Amiga Mini high-end PC wants to relive Commodore glory days
The home computing cash-cow of the 1980s turns high-end gaming PC with a seriously pricey price-tag.
Moooo! Grrrrr! Smash! Crash! That's the sound of a curmudgeonly cash-cow being dragged out of retirement to see whether there's a drop or two of milk left in her wizened udders. The name of this cash-cow: Amiga.
Amiga's maker Commodore -- remember them? Congratulations on being as old as me, but bad news: it's not the same company, it just owns the name -- has reintroduced the Amiga brand, slapping it on a high-end gaming PC which looks suspiciously like a Mac Mini. It's even called the Amiga Mini -- so Apple's lawyers are presumably getting ready to fire forth a barrage of cease-and-desist letters claiming it patented smallness.
The Amiga Mini bears no relation to the Amiga home computers of the 1980s -- which were weak imitations of the infinitely superior Atari home computers (discloser: Atari rules! Amiga is lame! etc etc). The Amiga brand has merely been slapped on a high-end gaming PC which in turn has a whopping $2,495 (£1,580) price-tag slapped on it.
Inside this very expensive aluminium box you get a 3.5GHz Sandy Bridge Core i7 CPU, a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 430 GPU, 16GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive and a 1TB hard drive. It runs Commodore's Linux-based OS Vision. The rebirth of the Amiga brand as an overpriced Apple-aping bauble was spotted by the folks over at The Verge.
If you don't care for expensive internals and just want to pretend you've travelled back in time to the 80s by having a box with AMIGA stamped on it, Commodore will flog you the branded case with just a Blu-ray player inside for the not-exactly-cheap $345 (£220).
Or you could ring them up and ask if you can buy the empty case for a tenner -- and then use the gutless box to relive all those great Amiga memories. (You lamers.)
Asked about alternative uses for the Amiga Mini, a member of an Atari fan forum on Facebook said: "Can you cook on it? I really fancy a bacon and egg sandwich! And all those electronics in a small box might generate some heat! Nice to see they left a clear cooking surface on top..."
Are you mad enough to spend £1,500 to rekindle your love of Amiga, or would you rather pelt it with eggs? Let us know in the comments or continue ye olde tech fanboy war over on our Facebook wall.