I have been a minimig owner for the last few weeks - I have to admit that its the best thing since er, the Amiga 500. True, it doesn't play AGA games but considering that most AGA games have OCS/ECS versions its not much of a problem. I have installed the latest firmware publicly available, compatability is quite high and most games I tried work. If it doesnt, usually trying the same game as released by some other cracking group would do the trick. For example with a particularly release of Stunt Car Racer, I kept getting bad graphics, so I tried another one and worked perfectly (interesting thing would be to test the first image in a real Amiga or UAE). A neat option in the latest release is that it lets you to do 'fast loading' for quicker loading times. I haven't actually checked side by side with a real amiga but its quite fast.
Another advantage of the minimig is that it comes with a scandoubler, and IF You can get a monitor that goes down to 50hz it would be great. I bought a Benq G2020HD widescreen monitor and it works great. Not only it syncs at 50hz with no problems and the pixels arent blurry at all, but it also has the option to display the image at 4:3 ratio, so the picture does nook squashed. The scrolling is great too.
I think the Minimig is a must have if you want to have a modern alternative to the A500. There are various upgrades to it such as a 4meg RAM upgrade and the ARM expansion (if you can find one), but I don't know if they are worth investing in (these upgrades are not exactly cheap), I like my vanilla Minimig as it is
I think the only piece of kit that maybe actually better be than the minimig would be the Clone-A, but we haven't heard fresh news on this for years now, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
One question from my site... is the firmware with HDF support for vanilla minimigs publicly available yet?
