Before we get into the device itself, I feel I have to give a full disclaimer. Back in 2018 myself and my good friend Gunnar Kristjansson (the man behind the Amibian Linux distro for Raspberry PI) had a little Amiga meetup at my place. As we started talking it became clear that we both wanted to create a ready to use Amiga device, more or less the exact same thing as the Amiga mini that is now being sold (except ours would cater to both gamers and the creative type equally).

We spent the next few weeks defining our goal and concretize what exactly needed to be done with regards to hardware, case design and software. I contacted a person I know in China and got a rough estimate on case prices (per 1000 units), and I also contacted the Raspberry PI foundation about buying 1000-by-1000 units and what sort of discount they could offer us.

At the same time, Gunnar contacted Cloanto. At the time it was possible to buy the Amiga ROM files via the Android store for 1€ (if memory serves me correctly), but we wanted to buy 1000 licenses at a time as well as Workbench – so that the device would be legally secure and ready to rock out of the box.

Sadly, Cloanto stonewalled us completely the moment we shared our plans (which is why i suspected they were involved with a “mini” project, something they denied at the time, but which turned out to be correct). Without going too deep into the nitty-gritty, it resulted in a somewhat nasty argument between myself and Mike, and ultimately our Amiga Mini was never released. Gunnar has continued to make the Amibian distro, and I ventured into creating Amibian.js, which is a re-make and modernization of Amiga OS designed to scale from a Raspberry PI all the way up to massive cloud based clusters.

I know that some of you will conclude that I carry a grudge against Cloanto, but that is not the reason I have been vocal against them in the past. Seriously, if that was the case, i would say it. Pretending is not my strong suit.

My issues with Cloanto is not rooted in our mini project (holding a grudge for 4-5 years is a bit much), but rather the fact that they have spent the past 20+ years selling software someone else has made (UAE), without giving anything back to the developers behind UAE. They also have a culture of lawsuits, both against individuals and companies, which has helped keep the Amiga in limbo for decades (note: Hyperion is also a part of that, so its not solely Cloanto’s fault).

It is that fine line between what you can do, and what you should do. They are not legally bound to give back to UAE, but they should have done so. But then again, this is just my personal blog and my subjective view. I have no problems with other people holding a different viewpoint. Ultimately, what matters is what is done with the legacy, not who said what.

I welcome the Amiga mini, but have expectations

While some would say I am too biased, I still feel my criticism of the device on Facebook holds merit. I have been against it because I was hoping that the A1222 and Vampire would put the Amiga into the public eye again, so getting the official stamp of “retro” and “a computer from the past” is the last nail in the proverbial coffin as far as I’m concerned.

Sadly the A1222 never materialized, and the Vampire stand-alone needs more time to become a polished product (with regards to software, support for 080 in popular compilers, and AROS surpassing Workbench in terms of stability, compatibility and features). The Quartex Media Desktop is on it’s way, I have just spent a whole year working on the development tools, which is due out in a couple of months (if all goes to plan). The desktop system will need refactoring, so I dont see it finished until this fall (before xmas).

It is no secret that I feel Cloanto is the worst possible owner for the Amiga IP. The way they have treated Hyperion is distasteful and simply serves to keep Amiga in the dark for another decade; continuing a pattern of behavior that Amiga Inc was convicted for in a court of law. So I have my reasons for my critique of Cloanto -and it’s not about our plans being thwarted, but rather how the Amiga intellectual property is mismanaged.

I welcome a mini that was better than our own design and that gave something back to the community that fostered it. So in this post I will unpack why I think this device comes up short.

Price point

To put things into perspective with regards to hardware: The Amiga Mini retails at €120 where I live, which is very expensive compared to other mini devices in the same category (e.g SNes, Megadrive or Neo-Geo). For this amount of cash you could instead pick up a very capable x86 single board computer, one that runs WinUAE at excellent speed.

Even if you stick with ARM single board computers, you could pick up an ODroid N2+ with 8Gb ram and a good eMMc storage for roughly €80, which has features like onboard Bluetooth, support for remote controls, SD card reader and onboard wi-fi. So in my view the Amiga mini appears wildly overpriced compared to the alternatives. Although you do need to be somewhat technical to install Linux, Amiberry, and finally recompile for the SoC you are targeting.

To underline: the Amiga mini is not designed for a technical audience, and as such works out of the box with zero configuration needed.

Access to UAE and common features

Putting hardware to the side for a moment — what I think is the most puzzling with this device, is the lack of ADF and harddisk support. We know it’s running a fork of Amiberry so mapping a USB drive as DH0 (or a folder on a USB-drive) is technically there and ready to be used.

In other words, the device is more than capable of supporting a harddisk mode (where a folder or USB stick acts as the medium), it also has ADF support as a part of the emulator software it’s running. But in their infinite wisdom, the designers consciously chose to disable these features.

Strange palette of games

You would imagine an Amiga mini to be filled with all the hits the platform has to offer, yet the selection of games are .. curious. Sure, there are some amazing games included, like Kick-Off, Chaos Engine, Battle-Chess, Supercars and Another World — but these are not the games that made the Amiga into a spectacular success and cult classic.

For example, they have included 2 versions of Alien Breed (both 2D and 3D), but this is a late game that met with limited success. The games that truly made the Amiga were titles like Rocket-Ranger, It came from the desert, Defender of the crown, Kings of Chicago, Wings and Shadow of the beast (just to name a few). They should have dropped one of the Alien Breed releases and at least gotten Rocket Ranger in there.

Also, you would expect XENON-II to be one of the titles, it’s such an archetypal Amiga hit after all. But instead they have gone with something called Project-X that is nowhere near the quality of the former. I’m sure this is a great game (I only tried it for 10 minutes) but this is a game I have never played before now. It’s not a game that instinctively makes you think about Amiga.

There are also some very strange picks, like The Sentinel. A 3D game that was visually poor even when it was released, and is safely in the obscurity category. At the same time they have completely ignored games like Ruff’n Tumble, which is probably one of the most playable platformers – and graphically excellent – in Amiga history. Ruff’n Tumble really is a game that gives Sonic and Super Mario serious competition. I know a lot of people say that Superfrog holds that title, but visually Zool and Superfrog dont even come close. It is also a damn playable and really showcase what the Amiga could do for 2d gaming.

Other strangely boring titles that is included are Paradroid 90 and Lost Patrol. I’m sure they have their odd fans here and there, but comparing those to aforementioned Rocket Ranger et-al, they seem completely out of place. I would even say that California-Games should have been excluded, because that was ultimately a C64 game that never truly got any traction on the Amiga. The graphics are poor, sound is awful and animations very much C64-ish.

The Indiana Jones adventures would likewise be titles that could have lifted the whole product. I do realize that getting a license would have required more work, but probably not as much as you think. These titles are wildly popular free downloads and is generally seen as abandonware. LucasArts would have little leverage to press for outlandish royalties. One might even argue that including them would help retain the LucasArts label.

It kinda feels like the games were thrown together in the 11th hour based on what they could cheaply license or take, rather than carefully planned in the years it took to create this product.

Corrupted games and instabilities

I also experienced the odd crash and instability with two games. Dragons Breath and Simon the sorcerer. The latter seems most affected by this. When you go to meet the wizards at the pub (very early in the game) and start a dialog with them, the game crashes 2-3 questions into the dialog. Some times it works, but the sprite graphics for Simon is corrupted, but most of the time UAE just crashes to a black-screen.

This can be a problem with UAE itself, but it’s more likely that that game data is damaged – or indeed that the runtime model for UAE must be changed to accurate rather than fast. At least that tends to fix problems with some games suffering the same instability – it’s impossible to determine when the product is essentially a black-box.

Not really representative

Whenever I have argued against the Amiga mini, someone has reminded me that this box is not for developers or hardcore Amiga users – it’s for people that either owned an Amiga briefly in the 80s, or people that never could afford an Amiga.

If we run with that logic, then the Amiga Mini is a form of presentation, a way of saying “hey, look at what the Amiga could do and join the fun!”. If that is the case, then why not include the titles that truly are distinctive Amiga? Again, there are some very good titles here, but when as much as 50% of the bundled software are “lesser games” that never sold machines or had a large following – then some criticism is warranted.

This spartan selection would have been understandable if they at the very least bundled Workbench and the ability to mount a folder on a USB stick as a harddisk — and further, ADF support. Because then the users would not be “locked in” to a palette of titles as representative of the Amiga as an Atari magazine.

WHDLoad

The only way to play games that are not hardcoded to the system, is to use WHDLoad. This is a nice feature, but somewhat limited.

My rationale here is simple: when you are making a mini machine that has a large, cult like following to this day – excluding that group is not a smart move. Yes, the device is clearly for the casual gamer or console owner, but considering that UAE already have the functionality I am arguing for, it quite frankly makes no sense for them to have gone out of their way to disable it. It only serves to exclude the massive resource that is the Amiga community.

Historically speaking, such moves tends to have dire consequences, because if there is one thing Amiga people are known for, it’s breaking into impossible things. Heck, our community even produce carbon copies of the Amiga hardware! No other community has our level of technical excellence per capita. None.

What they should have done was to recognize that the Amiga community would help drive their sales – IF – they threw us a bone. Again, all we needed was a way to run Workbench and use a USB stick as a harddrive, and preferably a settings option where the machine would boot to workbench. Hardly asking for blood here, it’s all included in UAE / Amiberry anyways.

Keyboard support

Most amiga games were coded in a non system-friendly manner. Typically using assembler or a hybrid mix (e.g Blitz Basic, Pascal, C with inline assembler). As such there is no uniform way of supporting a keyboard inside games, except plugging a keyboard into the third USB port directly.

I can confirm that this does indeed work. You can plug in any ordinary USB keyboard and use that for in-game typing. Sadly they have blocked the F11 command which normally displays the UAE emulation menu.

There is a way around this though. If you download a WHDLoad setup for workbench, you can force the menu to be displayed via the 68k uae-control shell command. The downside being that you have to manually load the Workbench WHDLoad packag, and then further load games there.

I think that eventually someone will roll an alternative boot.rd image for the device that you can flash, turning it into a “normal” Amibian machine. Sadly such an operation would violate the warranty, but to be frank – the device is useless for anything but casual gaming (if you can live with games that crash that is).

The good stuff

The benefit of bolting the device to WHDLoad, is that we are going to find a ton of game collection disk-images on BitTorrent after a while. And knowing how detailed gamers are, there will be little or none that is not working. So if you always had some WHDLoad titles that did not work properly – I think we will see less of that as gamers get to grips with the system.

I also think the case is ok. It’s not great, but definitively a good case. In the design Gunnar and myself made, we wanted to re-use the floppy disk slot as an SD-card socket. I played around with the idea of having a small, fake disk that you placed the sd card into, and further pushed into the floppy drive. The smallest sd cards can be fiddly to deal with after all, and such a sideloader would help fix that; And visually it would look like a semi-inserted floppy disk which brings back fond memories for everyone. The Amiga Mini case sadly lacks any fun features like that – instead it supports a third USB port around the back suitable for a USB thumbdrive or extra joystick (i presume, I dont have an extra controller handy).

The case is very detailed and larger than I expected, which is a good thing (+1 for that). I hate those tiny Raspberry-PI cases, because the weight of the cables tends to drag the device around so it falls to the floor. This will not be an issue here, and it is sturdy and has a little weight to it. So execution here is good.

The mouse and CD32 joypad are likewise good quality. I was surprised that they had made the mouse smaller than the original tank mouse. It’s not terrible or anything like that (actually works quite well), but I dont see why they chose to do this. In terms of packaging there is more than enough space for a full-size tank mouse, and the extra volume would have been air. At the price this device sells for, I think a real size tank mouse would be a bonus, but it’s ultimately not a huge issue.

I guess the only bonus for us hardcore Amiga fans, is that we now have a source of easily available Amiga USB mouse and CD32 joypads. That at least is something. Not quite worth the 30 year wait by any stretch of the imagination, but it is something.

Oh, and the menu system is excellent. Its easy to pick a title, and they have solved save-states in an elegant and effective way. So they deserve a +1 on the integration and menu. Fair is fair.

HDMI splitter and wi-fi

The device is clearly designed to be used with a TV, which is perfectly fine. But if you want to use a monitor like I did, especially if you want to show it off at the office, you will need a HDMI splitter because there is no audio-jack available.

Since it’s designed for casual gamers, i cant really subtract a point for this. But I am very puzzled why they didn’t use an established SBC inside. Speed wise it performs close to an ODroid XU4, which retails at $20. Hardkernel would no doubt be willing to bend backwards for a contract, and could have delivered an overclocked version with even more bang for the buck at $10 a piece — including audio jack, bluetooth and wi-fi. I can only imagine what the price tag is on the guts here, because it lacks all of these things. Most likely $6 worth of hardware inside this case. The lack of wi-fi is likewise strange in 2022 for an ARM device.

Having said that, the GPU performs exceptionally well. I have not experienced any graphical glitches or artifacts, which is typical for Raspberry PI 3b and other cheap ARM devices. There are no artifacts, no flickering — and it’s silky smooth. There is also an option for switching between 50Hz and 60Hz refresh rates.

So fair is fair, the GPU is performing without issues.

Still time to fix it

The people that made this device can still remedy the situation via updates. The concept of “firmware” here is — and this is an educated guess — a small Linux disk-image stored in flash memory. So updating the executable front-end to UAE should be easy enough.

They can enable the UAE / Amiberry features that would make the device usable for us normal Amiga users via an update if they want to. This is only a cheap ARM device running an emulator after all, so there is no legal or technical reason why the emulation should not expose all it’s features.

But, I am not really worried. People are already busy hacking this thing, so I dont think it will take too long before it’s made usable by someone in the community. Just a shame that we have to do this ourselves, all things considered.

Is it worth it?

I honestly think the price is absurd, but if you have zero skills and simply cannot be arsed to buy a Raspberry PI and install Amibian, then I suppose this will be useful.

I think the price will be a negative for the adoption as a whole. You can pick up a SNES-Mini + Megadrive mini for roughly the same price. There needs to be a bit more incentive I think, but it is a smooth package if you are happy with the games that are there, no doubt about that.

One thing that this product doesnt recognize, is that most of the value in an Amiga was that it doubled as a serious computer for creative teenagers. The amount of people that bought an Amiga to use DPaint, Soundtracker, Blitz Basic, Amos Basic – or learn to use one of the classical programming languages like C, Pascal or Modula 2, was huge. It was completely disproportionate compared to other platforms where people either used a computer for business or purely for entertainment. The Amiga managed to strike a balance between creativity, art, programming and gaming that really was unique.

By leaving out Workbench and the possibility to access the creative aspect of Amiga, the Amiga mini feels incomplete. It’s a representation of Amiga without the stuff that made the Amiga such a monumental success; which coincidentally is the reason why thousands of people still love and use the platform 30 years later.

The irony is that what will drive the sales to begin with, is the Amiga community the designers went out of their way to block. I honestly dont get their rationale here. They must have spent a fortune producing this product, so i would imagine they want to get as much return on investment as possible.

Either way, it is what it is.

Personally, I will donate this thing to my son. He always wanted an Amiga but dont have time to learn anything — so this is perfect for him once I get a good WHDLoad collection, because he will not find any of these titles interesting (except Chaos Engine and Supercars if I know him correctly).