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Offline Dwyloc

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Re: Minimig. Experiences and questions
« on: January 07, 2010, 05:47:04 PM »
Quote from: runequester;536927
Still pondering getting a minimig since its size and convenience is appealing to me (and it'll turn out a lot cheaper than a 1200 with indivision)

Since this is almost entirely for gaming, is there any significant gains to be had from getting the 4 MB RAM compared to 2 ? A few games had more sound (Walker, Hired Guns) with extra ram, but just about everything would run off a 1 mb machine anyways.

What are peoples general experiences with the minimig? Good and bad


Well I liked mine so much I purchased a second 4MB model to use with the ARM addon board for HD emulation.

You don't really need the 4MB version for playing games from adf images, but if you plan to use harddisk emulation at some point in the future to play WHDLoad installed games from a virtual harddisk than 4MB is really required.  As I has moving my minimig round to friends quite a bit I decided just to get a second one rather than send mine away to get the memory upgraded, That way I can keep the expanded on setup at home and keep the second one in a rucksack ready to take round to friends for a retro gaming session.

I find compatibility to be very good and it plays all my favourite games well just as smooth as the real thing, but it dose have some limitations, mainly when it comes to writing to adf images (the same limitations as WinUAE in general), mainly writing to some custom formatted adf disks dose not work at present.

If you want to play Lotus1 , 2 & 3, SimCity, Civilization, Eye of the Beholder, Lemmings or  Jumpin' Jackson I can confirm it works perfectly after many hour of extensive testing :-)

Most other games I have tried also work without problems but sometimes you need to try more than one version of a cracked adf to find a good version (just like the old days).

In my opinion the minimig is the best thing to happen to Amiga gaming since the A1200 came along and put HD and more ram in reach of us less well off Amiga games that just did not have the money or space for a big box amiga.
Sam440ep 667mhz 512megs OS4.1
Minimig, 4MB RAM, ARM add-on board
Amiga 1200 Eyetech mk4 Tower, Blizzard 1240 040/40 32MB Fast ram, IDEFix Express mk2, mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3 PCI, PCI network card, OS3.9 BB2.
 

Offline Dwyloc

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Re: Minimig. Experiences and questions
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2010, 11:22:56 PM »
Changing the firmware is also not a big deel all you need is a PC with a serial port and a serial cable.

All software/firmware updates are open source and free, so you can apply the updates yourself as they are released.  You just cant change the amount of ram on your own as it has to be soldered inplace.
Sam440ep 667mhz 512megs OS4.1
Minimig, 4MB RAM, ARM add-on board
Amiga 1200 Eyetech mk4 Tower, Blizzard 1240 040/40 32MB Fast ram, IDEFix Express mk2, mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3 PCI, PCI network card, OS3.9 BB2.
 

Offline Dwyloc

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Re: Minimig. Experiences and questions
« Reply #2 on: January 08, 2010, 05:43:36 PM »
Quote from: bbond007;537120
This is with the YQ091224 firmware, right?
I see no option in any menu for "A600 IDE emulation"

You need this new PIC firmware update http://www.minimig.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=272 for harddisk emulation without an ARM Addon board but be warned HD emulation with the PIC chip seems quite slow from the limited testing I did earlier today.
Sam440ep 667mhz 512megs OS4.1
Minimig, 4MB RAM, ARM add-on board
Amiga 1200 Eyetech mk4 Tower, Blizzard 1240 040/40 32MB Fast ram, IDEFix Express mk2, mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3 PCI, PCI network card, OS3.9 BB2.
 

Offline Dwyloc

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Re: Minimig. Experiences and questions
« Reply #3 on: January 10, 2010, 12:55:03 AM »
Probably depends how old your TFT monitor is a year ago about 90% of the ones I tested seemed to work Ok with Amiga scandoublers as 50 Hz, but I was testing the ones purchased by businesses from Dell, Lenovo and Comapaq.  

Most on paper should have had problems but worked fine but they were all non wide screen models.  Finding wide screen TFT panels that work OK with PAL scandoubled inputs seems to be much harder, but if you have a non wide screen TFT panel purchased a year or 2 ago you may be OK.
Sam440ep 667mhz 512megs OS4.1
Minimig, 4MB RAM, ARM add-on board
Amiga 1200 Eyetech mk4 Tower, Blizzard 1240 040/40 32MB Fast ram, IDEFix Express mk2, mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3 PCI, PCI network card, OS3.9 BB2.