Minimig Available

[alexatkin]

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.

[alexatkin]

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

[alexatkin]

@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?