Amiga 500 Mini Announced

Retro Games, the company behind the C64 Mini, just announced an upcoming Amiga 500 Mini console. For those not familiar the C64 Mini was basically a single board computer (think Raspberry Pi style) wrapped in a custom molded C64 case leaning heavily on the nostalgia. While the device itself left something to be desired at launch it looked very neat and eventually received software updates extending the use of it considerably. The modding community also released many enhancements and software tricks for it. I bought my C64 Mini on sale later on and it’s a neat device and I use the bundled joystick for other things since it’s USB.

But Retro Gaming is back again with the new Amiga 500 Mini which may be an even better device this time around.

Again we have a nicely molded center device that tries to directly mimic the Amiga 500 design. I think it looks really neat and the included mouse and joypad are a great touch. Those peripherals may be worth the price of admission alone although it’ll be pretty steep at $140 at launch in early 2022. The nostalgia of course is the big part here and while the unit itself so far offers 25 games with the ability to load more as well as emulating (because yes this is of course software emulation) the beefier Amiga 1200 at the end of the day they want your money for your memories.

There are plenty of devices that will emulate the Amiga easily not the least your regular computer but nostalgia is indeed a powerful drug. I’d be curious to see how keyboard centric games fare on this since no that mini keyboard is not functional. I assume an external keyboard will have to be leveraged there but the games announced so far seem to lean more into the joystick/joypad side of things.

Still it’s a neat device and I may consider getting it once it releases if nothing else out of curiousity and the peripherals! The full announcement video is below.