You can soon own the childhood of a 30-something British person in miniature
The dream
The A500 Mini is on the way. From the makers of the C64 Mini, it's a retro console that emulates the ancient home computer and allows you to play Amiga 500, 600 and 1200 games. It's coming in early 2022, and there's a trailer and preliminary games list below.
The final roster will include 25 games, but only 12 are confirmed so far. Those are:
- Alien Breed 3D
- Another World
- ATR: All Terrain Racing
- Battle Chess
- Cadaver
- Kick Off 2
- Pinball Dreams
- Simon The Sorcerer
- Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
- The Chaos Engine
- Worms: The Director's Cut
- Zool: Ninja Of The Nth Dimension
The mini console's site offers a handful of technical details. You'll be able to save and resume, add your own games, use a USB keyboard, and it can output at 720p with different scaling options. It's standard stuff.
One of my brothers got an Amiga 500 as a Christmas or birthday present sometime around 1990, and it probably had more influence on my life than any other single object. The strength of it as a machine was that its game library contained a little of everything: the fighting and racing games and platformers you'd associate with contemporary consoles like the SNES, but also strategy games, management games, point-and-click adventures.
It's therefore a hard computer to do justice to with just 25 games, and the selection above doesn't immediately give me hope. Alien Breed 3D's pivot to first-person feels like a overreach, Kick Off 2 pales in comparison to Sensible Socceer, and I'd rather Overdrive or Skidmarks to ATR: All Terrain Racing. Pinball Dreams, The Chaos Engine and Speedball 2 are all bangers, though.
If they put Superfrog on there, I riot.