The A500 Mini

I had an Amiga 1000 back in 1986 and upgraded to several other models over the years. This is a great blast from the past. At the time, these systems had the best games for home use, only surpassed by the Super Nintendo quite a few years later.This system is cute, but powerful. If it only had the games it came with, it probably would not be worth the price, but once you format a USB Stick and load games from the internet on it, it becomes a great deal. There are over 3,000 games out there, and many are very good.First note, if you want to add the thumb drive, buy one that is 32GB, if you go larger than that, windows is a pain when you try to format it. I has to get a special program to do it, since I bought a 64GB drive. If you buy a 32GB thumb drive/USB Stick, you can format it as a FAT32 disk. Keep in mind that ExtFat does not work, it must be FAT32 when you format the drive. You can use the same drive to update the firmware as well, which you will want to do. I was able to find a web page that had a tool that would download a bunch of games and store them in separate folders, so you didn't have to do the hard work. It alphabetized them and if there was more than the system could handle in one folder, it would break it in to more than 1 folder. This made the process much easier. Each game takes up very little space, so on a 32GB drive, you probably could easily hold more games than there are out there.The only thing I didn't like about this machine was that it does not easily allow you to load WorkBench, which was the Amiga's version of Windows. If you want to run tools and utilities and such, WorkBench was where you would do that. If all you want is the games, then you don't need WorkBench, and you are good.The other thing is, it does not support internet connection, so adding games and such are all done on your PC, through the use of the thumb drive. On the original machines, at least the larger ones, like the Amiga 2000 and above, you could network them and use a modem to connect to the internet. It would have been nice to have the option to use a modern ethernet connection to get to the internet, but maybe a future upgrade will allow a USB Ethernet adapter to work.Another note, while this comes with 3 USB ports, the power cord does not take up any of those ports, so you can use the mouse in one port, the game pad in another port and still have a 3rd port available for the thumb drive. It will also support a powered USB hub, where you could then plug in more items, like a joystick or another game pad, ect. The one thing to keep in mind, you need to plug the thumb drive in to a direct USB port, not through a USB Hub. Use the hub for the mouse and any other things you care to hook up to it.This unit is nice, because it can run as many of the different Amiga models, so if some games are designed for a later model, you can still run them. They also did a speed test on this unit, using the old SysInfo utility, and it out-performed even an Amiga 4000, by a lot, so the emulation is quite fast with the new hardware. Of course the original Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, so 37 years later, we have much faster computers.I hope this was helpful, I tried to touch on some of the big things, yet not give out any web sites that might be frowned upon. There are many games that are in the public domain now, so you can legally use those. There are some that are not, and it can be tricky knowing which ones are, so there can be a bit of a fuzzy area, so that is up to you to determine what you want to load.

I wasn't sure if it was going to be worth the price, but it really is! The built-in games are great and the interface works flawlessly. The Amiga tank mouse, the game pad, and the little Amiga itself looks wonderful. The instructions they included were spot-on and easy to follow. As an owner of a couple of original Amiga computers and lots of software, I was able to get a USB flash drive full of WHDLOAD games installed and it runs those well too.I highly recommend this little machine to play those great old Amiga games!Now, I hope they will put out a full-size one as I'd grab that up too!Thank you Retro Games for a great product!

Retro Games A500 is priced right and out of the box your presented with 25 games from the days of Amiga.. the magic comes from having a flash drive and plugging into a world of fun! People are putting together different mods that allow the A500 mini to play almost every game from the time and there are several of them to choose from but do your homework before updating your machine because one doesn't work after the update! However there are even places on the internet that are selling new games made for the system.. please don't misunderstand me.. it's not a physical copy of a game but a download that will allow you to play with the program you purchased on the A500! Retro Games did a wonderful job in reproducing the look and somewhat the feel of the Amiga of long ago.. including a "tank mouse" that I honestly could grab and use over the wireless mouse I use on my computer and also a controller that is very nice to use although not everything works for it but one must remember these games and programs were written for a system made in the 90's but when work they work really well! I hope this review helps you to make a decision on whether to get one or not.. I haven't regretted my decision to get one!