IT SEEMS nearly every console of our youth is being hewn in plastic with Spinal Tap dimensions, and the latest late machine to be resurrected for this miniature hall of fame is the Amiga.
Spanish for friend', Commodore's 16-bit powerhouse ruled the home computing scene of the early 1990s. And next year 40-somethings can invite people to "say hello to my little friend" when a teensy version of the legendary disc-spinner whisks geriatric gamers back to their prime.
Ruling the golden age of gaming computers – a heady world of demo discs, rampant piracy and schoolyard fights with those smelly Atari ST owners – the Amiga's word processing, programming and artistic chops were what you sold it to your parents on: but this was a games machine through and through, with chops that put its console contemporaries to shame.
The dinky A500 Mini from Retro Games (no stranger to Commodore hardware, having previously produced the C64 Mini) sports all the gubbins you'd expect from a mini console, with instant save 'n' resume gameplay and a CRT filter for that old monitor vibe.
The A500 Mini comes with both an "authentic mouse and gamepad" – though it remains to be seen whether that mouse authenticity extends to users needing to periodically clean accumulated skin and hair from its track-ball – while sausage fingered keyboard warriors can add their own full-sized QWERTY.
Twenty-five games are included, with highlights including Alien Breed, Another World, Kick Off 2, Pinball Dreams, Speedball 2 and Worms. Of course, this is the mere iceberg-tip for a machine that harboured hundreds of stone-cold classics such as Xenon 2, James Pond and gory sword-slasher Barbarian – which famously featured Page 3 'stunna' Maria Whittaker and a pre-fame 'Wolf off of Gladiators' on its cover. And it wouldn't really be an Amiga without Deluxe Paint.
Yet the A500 Mini is pregnant with possibility – and, unlike its miniaturised console stablemates, gamers can plug those software gaps by downloading their favourites onto the device from legally grey sources.
Cue rampant piracy the likes of which hasn't been seen since the days of, well, the original Amiga, when all you needed was a bunch of like-minded mates, a fistful of blank discs and a cracked version of X-Copy Professional.
The A500 Mini is due out early next year – just in time for the Amiga's 35th anniversary – for a rather competitive £119.99, ensuring the fading mini-console boom goes out with a bang.
