Amiga: THEA500 Mini in pre-order on Amazon, grab this mini-console

Amiga: THEA500 Mini in pre-order on Amazon, grab this mini-console

Amiga

The pre-order of THEA500 Mini, the Amiga mini-console with 25 classic games included, is currently available on Amazon. The price is € 129.99 and the release date is March 31, 2022.



Amazon Offer THEA500 Mini - - € 129.99

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THEA500 Mini includes 25 games, here are the ones revealed on Amazon page:



Alien breed 3D Another World ATR: All terrain Racing Battle Chess Cadaver Kick Off 2 Pinball Dreams Simon the Sorcerer "many more"

This mini -console emulates Amiga 500, 600 & 1200 (OCS / ECS / AGA). It is compatible with 100 classic games and Amiga demos, using WHDLoad for simplicity (games must be legally obtained / purchased from their rightful owners). Package includes: THEA500 Mini (Buttons not working; virtual keyboard included), 2-button USB mouse (1.8m cable), 8-key USB precision gamepad (1.8m cable), one USB-cable C for the power supply (1.8m; USB AC adapter not included) and an HDMI cable (1.8m).

The official description of the product reads: "Welcome back to the 80s and the the pinnacle of 16-bit personal computing. Released in 1987, the Amiga 500 featured a 16/32-bit CPU (central processing unit), 512Kb of RAM, and a set of custom chips to produce best-in-class sound and video. . We present the THEA500 Mini, a compact reinterpretation of this classic home computer. "

THEA500 Mini This news includes an Amazon affiliate link that can earn a commission at geekinco.

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Getting The Amiga 500 Online

If you were lucky enough to have a Commodore Amiga or one of its competitor 16-bit home computers around the end of the 1980s, it’s probable that you were doing all the computing tasks that most other people discovered a few years later when they bought their first 486 or Pentium. So in the mid 1990s when all your friends were exclaiming at Paint Shop Pro or their Soundblaster cards you’d have had an air of smugness. Multitasking? Old hat! Digital audio? Been there! Graphics manipulation? Done that!


There was one task from that era you almost certainly wouldn’t have done on your Amiga though, and that was connect it to the Internet. The Internet was certainly a thing back in the late 1980s, but for mere mortals it was one of those unattainable marvels, like a supercomputer with a padded seat round it, or a Jaguar XJ220 supercar.


Later Amigas received Internet abilities, and Amiga enthusiasts will no doubt be on hand to extol their virtues. But the machine most people will think of as the archetype, the Amiga 500, lacks the power to run most of the software required to do it. If your 500 with its tasteful blue and orange desktop colour scheme is languishing though, never fear. [Shot97] has produced a guide to getting it online.


It’s important to understand that an Amiga 500 is never going to run a copy of Chrome or play a YouTube video. And he makes the point that any web browsers that might have surfaced for hardware of this class delivered a painful browsing experience. So instead he concentrates on getting the 500 online for something closer to the online scene of the day, connecting to BBSs. To that end he takes us through setting up a PC with  Hayes modem emulator, and connecting it to the Amiga via a null modem cable. On the Amiga is a copy of the A-Talk terminal emulator, and as far as the Amiga is concerned it is on a dial-up Internet connection.


The PC in this case looks pretty ancient, and we can’t help wondering whether a Raspberry Pi or even an ESP8266 module could be put in its place given the appropriate software. But he has undeniably got his A500 online, and shown a way that you can too if you still have one lurking in the cupboard. He has also produced a video which we’ve put below the break, but be warned, as it’s nearly an hour long.


If you are after a wallow in Amiga nostalgia, perhaps you’d like to read about a business using the ultimate high-end Amiga on the 1990s. And if you want to take it further but lack real hardware, have you ever tried AROS?


Via Hacker News.