I've spent the past few weekends with the A500 Mini now, it took me a while to get it to where I need it to be, but I got it there, and now I absolutely love it.
I'm setting this up for my brother, who is not a tinkerer to say the least, so it needs to work pretty much flawlessly. I also need it to work with two joysticks (Speedlink Competition Pro) and have a keyboard. When I first got this thing back in April nothing was working right because of the default joystick mappings that I've mentioned earlier in this thread. There was a way to fix that on a per game basis, but after it got announced that it would be patched, I decided to wait for that. The patch works great, and does exactly as advertised, the joysticks are working now, all though they've mapped the other buttons on the joystick a little strange. Like the second (right) button on the competition pro doesn't work, it should have been Fire1 (for a 1 button joystick) or Fire2, but instead it does nothing now, and Fire2 is assigned to one of the other buttons. This doesn't seem to cause any practical issues, but lefties might have an issue with it. I don't understand why they couldn't include a system default mapping tool for every device, like the mapping tool they have for the gamepad, only for other devices as well, and as a system default, not just per game. In any case, the joysticks are working properly now.
First thing I did was buy a powered USB hub and a keyboard, it doesn't need to be powered but I was hoping to power the Mini from the hub, but that just doesn't work even though they're all charging ports. So I bought an adapter, but I got a cheap one, and that produced a curious bug where the Mini would power up, but after having shut down it would not power back up until I had disconnected the USB-C, and plugged it back in. I used it like that until I tried a better adapter I had laying around (an old, but original samsung phone charger) and it worked great after that, so get a decent adapter, don't go super cheap.
The keyboard and everything else I plugged into the hub worked perfectly, but the gamepad would sometimes compete with the joysticks for priority when all three were plugged in. If I started a 2p game there would only be one joystick in addition to the gamepad to pick as controller, if one player picked the joystick, only the pad was left for the other player. You can set up the controllers you want to use in the game settings, and even if you specify that you want 2 joysticks, if all three devices are connected to the system it might see the gamepad as a joystick, and in the game you'll only have one joystick and the gamepad to choose from. The system doesn't support loading 3 different controllers, you can only have two, and it only happens with joysticks and gamepad, never the mouse and keyboard. I know that you can press Home+X on the gamepad to pass priority to the next device, but that only works if there is one other joystick plugged in. With two joysticks this only swaps one joystick for the next, you're still left with the gamepad and a joystick as controllers instead of two joysticks. To fix this you have to unplug the gamepad altogether.
I haven't tested this extensively, but I went at it for a good long while, and sometimes I was able to reset the priority by disconnecting the gamepad and the hub itself from the Mini, then reconnecting the hub and the pad. However, it didn't always work, and in the end I found it was easier to just have the gamepad disconnected when playing 2p games with two joysticks. The order in which devices are plugged in seems to matter, or possibly which port in the USB hub they're plugged in to. It probably has to do with how the Mini discovers the different USB devices. I assume this is why the gamepad doesn't necessarily take over one of the joysticks, but if you use the gamepad to navigate the menus and start the game it will always take priority over the joysticks (or one of them).
The keyboard works great for navigating the menus however, so you don't need the gamepad anyway, the keyboard has all the necessary buttons. Mouse+Keyboard+Joystick works well, the only thing I've found the gamepad useful for is having the "Home" button available for jumping back to the menu carousel if something crashes or hangs. You can quit most games by pressing either F10, 'Home' or * on the keyboard, but on some games you can't. For some games the only way to quit back to the menu is pushing "Home" on the gamepad, even if you have this button on the keyboard, some games will only accept a "Home" press from the gamepad (or a joystick I assume, if the joystick had a "home" button). When this happens, and the gamepad isn't connected you need to press the power button (not hold it) on the back of the Mini, this will bring it back to the menu carousel.
I tried the aminimiga Amiberry softmod (linked earlier in this thread), and at first I really liked this mod. It comes preloaded with almost the whole WHDLoad Games package with a library of uncompressed WHDLoad games as well as Demos. It gives full control over which devices to use, no priority issues, and I could adjust the clock speed of the cpu for games that ran way too fast, which turned out to be many. One problem I soon encountered was that very few games would run correctly out of the gate. After a while the amount of tinkering and setup I had to do to make each game work started to become a lot. WB (Workbench) needs to use the full speed that the cpu can deliver, and having to switch back and forth between the settings while going in and out of games got very tedious. I was not able to save and load different configurations either for some reason, that might have helped a lot because then you can easily switch between different settings, but I could never get it to work, not sure why.
I messed around with a ton of games, but many just wouldn't run right, either they ran too fast (even after having set the cpu to 7 MHz), or they had weird graphical glitches that just wouldn't go away no matter how much I tinkered with the settings. Some games, like 'North and South' and 'Defender of the Crown' have minigames in them that you need to play, and even if I could get the game itself to run correctly, the mini games would run away at breakneck pace. It was a mess, and I quickly got swamped with issues, so I went back to trying to use the default system launcher and compressed WHDLoad files. To my surprise almost every game I tried worked great with no glitches and running at the correct speed right out of the box, minigames and everything. The few exceptions were some games that still ran way too fast, but that had an easy fix, just add the line 'cpu_speed=real' to the .uae file. This, of couse, has to be done on a separate computer, but thankfully I only ran into this issue for a very few handful of games (Firepower, Defender of the Crown, F18 Intercepter, Hostages and a few others). Most games just came up flawlessly, and I tested a lot of them. Compared to the amount of issues I had in WB, this was tiny.
I had not reinstalled the WHDLoad package from retrogrames, but simply kept the one that came with the Amiberry WB, it comes with a much larger and more updated XML database. This is a newer package, and though unofficial, it seems to work much better. I didn't want to go back and test the old package against the new one just to see the difference, the system was finally working great! Also, I kept the demos that came with the aminimiga download, just compressed the folders to make them work in the system launcher. They're also available as separate downloads of course, like all the rest of the WHDLoad package.
So, to summarize, aminimiga WB is great if you want tools do to more with the system like browse, open or edit files, or load games and programs in ADF format, not so much if you want an out-of-the-box amiga gaming system just using WHDLoad (but definitely do get the 'unofficial' newer WHDLoad package with the updated XML database in any case). A USB hub with all your devices plugged in works great, but beware the gamepad vs joystick priority issues when using 2 joysticks. This is something that should easily be patched out in a later update, so hopefully that gets done. With the new WHDLoad package almost every game runs perfectly, with a few exceptions that need a 'cpu_speed=real' line added to the .uae config file, and since this can only be done by taking the USB stick out of the Mini and plugging it into and editing it on a different computer, it can be a bit of a hassle. In addition, whenever you enter the game settings, that .uae file gets overwritten, so you have to do all your settings before editing the .uae file, and then never go back to game settings, or else you have to do it all over again. So yeah, it's a hassle, and thankfully it doesn't apply to a lot of games, but this issue could also easily be patched out by simply adding a 'CPU Speed Real' check box in the game settings menu so that the system keeps that line in the .uae file.
Hopefully we'll get those minor issues fixed, and at that point I'll have nothing else on my wish list for this system, it works and it works great! Now this will go back in its original box to be given away as a birthday present and bring countless hours of childhood joy!