Amiga Emulation on Intel N100

26 October 2025

Regular readers may recall that I bought an Intel N100 based SZBOX MiniPC for use as a home server, but later abandoned it because of USB being unreliable under load.

Regular readers may also recall I was recently in Germany for the Amiga 40 convention. That got me thinking: my current travel combo of 16" MacBook Pro and Retroid Pocket 3+ is quite heavy and bulky, so could I swap it for a smaller and lighter single laptop instead? I had a look around and there were several based on the Intel N-series CPUs that seemed to fit the bill, but could they run the Amiberry emulator at full speed?

The N100 benchmarks 60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5 in single core should be fine, but there is nothing like a real world test. I needed to wipe the MiniPC anyway, and one fresh install of Debian and downloads of Amiberry and Amiga Vision later I was ready to go.

I am happy to report the N100 performed very well even with the more demanding Amiberry 7. Copper-heavy games like Jim Power and Alien Breed 3D ran perfectly and at a good speed, and I have seen the A500 Mini struggle with some of these. The Frontier 3D intro ran well too. It felt a little more sluggish than my A500 030-50 but I wouldn't put money on it and it was running in 4K resolution. Fears ran slowly, even in a smaller window size, but I suspect that's down to the game.

So, great success. Now to find a travel/show laptop. While not N100, the ThinkPad Yoga X13 Gen 1 series perform similarly (Intel 10th Gen circa 2001), have good build quality, are supported well in Linux, and can be had refurbished for £250-£300 at current prices. The foldable form-factor could be good for a show machine too...

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