Exclusive First 'The A500 Mini' Prototype Playtest 75
Longtime Slashdot reader Mike Bouma writes: Retro Recipes LLC has previewed prototype serial #01 of the "A500 mini" Amiga retro console on YouTube. The console comes with 25 preinstalled games including Worms: The Director's Cut, Simon the Sorcerer, The Chaos Engine, Super Cars 2 and Speedball 2.
Additional games can be played in WHDLoad (.lha archived) format through a USB stick. The device comes included with a gamepad and mouse that can also be bought separately. The A500 mini has a HDMI video output and is scheduled for release on April 8th 2022.
Additional games can be played in WHDLoad (.lha archived) format through a USB stick. The device comes included with a gamepad and mouse that can also be bought separately. The A500 mini has a HDMI video output and is scheduled for release on April 8th 2022.
No keyboard? (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like the keyboard is fake, just for looks. The keys don't seem to work, which means any game which uses the keyboard will need an additional keyboard plugging in.
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In essence it's just another nostalgic looking case for an emulator.
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Sure, you could type on that keyboard with a toothpick, I suppose. I don't think they wanted to spend money on people wanting to type with toothpicks however when a USB connector is a lot cheaper :P
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If this follows the C64 mini you will need to wait for the A500 max to get a working keyboard.
From the preview video it looks like most games included with the system will have any keyboard commands remapped to the gamepad controller.
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An on-screen keyboard is also demonstrated in the video.
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Re: No keyboard? (Score:2)
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Remember the days (Score:1)
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It's just emulation, so no, it isn't worth buying. Especially with the stupid fake keyboard. What would have been 9000 times cooler would be to make it look like an A1000.
Re: Remember the days (Score:5, Informative)
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I wonder how good the emulation is. WinUAE is now extremely accurate, Toni has done an incredible job. He's even found a lot of hardware bugs and undocumented features that nobody knew about. It plays 99% of stuff flawlessly now, to the point where an FPGA might not be noticeably better.
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The C64 and VIC were a forked version of VICE and some people had niggles about that, because there was definitely functionality missing from the fork (still is, afaik, though I can't remember what, off the top - REU support might be one of the niggles). It's not exactly upgradable to use the vanilla/mainstream VICE code, though of course where there's a will there's a way - I expect the same will be true of TheA500. RetroGames has been really very responsive with firmware updates for the 8-bit emulator pla
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factual channels like Adrian's Digital Basement, The 8-Bit Guy, VWestLife etc.
I agree with you on perifractic, not a fan at all, but your other choices are rough. ADB is fine to watch, he perhaps shouldn't be seen as any kind of authority, he tends to go in blind but at least he seems aware of his limitations and eventually gets where he should have got before picking up the camera. Not so the 8-bit guy who appears to barely skim a wiki before getting in front of the camera and getting major details wrong, then angrily defending his lack of effort to the "haters." And everyone knows
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but you said "factual" and I was triggered
That's fair. Perhaps what I should have said is that they don't rely on silly gimmicks like thought bubbles coming out of a dog's head. Perifractic and RMC (formerly The Retro Man Cave) are both off my sub list because they are just too visibly padding their content out for monetization reasons, and I can't stand their delivery. Adrian, by contrast, goes into these things much as I would (maybe I might have slightly better tools than him, since I was an embedded engineer a long time) - but the point of his
Re: Remember the days (Score:2)
In theory, emulation could be better from a practical standpoint due to modern video realities. Native Amiga-format video was intimately tied to CRT characteristics that many/most of today's TVs emulate poorly (if at all).
There's also disagreement about how a CRT *should* be emulated. Some prefer the "authentic" look of black scanlines... which are actually harder to do so they look "right" than you'd think (because the current field's scanlines actually bleed into them and overlap... you don't just render
Re: Remember the days (Score:2)
Oh, and only about 30-60% of American LCD TVs are capable of rendering 25/50fps modes natively
Even the C64 NTSC versions had timing issues on some HDMI sets. They fixed it in a firmware update, but if you had a set that had no picture... Well, you needed to bring the machine to someone else's house :)
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Just like the PiDP-11 kit. It's a fancy case for a raspberry pi with switches and blinky lights. https://obsolescence.wixsite.c... [wixsite.com]
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My guess it is fpga based so a bit better than your standard emulation
It either emulates or it doesn't. Why would an FPGA make it better if it's already emulating?
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It either emulates or it doesn't. Why would an FPGA make it better if it's already emulating?
Software emulation on a CPU does normal multitasking, so parallel emulation of the several chips have to switch between processes. So the I/O chip emulation may have to wait for the video chip emulation and the sound chip emulation, which causes lag.
Hardware emulation on an FPGA can emulate the several chips at the same time in a truly parallel way. So this can do cycle accurate [stackexchange.com] emulation. Example: the Minimig [github.com] Amiga emulator in the MiSTer FPGA project [github.com].
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Software emulation on a CPU does normal multitasking, so parallel emulation of the several chips have to switch between processes. So the I/O chip emulation may have to wait for the video chip emulation and the sound chip emulation, which causes lag.
There is an ocean unsaid beneath this (not the least of which being that it's technically possible to pin core affinity between emulation modules and hardware CPU cores for literal parallel processing - although AFAIK this is almost never done because it's quite unnecessary). Anyway: It's completely possible to perform cycle-exact emulation of any system, on any other system - with sufficient care, you can absolutely accurately emulate anything by accurately representing the transition from "state at nanose
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in practice, the emulated-to-real translation step doesn't have to have anything LIKE the same temporal resolution as the actual hardware emulation.
Yes it does. Many old C64 and even ZX Spectrum games sync the CPU to the video chip and do things like changing color palettes in sync with the electron beam in the TV set.
Fortunately they used to run in the single digit MHz and we now have 1000 clock cycles to emulate each clock cycle on the original machine.
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Yes it does.
No, it doesn't. Re-read how I broke the process down. As long as the relative cycle accuracy of the components you are emulating is correct, your emulated universe will contain an exact machine state (the entire machine including raster positions etc) corresponding to the state that real hardware would have after executing the same number of cycles. Taking that invisible RAM universe and rendering it out to the host machine's display and audio hardware does not have to be performed with anything like the sa
Re: Remember the days (Score:2)
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I had an Amiga 500, and I don't see why anyone would want a fake Amiga 500. Agree, the A1000 or the A3000 would have been much better options.
On that note, if you are fine with emulation there are some nice 3rd party A1000/3000 cases makers out there. That might be a pretty cool project.
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I don't see why anyone would want a fake Amiga 500
For people who want a hit of nostalgia but don't want to set up WinUAE with its multitude of options or deal with snooty forum members telling you to order amiga forever CDs to get the kickstart roms (which they likely didn't but don't want to share the source of their piracy with the newcomer).
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A lot of non nerds had an A500 for games, so this will be of interest to them. Setting up an emulator, especially for really good Amiga emulation, is not trivial.
Re:Remember the days (Score:5, Informative)
Setting up an emulator, especially for really good Amiga emulation, is not trivial.
Really? I found to to be amazingly trivial. I bought a copy of Amiga Forever, installed it in a few clicks, and played it till I was tired of it. I suppose it could be task if you decide to source legal roms yourself, rip them, and then do it that way.
I see why some people would want to re-live the glory days of the Amiga. I just agree with Dinky that a A1000 or, in my case, a A3000 would have been much better for this.
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Right, you paid someone to make it easy. If you just download the emulator it's tricky to get it right.
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Pretty much. $24.99 if I remember correctly. Worth every penny of it. It was also the only way I could figure out to make sure I had legal copies of all the software and ROMs.
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It comes with an Amiga-styled gamepad and mouse, but those are also available to buy separately and use with Linux.
And the 25 games are licensed copies, not pirated.
It seems to boot faster than RetroPie, and you get an interface that you don't have to customise that much to make look good.
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I actually skipped the whole story and used Google. It turns out it's actually pretty mainstream - for example: https://www.game.co.uk/en/the-... [game.co.uk]
I've got to say, this might actually be a console I'm interested in. It's pretty "open" in so much as the Amiga's been picked to pieces years ago. It's also cheap and the whole thing works via SD memory, so no fiddling about with CDs or downloads to a locked down hard drive or "virtual ownership" online or whatever.
I will admit, that if the kids have to watch me pl
Re: Remember the days (Score:2)
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Picked to bits? My memory was that the manuals included full circuit layouts, so at most you'd need to identify bugs in the custom chips.
Re: Remember the days (Score:2)
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I guess one day we might see something like this that can be a BBC micro, an Amiga 500 and perhaps something like an N64 or even a Wii - all determined by which game you pick on off a menu. That would be pretty cool - especially if a few small-scale devs get involved and make new games for it.
I think MiSTer FPGA comes close to what you describe: https://github.com/MiSTer-deve... [github.com] I don't think it has enough grunt to emulate N64 or Wii, but it'll do older consoles with no problems, and a long, long list of retro computers (including the BBC you mentioned, and plenty of different Amigas) It uses an FPGA so there should be minimal lag, and chipset timings should be accurate (assuming they are accurately modeled in the FPGA).
Some assembly is required, but if you can use a screwdriver and read instruc
Adds vs News? (Score:1)
No New Zealand Story installed? (Score:2)
Re: No New Zealand Story installed? (Score:2)
I'm bored . . . (Score:2)
I'm bored, but I'm not so bored that I can sit through a 35 minute video about an Amiga console.
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I decided I didn't care any more after about 5 minutes when it still wasn't even powered on.
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I decided I didn't care any more after about 5 minutes when it still wasn't even powered on.
Every time I've seen his videos, they have that effect on me. I know that he is quite popular, but I can't stand his videos.
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I decided I didn't care any more after about 5 minutes when it still wasn't even powered on.
Every time I've seen his videos, they have that effect on me. I know that he is quite popular, but I can't stand his videos.
Ditto. The pacing is off, the content seems to be a lot of words that hide the fact there is very little content. So many other retrocomputing people to watch that have more engaging videos.
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Never seen him before and hopefully will never again. I found the sound effects and the thought bubbles coming out of the dog head to be to childish. Blocked the channel and told youtube not to recommend it.
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Obligatory... (Score:1)
...but does it run Linux?
A500? (Score:2)
Worms: The Director's Cut doesn't run on an A500, it requires an A1200...
Why would they call this thing the A500 when it's actually emulating an A1200?
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Because it doesn't have a working keyboard, they shipped it with some CD32 titles that had been made to use the gamepad's additional buttons instead.
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So it's basically a "CD32 Mini" with some form of more modern storage to replace the CD.
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It emulates both the A500 and A1200 but they were finding it hard to produce the morphing case so settled on just using a miniaturized A500 case design.
Whoopee fucking do (Score:2)
It's happened numerous times for retro console / computers so what's so special about this one? You could literally just buy a Rasberry Pi, install Retro Pie and have the same experience. It might take a tiny bit of extra effort but I assume anyone who owned an Amiga would be capable of figuring it out. Going this route also means you get to c
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It also isn't a simple task for the vast majority of the target market to make an A500 replica case. Sure there will be some people that buy this that have access to a 3D printer but I would hazard to guess that that would be a minority of the market.
Re: Whoopee fucking do (Score:2)
Re: Whoopee fucking do (Score:2)
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Guess you must have a different Etsy from me. I did a search for A500 and didn't see any cases what-so-ever. /. I suppose I should use a car analogy. You can build your own (insert car model here) from parts but not everyone wants to do that.
My main point was that not everyone is going to want to roll their own A500 emulator. Since this is
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And that's basically the point - you can get a RPi, load it up with RetroPie and have an Amiga. Sure it takes a modicum of effort to put together but I assume people nostalgic
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The problem with single-use retro computers like these is that the novelty wears off after a while, at which point you have an unloved device that ends up in storage or for sale. A general purpose PC allows you to fire up MAME, JNES, or dozens of other console and desktop emulators.
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You can also use UAE on WIn and Linux on a X86 PC. :)
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The Amiga magic went away (Score:2)
Back in the day, I was a big Amiga person. Bought a lot of games, had maxed out my A2000, bought an A1200. Life was fun.
Then one day, the magic went away. I realized it had been years since the A2000 had been last turned on; the A1200 was gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere. When the retrocomputing thing started, I was slow to pick it up, but acquired a couple of old Macs and a ZX Spectrum Next (which is a great deal of fun to go back to 80's BASIC with the years of professional experience now at han
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I knew that the magic the Amiga originally held for me was completely gone when I added Shapeshifter to my startup-sequence and just started using my A4000 as a Macintosh clone. But then neither my A3000 nor my A4000 really amazed me the same way my A2000 did, so I guess the magic started fading a long time before then.
When I set up my UAE environment many years later, I noticed that I barely bothered with any AGA titles. Says a lot about how things were at the end.
I'll wait for Tandy 1000 Mini (Score:2)
I'll wait for Tandy 1000 Mini ... or I'll get an RPi 400 for $100 and have a working keyboard.
No Lemmings? (Score:2)
Seems like a missed opportunity to bring back Lemmings.
Re: No Lemmings? (Score:2)