Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 25,000 Games? PS1 Ceiling, 7.5/10

There is a number on the front page of Miyoo's official store, and the number is 25,000. Twenty-five thousand games, bundled, included, yours the moment a padded envelope the size of a deck of cards lands on your doormat. It is one of the great retro-handheld numbers, and like most great numbers it is technically true and almost entirely useless.

This is a review of that number. Not of a single cartridge, not of one canonical classic, but of the list — the sprawling, duplicated, legally radioactive library that ships crammed onto a microSD card inside the Miyoo Mini Plus. We are going to take the list seriously, because Miyoo's marketing does, and because a great many people bought this thing on the strength of that five-digit promise. What follows is the deadpan accounting: what the list actually contains, what the hardware can actually run, what you should actually pay, and whether a curated pile of other people's copyrighted work is worth 7.5 out of 10. The short version is that it is, for reasons that have very little to do with the number 25,000.

The 25,000-Game Lie

A number that means nothing

Let us start with the counts, because they are gloriously incoherent. Miyoo's headline storefront advertises 25,000 games on a device page dated January 2025. A second official-looking Miyoo product page, updated in October 2025, offers three storage tiers with preloaded counts of 13,056, 25,966, and 27,549. A third-party game-list vendor updated its page in February 2026 to claim a flat 28,000 games built in on a 128GB card. Meanwhile, marketplace sellers on Amazon will happily sell you a 128GB Mini Plus loaded with 11,000 games for twenty-five dollars.

Notice that none of these numbers agree, and notice that price and count move in opposite directions. The most expensive listing brags about 25,000 titles; the cheapest brags about 11,000. If game count were a measure of value, the cheap card would be worth less. It is not, because the count is not a measure of anything. It is a measure of how many files a reseller dragged onto a memory card before shrink-wrapping it. A ROM set is not a library; it is a bucket, and the number on the box is the size of the bucket, not the quality of what is in it.

What Miyoo actually ships (nothing)

Here is the part the storefronts bury: Miyoo's own firmware ships empty. The device you buy from Miyoo the manufacturer is a shell, a screen, a SigmaStar chip, and a menu. Every one of those 25,000 games is a ROM — a dumped copy of a commercial cartridge or disc — loaded onto the card by a reseller, not by Miyoo, and not with anyone's blessing. The 25,000 games included line is a distributor flourish, and in most jurisdictions it describes an act of copyright infringement performed on your behalf as a sales incentive.

This matters for the review because it defines what you are buying. You are not buying a library the way you buy a Steam bundle or a console maker's subscription. You are buying a hardware platform and, if you take the pre-loaded card, a stranger's idea of a good ROM set — usually a mangled fork of a community pack, full of duplicates, bad dumps, hacks, and regional variants of the same twelve games. The honest move, which we will get to, is to wipe the card and build your own list from backups of games you own. The marketed move is to accept the 25,000 and never think about it again.

Reviewing a list, not a game

So this is an unusual review, and it needs an unusual yardstick. We are not scoring Chrono Trigger; Chrono Trigger scored itself thirty years ago and the verdict was masterpiece. We are scoring the proposition: does the Miyoo Mini Plus, as a delivery mechanism for a curated retro library, justify its price and its hype? To answer that we have to separate the signal from the padding — the roughly two hundred games that make this device beloved from the twenty-four-thousand-odd that pad the box copy. The good news is that the signal is real. The bad news is that Miyoo would rather sell you the padding.

Specs and the PS1 Ceiling

The SigmaStar heart

Every argument about the Miyoo Mini Plus game list eventually collides with one chip: the SigmaStar SSD202D. It is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 system-on-chip with 128 MB of integrated RAM and — this is the load-bearing detail — a 2D-only graphics unit. There is no meaningful 3D acceleration on this device. None. Everything it draws, it draws in software on those two little A7 cores.

That single fact sets the entire ceiling of the list. Systems that rendered in 2D — the NES, the SNES, the Mega Drive, the Game Boy line, the PC Engine, the Neo Geo, most arcade boards — run beautifully, because emulating a 2D machine is mostly a matter of CPU cycles and the SSD202D has just enough. Systems that rendered in 3D and expected a GPU to help — the Nintendo 64, the Dreamcast, the PSP, the DS — do not run, or run as a slideshow, because there is no GPU to lean on. The list stops, hard, at the PlayStation. We wrote about this wall at length in our breakdown of the 28,000-game PS1 ceiling, and nothing about the 2026 firmware moves it.

The screen and the shell

The Plus half of the name refers to ergonomics, not silicon. Against the original Miyoo Mini, the Plus grows the display to a 3.5-inch 640×480 IPS panel, swells the battery to 3000 mAh, and — crucially for the list-curator — adds 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. The chip underneath is identical. If you have read our same-chip, bigger-screen comparison, you already know the punchline: the Plus is a comfort upgrade, not a power upgrade, and the original Mini is discontinued anyway, which settles the argument by attrition.

That 640×480 panel is, quietly, one of the best things about the whole proposition. A 4:3 IPS screen at that pixel density is a near-perfect canvas for systems that themselves output 4:3 at low resolutions. SNES games look correct. Game Boy Advance games, natively 3:2, get a small letterbox, but the sharpness is excellent. This is a screen built for the exact list the hardware can run, which is either good planning or a happy accident, and after a week with the device you stop caring which.

The specs table

Here is the device and its library laid out as one object under review. Note the license row, because no other handheld review will be honest enough to include it.

What Actually Runs

The honest system list

Strip the marketing and the real game list — the systems that run at full speed with clean audio and no drama — looks like this: NES/Famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo, WonderSwan, and a healthy slice of arcade via Final Burn Neo and MAME 2003-Plus. On top of that sits the PlayStation, which runs — with caveats we will get to — and which is the crown jewel and the ceiling in the same breath.

That is not a small list. That is, functionally, the entire canonical run of 8-bit and 16-bit gaming plus the 2D end of the 32-bit era. If your idea of retro tops out somewhere around Symphony of the Night, the Miyoo Mini Plus runs your entire idea of retro. The 25,000-game number exists precisely because these systems produced tens of thousands of cartridges, and a ROM set can hoover up every last regional variant, unlicensed sports title, and mahjong game nobody has touched since 1991. Breadth is easy when the systems are old and small; the padding writes itself.

Where the list lies: arcade and Neo Geo

Arcade is where the game-count padding gets most aggressive and most misleading. A full arcade set nominally contains tens of thousands of entries, but a huge fraction are BIOS files, clones, bootlegs, mechanical machines with no video, and titles that require a stronger CPU than two Cortex-A7 cores can offer. The Mini Plus runs Capcom's CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards well — Street Fighter II, Marvel vs. Capcom, the whole fighting-and-beat-em-up canon — and it runs Neo Geo's MVS library well, which is the part that matters, because Neo Geo is where Metal Slug lives.

What it does not run is anything built on 3D arcade hardware or the heavier late-90s boards. So when a listing brags about eight thousand arcade games, read it as a few hundred arcade games you would actually load, plus several thousand entries that are clones, BIOSes, or simply unplayable on this silicon. The Neo Geo subset alone justifies the arcade folder; the rest is ballast dressed up as abundance.

The ghosts: N64, Dreamcast, PSP

Some resellers, chasing a bigger number, load N64, Dreamcast, and PSP folders onto the card anyway. This is where the list crosses from optimistic to dishonest. The SSD202D cannot emulate these systems at playable speed — no 3D GPU, not enough RAM, not enough clock. A reseller who ships you a card with a Nintendo 64 folder is padding the count with games that will run, if at all, at single-digit frames per second with broken audio. If you want the systems above the PS1 line, you want a different class of device entirely; our Retroid Pocket 6-versus-5 breakdown covers what that upgrade actually costs. On the Mini Plus, those folders are a trap, and their mere presence is the single fastest way to spot a padded, over-promised game list.

The Flagship Five

Handheld Picker's 2026 review cut through the noise by naming the games that actually justify the device: Chrono Trigger, Pokémon, Castlevania, Final Fantasy VII, and Metal Slug. It is a good list — not because it is surprising, but because it is honest. These are the games people buy a Mini Plus to replay, and each one exercises a different corner of what the hardware can do. Let us take them as the peer games of this review and see how the list handles its own headliners.

The RPGs: Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII

Chrono Trigger is the ideal Miyoo game and it is not close. It is a SNES title, so it runs flawlessly; it is turn-based, so the SSD202D never breaks a sweat; it has battery saves plus emulator save states, so the commute-sized play session it was never designed for suddenly works. The 1995 Dream Team of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and artist Akira Toriyama built a game that, by accident, is perfectly shaped for a 3.5-inch screen and a twenty-minute train ride.

Final Fantasy VII is the more interesting case, because it is the ceiling in a single package — sorry, in three discs. It is a PlayStation game, and it runs, but it is exactly the kind of PS1 title that reminds you the ceiling is real: the pre-rendered backgrounds look gorgeous on the IPS panel, while the low-poly field models flicker at the edges of what a software renderer wants to do. Disc swapping is handled in the menu. It plays; it does not sing the way the 16-bit library sings. FF7 is the game that proves the PS1 is the ceiling and that the ceiling was worth reaching.

The action pair: Castlevania and Metal Slug

Castlevania on the Mini Plus means, primarily, Symphony of the Night, a PS1 game that behaves like a 16-bit game and therefore runs like a dream. Koji Igarashi's 1997 masterwork is 2D sprite work on 32-bit hardware, which is the sweet spot: all the fidelity of the PlayStation, none of the polygons that choke the chip. For the deeper lineage — the brutal 8-bit entries, the Game Boy Advance trilogy — the Hardcore Gaming 101 Castlevania feature is the definitive tour, and every game it describes runs perfectly here.

Metal Slug is Neo Geo, which means it is arcade-perfect on this hardware and the definition of pick-up-and-play. The HG101 Metal Slug retrospective catalogues a series whose entire appeal — dense hand-drawn animation, instant restarts, two-minute runs — maps exactly onto a handheld you pull out at a bus stop. If any game was designed in 1996 for a device that would not exist until 2023, it was this one.

The Pokémon problem

Pokémon is where the list's legal murk gets personal. The Game Boy and Game Boy Advance Pokémon titles run perfectly — Red, Blue, Gold, FireRed, Emerald, all of it. But Pokémon is also the series Nintendo defends most aggressively, and it is the clearest example of why the included framing is a liability rather than a feature. The games play beautifully; the trading and battling that were half the point are gone, because there is no second Mini Plus to link to and no analog for the modern remakes the chip cannot run anyway. Pokémon on the Mini Plus is a single-player nostalgia machine, which is most of what people want, but it is worth naming what the format quietly removes.

Here is the flagship five as a comparison table — same genre in the sense that matters here, which is that they are the games the list is really selling.

Onion OS and the List

Stock firmware versus Onion

The single most important decision a Mini Plus owner makes about their game list is which operating system manages it. Out of the box you get Miyoo's stock firmware, which is functional and has improved a great deal, but the community answer — and the reason this device has the reputation it has — is Onion OS. Onion is a custom firmware that reorganizes the entire library into clean, per-system folders, adds box art and metadata scraping, manages save states properly, and generally turns a bag of ROMs into something that feels like a product.

There is a version floor. Per RetroCompass's 2026 firmware guide, the device needs a base Miyoo firmware of 202305052130 or later before Onion OS will install cleanly. Get that wrong and you spend an evening reflashing. Get it right and, as the guide notes, Onion can pull its own updates over Wi-Fi through the OTA Update app — a genuinely modern touch on a device pretending to be from 1994.

The folder structure

Curating the list means understanding how Onion expects the card to be laid out. Every system is a tagged folder under Roms, and the emulator cores read from those folders. Strip the pre-loaded card, drop your own backups into the right folders, and the menu populates itself. The skeleton looks like this:

/Roms
  /FC        NES / Famicom
  /SFC       Super Famicom / SNES
  /MD        Mega Drive / Genesis
  /GB        Game Boy
  /GBC       Game Boy Color
  /GBA       Game Boy Advance
  /PCE       PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
  /NEOGEO    Neo Geo (needs neogeo.zip BIOS)
  /ARCADE    FBNeo / MAME 2003-Plus
  /PS        PlayStation (.chd or .pbp)
  /WS        WonderSwan
/BIOS        system BIOS files live here
/Saves       save states and SRAM

Retrododo's coverage of Onion OS v4.2.3 documents the newer niceties layered on top of this — expanded system support, interface polish, better save handling — and if you want the canonical step-by-step, Retro Game Corps' long-running Miyoo Mini setup guide remains the reference document three firmware generations later.

Curating down from 25,000

Here is the contrarian advice that will make your Mini Plus better: delete almost everything. A curated card of three or four hundred games — the flagship five, plus the fifty-or-so titles per system that actually matter — is a dramatically better object than a card groaning under 25,000 entries you will scroll past forever. The big number is a browsing tax. Every duplicate, every bad dump, every unlicensed baseball game is a row between you and the game you actually opened the device to play. The best game list on a Miyoo Mini Plus is the one you built yourself, and it has two zeroes fewer than the one on the box. If a handheld is not your only screen, our guide to running RetroPie on a PC in 2026 covers the big-screen half of the same hobby.

Rivals and Alternatives

Versus the original Mini

The original Miyoo Mini is the sentimental favorite and the wrong answer in 2026, for the simple reason that it is discontinued and shares the Plus's exact SoC. Same SSD202D, same 128 MB, same PS1 ceiling, same list. What you lose going back to the Mini is the bigger screen, the larger battery, and Wi-Fi — which is to say you lose OTA updating and comfort, and gain nothing but a smaller pocket footprint. If you already own a Mini and love it, keep it. If you are choosing today, the Plus is the device and the Mini is a collector's curiosity.

Versus the Anbernic RG35XX

The RG35XX is the Mini Plus's natural rival and it is a genuinely different bet. Anbernic's H700 generation — a quad-core Cortex-A53 with a full gigabyte of RAM and, on the higher models, HDMI out and Bluetooth — pushes the ceiling a little higher: it can make a selective, patient run at Dreamcast, PSP, and light N64 in a way the Miyoo simply cannot. The trade is software. Miyoo's Onion OS ecosystem is more mature, more polished, and more beloved than Anbernic's stock firmware, and the Mini Plus is the more comfortable pure-2D machine. You are choosing between Miyoo's better software on weaker silicon and Anbernic's stronger silicon on rougher software.

Versus going up: Retroid

If the PS1 ceiling is the dealbreaker — if you bought the list for the N64 and Dreamcast folders that turned out to be a slideshow — then you are not in the Miyoo's weight class at all. You want an Android handheld with an actual GPU, and the modern answer is a Retroid Pocket, whose 2026 lineup we ranked in detail. The gap in price is large and so is the gap in capability; the Mini Plus at sixty dollars and a Retroid at two-hundred-plus are answering different questions. One is the best way to replay the 16-bit canon on a train; the other is how far up the console timeline you can climb in your pocket. For the first question, the Miyoo wins on price and charm. For the second, it was never in the running.

The library-versus-library comparison, device by device:

Pricing and Availability

The official price chaos

There is no single price for a Miyoo Mini Plus, and the spread is instructive. Miyoo's headline storefront — the one with the 25,000-game banner — listed the device at €109.90 in early 2025. The official UK store, updated in January 2026, lists the 128 GB model at £59.99 and the 64 GB at £55.99. Handheld Picker's 2026 review caught a sale at $56.99 for a 64 GB color variant during a five-day window in May 2026, against a regular price of $79.99. GamesRadar's coverage clocked Amazon around $61.99 with a stacking 5% coupon, and £77.99 in the UK.

Read those together and a pattern emerges: the more prominently a listing advertises its enormous game count, the more it charges. The €109.90 storefront is the most expensive way to buy the cheapest silicon on the market, and what you are paying the premium for is the ROM bundle — the exact part of the transaction with the least legal footing.

The $25 trap

At the other end, Amazon marketplace sellers list 128 GB Mini Plus bundles with 11,000 games for $25.99 and even $25.00. This should trip every alarm you own. A genuine Mini Plus costs Miyoo more than $25 to manufacture; a $25 listing is either a clone with inferior buttons and a worse screen, a scam, or a genuine unit subsidized entirely by the illegal library it is advertising. There is no version of twenty-five dollars for a real Mini Plus plus 11,000 games that is both legitimate and sustainable. Treat these listings as what they are: bait.

What to actually pay

The honest target price for a real Miyoo Mini Plus in 2026 is roughly $55-65, or £55-60, from Miyoo's own regional stores or a reputable retailer — and ideally for the bare device, or with the understanding that you will wipe and rebuild the card. Do not pay the €109.90 loaded premium, and do not chase the $25 mirage. The device is worth its street price. The list it comes with is worth exactly nothing you could not assemble yourself from your own backups in an afternoon.

How the List Plays

Casual and commuter

This is the use case the Miyoo Mini Plus was born for, and it is the one it nails. The device is genuinely pocketable, the 3000 mAh battery gets you through a working week of short sessions, and save states mean you can quit mid-boss and resume on the home menu. GamesRadar's reviewer put it plainly, having recanted a lifelong preference for original hardware: nothing, they wrote, now beats curling up with a Mini Plus and a handful of favorite retro games. For the casual player and the commuter, the 25,000-game list is beside the point — you load your ten favorites and the device disappears into the routine, which is the highest compliment a handheld can earn.

Completionist and speedrunner

The completionist has a complicated relationship with this list. On one hand, the SNES and GBA RPG libraries are here in full, save states make grinding humane, and a 3000 mAh battery outlasts most 60-hour JRPGs across a couple of weeks of lunch breaks. On the other hand, 25,000 games is a completionist's nightmare disguised as a dream — a pile so large it becomes paralyzing, a backlog you did not choose and cannot finish. The device rewards the completionist who curates ruthlessly and punishes the one who tries to honor the whole card.

The speedrunner is a harder sell. Emulation on a SigmaStar chip introduces input latency and timing behavior that will not match original hardware or a well-configured desktop emulator, which makes the Mini Plus a fine practice-anywhere companion but a poor primary for frame-perfect runs. Save states are a superb practice tool — set a state before the hard trick, hammer it a hundred times — but no serious runner is submitting times captured on a handheld with no analog stick and a software renderer. Use it to learn a route on the train; verify it at home.

Co-op and the single-player truth

Here the list runs into a wall the marketing never mentions: the Miyoo Mini Plus is a resolutely single-player device. There is no second controller, no link cable, no local wireless play between two units in any practical sense. Every co-op and competitive game in that 25,000 — every Contra, every Streets of Rage, every Pokémon trade — collapses into either single-player or hot-seat. Streets of Rage 2 is still one of the greatest games on the card; you will just be playing it alone, on a 3.5-inch screen, one set of thumbs. For couch co-op, the list is a museum of games you used to play with someone else. That is not a flaw in the Miyoo so much as a fact of its form factor, but it belongs in any honest accounting of what the list can and cannot do.

Who Should Buy This List

Buy it if

The Miyoo Mini Plus game list is an easy recommendation for a specific, honest set of buyers. You should buy it if:

• Your idea of retro lives between the NES and the PlayStation, and you have no intention of climbing higher.
• You want the best pure-2D handheld screen at this price, and Onion OS's curation matters to you.
• You will build your own list from your own backups, and treat the pre-loaded 25,000 as a card to be wiped.
• You value pocketability and a week of battery over raw horsepower.

Skip it if

And you should walk away — or buy something else entirely — if:

• You bought the list for the N64, Dreamcast, or PSP folders; the chip cannot run them, full stop.
• You need analog sticks, HDMI-out, or local multiplayer.
• You are a speedrunner who needs hardware-accurate timing.
• You are uncomfortable with the copyright status of a pre-loaded ROM library — a legitimate position, and one the marketing works hard to obscure.

The five recommendations

Distilled to concrete use-cases, here is who this device is for:

1. The commuter who replays the classics: buy the 64 GB, wipe it, load your two hundred favorites, done.
2. The lapsed 16-bit fan: this is the cheapest, most charming way back into the SNES and Genesis libraries you grew up on.
3. The curator who hates clutter: the Mini Plus plus a hand-built card is the platonic ideal of a focused retro handheld.
4. The gift-buyer: a sub-$65 object that looks like a Game Boy and runs Chrono Trigger lands harder with a certain age bracket than almost anything at the price.
5. The owner who wants more: keep the Miyoo for 2D and pair it with a Retroid or an Anbernic for everything above the PS1 line. They are complements, not competitors.

Pros and Cons

What the list gets right

Judged as a curated 2D machine rather than a 25,000-game claim, the strengths are substantial:

• The entire 8-bit and 16-bit canon, in full, at full speed with clean audio.
• A 640×480 IPS screen ideally matched to the 4:3 systems it runs.
• Onion OS: the best curation and metadata software in the budget class.
• Genuine pocketability and multi-day battery from the 3000 mAh cell.
• A street price around $56-62 that makes it a legitimate impulse buy.

What the list gets wrong

And the weaknesses, which are mostly weaknesses of marketing rather than hardware:

• The 25,000 number is padding — duplicates, bad dumps, and unplayable systems inflate a count that means nothing.
• The PS1 ceiling is hard, and padded lists pretend otherwise with N64/Dreamcast folders that do not run.
• No analog sticks and no local multiplayer, so half the co-op canon is technically present and practically dead.
• The legal status of the pre-loaded library is a liability the marketing hides.
• Price chaos: the loaded storefronts overcharge and the $25 listings are traps.

The Verdict

The rating: 7.5/10

Score the marketing and this is a 4. Score the machine and the two hundred games that matter and it is a 9. The Miyoo Mini Plus game list, taken as the honest proposition underneath the box copy, splits the difference and lands at 7.5 out of 10 — a superb, curated 2D handheld sold under a dishonest number, held back from a higher score by a hard ceiling, absent multiplayer, and a bundled library that is equal parts gift and liability.

The Machine's final word

The 25,000 games are a lie, but they are a lie in service of a truth: for the specific job of replaying the 8-bit and 16-bit canon on a train, nothing at this price is better. Buy it, wipe it, and build the list you actually want — three hundred games you love instead of twenty-five thousand you will never open. The number on the box is marketing. The device under it is one of the best sixty dollars in the hobby, and the game list, once you cut it down to the truth, is a 9 pretending to be a 7.5. The padding is what costs it the point and a half.

For the broader questions of preservation and legality that hover over every pre-loaded handheld, Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian remains the most literate chronicle of how we arrived at a culture that treats thirty-year-old games as both priceless and abandoned. The Miyoo Mini Plus sits squarely in that contradiction: a sixty-dollar box that resolves the industry's preservation failures with a memory card full of other people's work, and asks you not to think too hard about it. We thought hard about it. It is still a 7.5.