Nostalgia is often just rose tinted glasses. If most people get a maxi and an exact, iconic A500 with working floppy drive arrives, i expect the reaction would be “damn, this is big, ugly and games take 15 minutes to load then crash” It certainly was iconic, for sure!
Another part of the nostaglia for me is a 50% chance of getting a Guru Meditation error either before starting a game or even worse when into it.
Moonstone for example. I defeated the whirlwind woman enemy in the valley of the gods, so maybe 2 hours into the game as a kid. Then it hung with Guru Meditation. Time to get a more reliable machine
Also, I expect some original hardware owners are afraid it will drive the price of their hardware down. I have seen a sudden surge of Amiga hardware on auction and local thrift type websites. If the A500 mini is a hit, no doubt people will not bother with old unreliable hardware and having to deal with peoples mods to make them more reliable - Gotek drives, new PSUs, adapters to support HDMI and other mods. The A500 mini may drive prices down, also £1000 for some A1200 bundles, insane. I sold my A500 big bundle in about 2002 for £50 at a carboot sale (many big box games, A500+, 1mb ram upgrade, mouse, joystick etc.) Though it wasnt 'retro' then, just an old crappy Amiga
I dont expect the A500 mini (if it's a hit) to fully crash the Commadore original hardware market but it would shake things up as I expect some might get the A500 mini and then think "I wonder what it would be like to compare it to the real thing" They also wont want to spend £300 on the real thing though, but £150 may tempt them for an A500 original with a few games might.
Emulation setup is the main thing for me on the 500 mini. I've been into IT in general since the early 90s when I got my Amiga and have setup Retroarch, EmulationStation, WinUAE, PSPUAE, winfellow and fs-uae to play Amiga games I had as a child. By the time you have setup and configured the emulator to play a game, you no longer want to play that game! Each game often requires a few setting tweaks to get right so you launch a game 5-10 times to get it working reasonably well. By that time you want to try another game with those settings, but it doesnt work so rinse and repeat. Sometimes I just want to fire up Turrican II or Nebulus and have a quick 30 minute game rather than configuring an emulator with system settings and control settings for 28 minutes then play the game for 2 minutes. If the A500 mini is really plug and play and perfect, i'm sold. Unfortunately I can't see it happening but that's when the return process kicks in!
Interesting thought, the peripherals look well made as does the keyboard. I wonder if any savy modders could mod the keyboard to a working one? It would probably be a lot of effort to play 3 games that require a keybaord and the mini keyboard looks way too small but if its similar size to the A600, why not saw the lot out and stick an A600 keyboard in the casing? No reports of Workbench but dont see why Workbench cannot be WHDloaded, same for programs like Deluxe Paint
