I have the large TheC64 (and I had the mini, but sold it). I crowdfunded it way back at launch, and they sent a free TheC64 Mini when the large unit was delayed by a year, which to me says this is a pretty cool company. They’ve been responsive with firmware updates and customer requests for features. It’s really cool, actually – it’s like having a nice C64/VIC-20 combo machine that painlessly connects to modern video devices and doesn’t require replacement capacitors, a new power supply, or loading games off pokey Datasettes/1541s.
The emulation is solid, but so is C64Forever’s on my PC. The advantage here is having a solid physical replica of a Commodore 64, with the keyboard, graphics characters on the KB, USB joysticks, etc. Plus like a console, you easily drop it in front of a TV, though C64/Amiga games don’t really shine at 65 inches. :)
That’s why I’m not psyched on the mini Amiga. If you just want to run your old Amiga games or use the best version of WordPerfect, Amiga Forever exists and does a great job on the PC, even emulating high-end Amigas:
But if I could have a full-size TheAmiga in an A500 form factor but that actually also fully emulates the A1200 (as the mini does), I’d be game, as it’d be cool to get the “feel” of using an Amiga again.
Yeah, I never owned an Amiga, but @Editer’s got it right. Full size keyboard and A500 form factor that fully emulates the A1200 and you’ve got something.
One of the things that makes the Mini consoles so cool is everything feels like the originals. The TurboGrafx-16 is my favorite because not only does it have the right controller, it also handles CD games! It has probably the best total collection of games too given they went with both US and JPN high quality selections.
With these computers, I think you need to have it be a keyboard-sized device for sure. That’s how you get the right nostalgia and functionality to make it feel right.
It’s not like keyboards are expensive these days. Also, while these computers were used to play games (often primarily), they also were just fun to mess with as computing devices. Nothing wrong with letting people write Hello World code. That’s part of the fun!
It’s especially damaging for a computer like the C64 that had so many interesting stuff embedded in its keyboard, like those esoteric graphic characters that @Editer mentionned!
The Amiga had a few games that used the separated shift keys for different effects I remember, I hope that such a keyboard will be a feature because that is one thing that’s been an annoyance with USB keyboards over the years.
It’s (very loosely) based on the Amiga CD32 controller. If you’re unfamiliar, the CD32 was Commodore’s late attempt to make a game console out of the Amiga platform. Not unlike their similar attempt with the C64GS. Here’s the controllers side by side (done by me - probably not to scale):
I have about a zillion .D64s and VICE works fine on PC… but I bought a TheC64 Mini because it’s so DORBS (and cheap, and more functional than on first release back in 2018). I would have bought a TheC64 instead but they’re impossible to get in the US, and I’m not gonna bother with the astronomical shipping from the UK.
Yeah, they talk about the mini outselling the big one on TheC64, but here in the USA (where I think more of us were general computer hobbyists than pure gamers), the full-size one has been out of stock on Amazon forever, but the USA version of the mini is available for $40:
On the bright side, this time they’re launching on Amazon USA at the start. On the downside, as I post this the name is incorrect and the preorder link isn’t live; Retrogames says they’re working on getting that fixed, so hopefully this link will light up soon:
I might pick one of these up and resell it if they ever do a full-size version…
