

Unzip it to the flash drive with WHDLoad installed on and place any other games you want on the flash drive but they must be in LHA format

While there are many Amiga games in LHA form ready to be downloaded you must already own the software in some form (i.e. the original floppy) for legal reasons.

Now when you boot The A500 Mini with the flash drive connected you will see a USB Media Access option among the game selections which you can select with A.:

Then it is a matter of selecting a software title using A and pressing Home to play it.:

You can also use A to open a folder and Y to go back one folder.

Before running a game can you can press the Menu button to adjust settings such as what peripherals are assigned to the joystick ports, crop size and mouse sensitivity:

These options aren't available for the built-in games.

Note that unless expert mode is enabled you will not see the Blitter, memory and optimise options; to turn expert mode on access the games carousel screen and press the Menu button to bring up the options screen:

Navigate to Advanced Options, then select Expert mode and press A to enable it.

Here is a screenshot of Lemmings which I ran from a USB flash drive:

The first time I ran Lemmings it resulted in a black screen but future attempts were successful and it seems this issue may have been addressed as there is now a newer version of the WHDLoad Package (V1.0.1), so always update to the latest version when available.

A nice touch is that The A500 Mini's drive LED will turn on as the flash drive is being accessed just like an original Amiga would do when loading from a floppy disk or hard drive.

You may have noticed in the screenshot earlier showing the files on the flash drive that there were two Workbench files, however, I was unable to get them to work. Others have been successful but I've yet to find detailed instructions online how to get Workbench to work but will include it on this page should I find out how to. Bear in mind that The A500 Mini was designed primarily to play games rather than be used as a fully fledged Amiga computer and is a bonus to do anything other than play games.

It was much requested for The A500 Mini to support ADF files and this was added (along with some other longed for features) in firmware update V1.1.0 (available 12/5/22) which can be downloaded from:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/upgrade/

Lastly, to power off The A500 Mini you can either select 'Shutdown device' from the Options screen or press the power button until it shuts down.

The A500 Mini provides a nostalgia fuelled return of one of the most beloved 80/90s series of computers in a convenient although quite pricey form that (almost) anyone can pick up and play with little fuss. You may want to check out these videos I've selected to give further thoughts on The A500 Mini...

Dan Wood’s review:

The 8-Bit Guy’s review (note: includes a teardown):

Retro Recipes’ review:

All 25 of the built-in The A500 Mini games reviewed by Metro:

https://metro.co.uk/2022/03/21/the-a500-mini-console-review-all-25-amiga-games-reviewed-16312268/amp/

Interview with co-creator of the A500 mini, Darren Melbourne, by Metro:

https://metro.co.uk/2022/04/08/a500-mini-amiga-console-interview-thats-our-passion-for-commodore-16427365/

Troubleshooting

FAQ

In addition to a brief troubleshooting guide in the manual the official site for The A500 Mini has an FAQ page:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/faq/

Can't suspend game

If a game has locked up and pressing Home doesn't return you to the games carousel screen try holding the power button for a couple of seconds but failing that try for longer, which will force a shutdown.

Firmware update

Firmware updates can be downloaded from:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/upgrade/

V1.1.0

Available 12/5/22.

Adds ADF (floppy) file support

Adds Playlist support

Adds Hot-Crop

Adds Keyboard control of the user interface

Allows the Virtual Keyboard to be accessed at all times

Allows controllers to be physically swapped during play

Swaps THEJoystick (THEC64 Joystick) fire buttons

Fixes the Virtual Keyboard Cursor-Right button

More details:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/manuals/update-1-1-0/

(No longer available due to update V1.1.0 being pulled.)

V1.1.0 reportedly caused issue with broken save states and the link to the upgrade page was removed from the Support page but if you went to the upgrade page directly you was greeted with this message:

The current firmware update has been temporarily removed while we address some issue and improve it further.

V1.1.1

On 14/5/22 the firmware page link was restored and update V1.1.1 became available for download, which has all the features of V1.1.0 but additionally:

Configures Competition Pro SL-6603-TWT joystick fire buttons

Fixes v1.1.0 Saved Game issues (missing saves and UI freezing)

Fixes v1.1.0 Emulator gui access

Fixes v1.1.0 speed reduction in some circumstances

Full details at:

https://retrogames.biz/support/thea500-mini/manuals/update-1-1-1/

Force a factory reset

While there is a built-in option to factory reset The A500 Mini you can also do it from the powered off state, which is useful if, for example, The A500 Mini has been configured to output a video mode not supported by your TV/monitor. Warning: the factory reset will delete all saved games and return all settings to their default values but any firmware upgrades won't be affected and no changes will be made to an attached USB flash drive. While powered off the factory reset can be performed by pressing and holding the power button until the welcome logo appears.

All content of this and related pages is copyright (c) James S. 2022