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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Retail News / Sales => Topic started by: Lecta on February 10, 2008, 06:21:46 PM
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Bassano del Grappa (Italy), 10 February 2008.
ACube Systems is pleased to announce the availability of the highly acclaimed Minimig.
The Minimig can be ordered directly from ACube Systems and soon from other resellers.
Two options are available:
1. Fully assembled board with 1GB SD Card at the price of 138 EUR.
2. Fully assembled board with 1GB SD Card and a PSU at the price of 149 EUR.
For both options the packaging includes a brief instruction manual translated in English, German, Italian and French.
All prices excluding local taxes and shipping costs.
You can order sending a mail to info@acube-systems.com.
Due to the high number of requests, all orders will be shipped whithin 7 working days.
http://www.acube-systems.biz/eng/news.php?id=23
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Great news. Can't wait for some reviews! Does it really come with an SD card? I thought the minimig was MMC? Have they changed it?
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Great news and great price! :-D
Though I wish they'd correct the SD card bit. Unless there has been a redesign I'm not aware of, its a MMC card that's needed.
ACube and Minimig FTW! :-)
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Hmm, but how many people are willing to shell out £111 for it? It would have to be less than half that to be appealing to most people. That's half an Asus EEE PC or a whole second hand laptop that can run WinUAE sufficiently for A500 emulation.
Also why FORCE an SD card on people? I have plenty of my own lying around and even my spare 256MB microSD will probably be enough space for me - if it werent too expensive to begin with.
Still, its cool its available but personally I couldn't rationalise spending that kind of money on one.
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@alexatkin
IIRC there was some sort of compatibility problems with some SD cards, so perhaps including a compatible one is for avoiding problems.
If you compare Minimig to Winuae, don't forget the price of the host "operating system".
It is a stand-alone Amiga 500 clone with some additional features, and in a very small size. I think there is nothing to be comparable.
Bye
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If you compare Minimig to Winuae, don't forget the price of the host "operating system".
As far as I can tell MiniMig does not include operating system, either.
So in fairness you need to add price of Amiga Forever (online edition is $30).
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Does anyone know of a cd rom that would hook up to a RS232 port?
I wonder if PC 2 Amiga software would work?
It would give it a cd or hd to save files.
:-)
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CD-ROM to RS232? Man, that would be slooooow... :lol:
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At first sight this might look expensive for a A500 redesigned, but you should not forget to substract the price for a scandoubler from the price of the Minimig because you get it for free with the minimig.
When you do this the Minimig does only cost you 50-60 EUR.
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@trekiej
Sounds like a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
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@alexatkin
This is a totaly different approach than a PC running UAE. This price for a totally new hardware isn't exactly excessive. It would cost you more to buy a second hand amiga 500 and (new or used) scan-doubler. Also given the fact an SD card reader is not available for the A500 at any cost..
Could they have made and sold this for less? It doesn't matter. The design is free to use, anyone who feels it is too expensive from A-Cube is free to manufacture their own to sell for less ;-)
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All very good answers.
However until you see the quality of the case they put the Minimig into then all bets are still off.
Its just when you look at the Asus eee PC and think that for £220 you can get a PC fast enough to run WinUAE with more RAM, AGA support, LCD monitor, battery, etc. Sure that is double the price but the fact is you are getting more than double the capability.
Let me set the record straight though. I am not saying that what Acube are doing is bad value or bad in any way. Just that when I look at it objectively based on value for money, getting an Asus eee is better value as it can run emulate just about any old console you care to think of (as well as natively running Linux or Windows probably MacOS X too with the hack) whereas the Minimig is stuck with only emulating the A500 when theres a fair few AGA only games that are worth playing too. Although I am well aware of the issues trying to reverse engineer the AGA chipset and I still am impressed that the Minimig exists at all.
I suppose really I am just a little disappointed that none of the production runs are big enough to be £50-60 as that's about as far as I could rationalise.
I am well aware of the size incentive though, I have an A600 and A1200 lying around purely because I have no space to set them up for use. That said, I could probably use UAE but I never seem to get round to it. Its so much easier to just whack a DVD into the Xbox 360 which again is where Minimig wins, you can't really say the real Amiga is easy as there's disk swapping and finding working floppies and it looks garbage on the HDTV whereas Minimig you could use an a spare VGA CRT.
I just wish more Amiga classics would get ported to Xbox Live Arcade then it wouldn't matter as much. But I guess not many of us want the Amiga version of Mr Nutz on another format. :-D
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There are a few things I don't understand. How would you load an operating system on this? How would you transfer files to it?
Would you just use the kickrom from Amiga Forever and load games like you would an old Amiga 500 by emulating a floppy or something?
Is there ways this is a little better than having an old A500 sitting around?
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@novaburst
How do you load the OS onto an Amiga 500? Same deal.
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Hi! to everyone watching the Minimig birth!
I own a small but growing PC shop in Kent (www.geekos.co.uk)and have been in contact with the guys at Acube?
I would like to showcase the Minimig for all those that can get to the shop in Southborough, Kent (40 mins away from London).
Ideally I would like to become a re-seller and get very involved with future Amiga projects.
I also deal in a lot of retro gear (Atari VCS to Amiga A1200), so even though I own a boring old PC repair shop I spice things up with the classic retro side of things, much more fun....but very little money in it!;-(
I am still an Amiga user and I'd like to see something rise from the ashes of Commodore.
Please drop me a line if you would be interested in seeing a working Minimig in-store?
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@weirdami
How do you load the OS onto an Amiga 500? Same deal.
Actually not quite. I doubt MiniMig supports Amiga Forever encrypted KS ROM images (or does it?). Assuming it doesn't, you first need to start Amiga Forever with the desired KS ROM, and then use application to grab the KS ROM. Then you need to transfer the ripped ROM to the PC side, and finally move it to the flash card.
Then you're ready to go, you just need the game or WB adfs, and add those to the SD, too.
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What I would like to know is if the Minimig also emulates the clicking noise of the diskdrive 8-).
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Available soon:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=777
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Ok, good to know, thanks Piru.
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Available soon:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=777
Excellent. I sent you an email asking if you were going to stock them, otherwise I was going to order directly from Acube (haven't got a reply yet, unless you count this). ;)
Are you going to sell a suitable PSU too? I'd like to order one that I know works at the same time.
Cheers,
Darrin
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CD-ROM to RS232? Man, that would be slooooow...
True, but parallel to CD-ROM/floppy/Zip devices are common, and there are serial-to-parallel converters, so it would be physically possible.
Not sure about the software, as most of the drivers for those devices are written for PC-DOS,
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Why bother? Just wait until someone impliments hard file support (or even ISO support) and there will be little need.
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@odin
Oh yeah I LOVE how WinUAE emulated the floppy drive noise. You KNOW its working because games like Pinball Dreams you remember how its supposed to sound when loading correctly.
@AmigaKIT
Minimig motherboard?
So am I to assume it ISN'T complete with a professional finished box to avoid shorting something out during use, the cat peeing on it or general dust issues?
Surely that's the whole point of a company manufacturing them rather than an individual?
Or do we just not know yet?
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lol, I loved it when the sound became an option in WinUAE. Now all we need is the sound of those old harddrives in the emulation :lol: Oh and perhaps the sound the Amiga 500/1200 PSU's made when they got a bit older (there was a high pitch noise when turned on or when turned off)
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Fatboy wrote:
> I own a small but growing PC shop in Kent (www.geekos.co.uk)...
Very interesting. If I have enough time in my June-July trip to Europe, I will try to stop by.
Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
The Other Group of Amigoids
http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1/
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I just saw my news submit about the Minimig at http://tweakers.net came trough (largest Dutch computer related news site/forum in the world with +250k registered members)
It will take some time before it's on the frontpage but it's in the queue. Expect some visitors from there I guess
:-D
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I am hoping to get a bit more in the way of classic and retro gear in my shop.
A Minimig would look great on one of my shelves fired up and playing Chaos Engine ;-)
Even if it is just a showcase venue at least some people can pop into the shop and see it for real!
Watch this space?
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@Piru
What I was getting at was that the A500 comes with the OS already installed type deal. I guess I forgot that MM doesn't. :oops:
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Looks interesting. Even emailed for pricing info.
That said, my Amiga 500 is in the closet and my XBox is softmodded to play UAE.
I'd need to buy this thing with a case to compete with what I have going now.
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@slobu
Your retro fetish affections are controlled by external appearances?
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Would it be possible to add the new A600 RAM expansion to the minimig?
Also, what about the IDE adaptor for the A500 that goes on the CPU?
Both project ara AFAIK open source and DIY project. But could all 3 be added on one board/box?
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@slobu Your retro fetish affections are controlled by external appearances?
Any bare board that is left open without shielding is a danger. You could shock yourself or fry the board with static/coffee/dropped screwdriver/pet hamster.
That said, I do care about appearances. I make sure to stuff at least two boing boing balls down my trousers whilst emulating my computer of choice. The neighbors could be watching, you know. :)
P.S. I've never beaten Barbarian or Blood Money so I don't consider it retro - it's very current for me!
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No, the MiniMig is 3.3v, the A600 and A500's were 5V. Wouldn't work to use their expantion bits.