Left it running for almost a hour though. I've got a good laptop so maybe AA is too old for it I guess?
An hour is definitely abnormal. I can't comment on extremely new PCs but I think AA should still work just as well.
I assume you ticked the "win10fix" in the scripts tab.
Did you install the things from the "extra" folder? DirectX, VC_redists and the Windows Desktop Runtime?
I'm not knowledgable on really new systems, but it's not strictly impossible that newer versions of Runtime are incompatible with AA2Mini. As for DirectX, I don't think you need that specific version which is bundled with the game as I have DirectX12 and the game runs fine with it, but if you're out of options then installing that over your current one is one possibility.
If those don't work, I recommend checking the install guide, maybe it says something that I missed.
Also, do you get an error log? It's in *\AAUnlimited\logfile.txt
If you tried everything else, maybe it helps in identifying the issue.