Minimig Available

[Lecta]

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

[tonyyeb]

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?

[HenryCase]

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! :-)

[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.

[szimbi]

@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

[Piru]

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).

[trekiej]

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.
 :-)

[Orjan]

CD-ROM to RS232? Man, that would be slooooow...  :lol:

[Lemmink]

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.

[Rob]

@trekiej

Sounds like a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

[redrumloa]

@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 ;-)

[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

[novaburst]

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?

[weirdami]

@novaburst

How do you load the OS onto an Amiga 500? Same deal.

[fatboy]

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?