[rob74]

Good article! I dabbled with MOD files myself in the nineties, but until recently wasn't aware that music made on the Amiga actually managed to get into the charts.

However I can't agree with the last paragraph: "Thirty-five years after the debut of the Amiga 500, a new generation of retro-curious musicians will have the chance to experiment with the machines, as the A500 Mini has recently launched. Perhaps it could be as loved as the original..." - since the A500 Mini is just an emulator running on an embedded board, and it doesn't even have a functional keyboard, you're probably better off running an Amiga emulator on your Linux/Windows PC or Mac...

[Jaruzel]

The A500 mini is a pile of tosh. I know because I have one.

It's basically 2 systems in one, the primary system is the nice carousel that lets you select and instantly boot and play the provided games.

The secondary system is an old version of the Amibian UAE based Amiga emulator, which is auto booted when you select an LHA archive containing a games' fileset via the USB drive. It's slow, clunky, and out of the box hardly supports any games or even Workbench. To get it working you have to muck about with XML config files and put games/apps into the archive files correctly. If I wanted to do that, I'd have stuck with a Raspberry Pi and a proper Amiga emulator. I have several real Amigas, so I know what's involved, and in my opinion the A500 mini is just a toy.

[bitwize]

If THEC64 is anything to go by, THEA500 Mini will get a full-size followup with working keyboard. It won't have more functionality than a PC emulator, but it'll be easier/more fun for normies to set up and use.

I've been really impressed with THEC64. It really delivers a retrocomputing experience that's close to the original in spirit.

[zozbot234]

The new "Mini" emulators typically support USB keyboards, I assume that the Amiga Mini does as well.