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

The box says twenty-five thousand games. The microSD card inside the box holds something closer to twenty-five thousand files, which is not the same claim, and the number of those files you will ever actually finish is closer to a rounding error. The gap between the count printed on the marketing page and the count that survives contact with a dual-core chip from 2019 is the entire subject of this review.

We are not reviewing the Miyoo Mini Plus as hardware here. That has been done to death, and the short version is that it is a lovely little grey brick with a 3.5-inch screen and a battery that outlasts your attention span. We are reviewing the thing the resellers actually sell you: the game list. The pitch. The promise that for roughly the price of two new AAA titles you receive the entire history of two-dimensional video games, pre-loaded, sorted, and ready.

The promise is about eighty percent true and one hundred percent misleading, and untangling which eighty percent is worth your thumbs is what the next seven thousand words are for. Bring skepticism. Bring a spare SD card. Leave the wallet closed until the pricing section, because the number on the tag is, as we will demonstrate, a rumor.

The Number on the Box

Start with the headline. The official Miyoo store in 2026 is still advertising the Mini Plus as a retro handheld with over 25,000 games, listed on its front page in the neighborhood of €109.90. That is the anchor number, the one that does the heavy lifting in every product photo and every reseller repost. It is also the number you should trust least.

25,000, 27,549, 13,056: pick a figure

The tell is the variance. Walk the 2026 listings and the count is never the same twice. One store swears the card has 25,966. Another rounds up to 27,549. A third, presumably running an older or leaner image, quietly admits to 13,056. A fourth just writes 28,000 and dares you to count. When a spec is real, it holds still. When it moves by fourteen thousand units between sellers of the same physical product, it is not a spec. It is a mood.

We have made this exact point at length in our breakdown arguing the real playable library is closer to 5,819 than 28,000, and nothing in the 2026 listings has moved us off it. The honest number depends entirely on how you define 'game,' and every reseller defines it in whichever direction sells another unit.

Where the count actually comes from

Peel the label and the inflation is mechanical, not magical. Four sources do all the work. First, arcade sets: a full FBNeo or MAME romset is tens of thousands of files on its own, most of them BIOS chunks, clones, bootlegs, and parent/child variants of the same cabinet. Second, regional duplicates: every NES library ships as USA, Japan, and Europe copies of the same cartridge, tripling the count for zero new content. Third, revisions and hacks: Rev A, Rev B, the translation patch, the 900 ROM hacks of Super Mario World that some scraper swept up. Fourth, the genuinely unplayable: systems the chip cannot run, present as files so the folder count looks fat.

Add those four and 25,000 assembles itself out of maybe a few hundred games you would recognize and a warehouse of digital packing peanuts. That is not a scandal. It is just how ROM bundles have always been counted, and it is why the number is the least interesting fact about the device.

What Miyoo ships versus what the reseller ships

One more distinction that the marketing works hard to blur. Miyoo, the manufacturer, ships firmware and a hardware platform. The '25,000 games' is not Miyoo's firmware; it is a reseller ROM bundle loaded onto a bundled card, assembled by whoever is fulfilling the order that week. This matters legally, as we will get to, and it matters practically, because two Mini Plus units bought the same day can carry wildly different lists. You are not buying a curated collection. You are buying a lottery ticket that usually pays out in Super Mario Bros. and disappointment.

What the SSD202D Actually Runs

Every argument about the game list eventually collides with a single piece of silicon. The Mini Plus is built around the SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 with 128MB of on-package DDR memory and an integrated 2D graphics block. That sentence is the whole ceiling. Learn it and you can predict the fate of any game on the card without turning the device on.

The SSD202D, in plain terms

Two cores clocked conservatively, a hair over a hundred megabytes of usable RAM, and a GPU designed to push flat sprites, not polygons. For 8-bit and 16-bit systems this is luxurious overkill; those consoles ran on kilobytes. For sprite-based arcade hardware it is comfortable. For PlayStation 1, which is fundamentally a software-rendered polygon machine, it is just barely enough, and only because the emulator does the heavy lifting on the CPU. For anything past PS1, it is a wall. Not a slope. A wall.

This is the same chip as the original Miyoo Mini, which is why our Mini versus Mini Plus comparison concluded the Plus is an ergonomics upgrade, not a performance one. Bigger screen, bigger 3000mAh battery, added Wi-Fi. Identical ceiling. If a game will not run on the Mini, buying the Plus does not change physics.

The folder that holds the list

Under the hood, the 'game list' is just a directory tree on the SD card. On the near-universal OnionOS custom firmware it looks roughly like this, and the layout tells you more than any product page:

SD:/Roms/
  FC/       NES / Famicom            .nes .fds
  GB/       Game Boy                 .gb
  GBC/      Game Boy Color           .gbc
  GBA/      Game Boy Advance         .gba
  SFC/      Super Famicom / SNES     .sfc .smc
  MD/       Mega Drive / Genesis     .md .gen
  NEOGEO/   Neo Geo (BIOS required)  .zip
  ARCADE/   FBNeo + MAME sets        .zip   <- the '25,000' lives here
  PS/       PlayStation 1            .pbp .chd .cue/.bin
  SEGACD/   Sega CD (BIOS required)  .chd

Note where the population explodes. The FC, GB, and SFC folders hold a few thousand files between them, most of them the genuine classics plus their regional twins. The ARCADE folder is where a bundle balloons from a few thousand into five figures. Delete it and your 'game count' drops by two thirds while your list of games you will actually play stays exactly the same. That single observation is the review in miniature.

OnionOS versus the stock build

The card usually arrives on Miyoo's stock firmware, a build stamped something like 202305052130 in its version string, and the near-universal first move in the community is to flash OnionOS, which by 2026 sits around v4.2.3. Onion fixes the menu, the box art scraping, the save-state reliability, and the general feeling that the stock UI was designed by someone who had heard about menus but never used one. What Onion does not do, and cannot do, is move the SSD202D ceiling. It is a better window onto the same room. PS1 is still the far wall, whichever firmware you are looking through.

The Game List, Platform by Platform

Enough about the number. Here is what the number contains, sorted by whether the chip actually respects it. The 2026 emulation guides converge on a consistent picture, and it maps cleanly onto the silicon: everything sprite-based sings, everything polygonal negotiates, everything past PlayStation is a file taking up space.

The 8- and 16-bit core

This is the real product. Handheld Picker's 2026 coverage frames the Mini Plus as ideal for 8-bit through PlayStation 1-era gaming, and the middle of that range is where it is not just adequate but genuinely excellent. Game Boy and Game Boy Color run flawlessly, with the guides naming Pokemon, Zelda, Tetris, and Kirby as representative. Game Boy Advance is equally comfortable, with Pokemon, Castlevania, Final Fight One, and Metroid as the cited examples. On the console side, NES/Famicom handles Super Mario Bros., Contra, Mega Man, and Gradius without a stutter; SNES/Super Famicom runs Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and Street Fighter II well; and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis covers Sonic, Streets of Rage, and Gunstar Heroes.

Neo Geo and the arcade bulge

Neo Geo sits at a happy intersection: it is technically arcade hardware, but its games are sprite-based, so the SSD202D eats them for breakfast. The guides name Metal Slug, The King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown, and all three are exactly as good here as they were in the cabinet, provided you supply the Neo Geo BIOS the emulator needs. The broader ARCADE folder is where the 25,000 count does most of its inflating, and where the experience gets choppiest: a lot of those cabinets are janky, a lot are duplicates, and a lot simply will not boot on the current core. The sprite games are gold. The rest is the packing material we discussed.

Save states change the whole calculus

One feature quietly rewrites the list's value: save states. The Mini Plus can freeze and resume any game at any frame, which turns a card full of brutal 8-bit arcade titles and 40-hour JRPGs into something a commuter can actually consume. A device that could only offer battery saves would be a museum. A device with instant save states is a library you can dip into for four minutes at a bus stop. Half the appeal of the game list is not the games; it is the ability to abuse them in ways the original hardware never allowed.

The PS1 Question

PlayStation 1 is the headline feature and the honest edge of the envelope in the same breath. The 2026 guides say most PS1 games run well, and they mean it, but 'most' is carrying a lot of weight, and understanding where the exceptions live is the difference between a satisfied owner and a returns label.

What actually runs

The named list is genuinely reassuring: Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX; Crash Bandicoot 1 through 3; Spyro 1 through 3; Metal Gear Solid; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; Tekken 3; and Gran Turismo 1 and 2. That is not a token list. That is a spine of the PS1 canon, and the fact that a €110 handheld runs it near-perfectly is the single most impressive thing about the whole platform. Symphony of the Night in particular is a 2D game wearing a PS1 disc, so it runs like a dream; Hardcore Gaming 101 has written more words on that game than most outlets write in a year, and every one of them is playable in your palm here.

Where it strains

The trouble is dimensional. The Mini Plus has a D-pad and face buttons and shoulder buttons and no analog sticks. Every 3D PS1 game that assumed an analog stick, and the later library increasingly did, is being played on a control scheme it was not designed for. Gran Turismo with digital steering is a compromise. Ape Escape, which literally requires two sticks, is a non-starter. Add the occasional CD-streaming game that pushes the read pipeline harder than the SoC likes, and 'most run well' resolves to 'most 2D and early-3D run well; twitchy late-era 3D is a negotiation.' The chip is not the only ceiling. The control layout is one too.

CHD, PBP, and the memory-card problem

Format matters more on PS1 than anywhere else on the card. Disc images arrive as .cue/.bin pairs, single-file .pbp, or compressed .chd, and the bundle authors mix all three, sometimes inside the same folder, which is how you end up with multi-disc games that half-work. Converting the library to .chd saves space and headaches, but the resellers rarely bother. And then there is the memory card: PS1 saves live in a virtual memory-card file the emulator manages, separate from save states, and a badly built bundle will happily share one card image across a hundred games until it corrupts. None of this is visible on the product page. All of it is the actual PS1 experience.

The N64 Mirage

Then there is Nintendo 64, the platform the marketing wants in the photo and the chip wants nothing to do with. This is where 'over 25,000 games' quietly stops being generous and starts being dishonest.

The five that work

Credit where due: the 2026 guides are honest that a specific handful is playable with tweaks. Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and F-Zero X will run, at reduced settings, with the right core and some patience. These are the demo-day games, the ones a reseller loads to prove N64 'works.' On a good day, with frameskip and a tolerant eye, they are genuinely fun. Mario 64 without an analog stick is once again a control compromise, but it moves.

The ones that don't

The same guides are equally clear about the other side, and this is the part the box never mentions. The harder N64 titles are explicitly not ideal: Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64 among them. These are the games that pushed the real N64's hardware, and emulating that stress on a dual-core A7 produces a slideshow. If your reason for wanting an N64 folder is Banjo or the back half of the Zelda catalogue, the Mini Plus will disappoint you specifically and by name.

Why the marketing includes it anyway

So why is N64 on the card at all? Because 'runs N64' is a checkbox that sells units, and because the five demo games provide just enough cover to print it. This is the exact gap where a purpose-built machine earns its keep. If N64 is your actual target, the honest move is dedicated hardware; we walked through how the Analogue 3D delivers real N64 with a free 2x upscaler, and it is a different universe of accuracy from a handful of frameskipped ROMs on a €110 brick. The Mini Plus does not do N64. It does an impression of N64, and only of five games, and only if you squint.

Is Any of This Legal?

Time for the part where The Machine reads the statute out loud. A device sold with '25,000 games' is selling you a legal situation as much as a play experience, and the situation is not the one the marketing implies. This is worth understanding before, not after, the package arrives.

Emulators are legal; the card is not

Split the object in two. The emulator software is legal, and settled so. In Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (9th Cir. 2000), the court held that reverse-engineering the PlayStation BIOS to build a competing emulator was fair use; the companion Sony v. Bleem litigation went the same direction. Running an emulator on a handheld is not the legally interesting part. The legally interesting part is the twenty-five thousand copyrighted ROM files pre-loaded on the bundled card. Those are not covered by Connectix. Those are, in the plain reading of the Copyright Act, unauthorized reproductions being distributed for profit, and 'but it is retro' is not a defense that appears anywhere in Title 17.

The 'I own the cartridge' myth

The most durable folk belief in this hobby is that downloading a ROM is legal if you own the original cartridge. It is a folk belief. There is no general statutory safe harbor that says possession of a physical copy licenses a downloaded digital one. Section 117 permits certain backup copies of computer programs made by the owner, and courts have read it narrowly; it does not bless pulling a stranger's ROM off a bundle because a cartridge sits in your drawer. 'Abandonment' is not a category in copyright law either. Abandonware is a community norm dressed up as a legal one. Nintendo made this abundantly clear when it sued the operators behind LoveROMs and LoveRETRO in 2018 and effectively pushed EmuParadise to pull its ROM library the same year. The rights holders have not forgotten the catalogue just because you have.

BIOS files and the quiet felony

Then there is the detail that turns a gray area darker. Several systems on the card do not function without a copyrighted BIOS: PlayStation needs an SCPH image, Neo Geo needs its BIOS, Sega CD needs its own. A bundle that 'just works' out of the box on those systems is a bundle that shipped you Sony's and SNK's and Sega's copyrighted firmware alongside the games. That is not an accident of the ROM list; it is a second, separate act of distribution baked into the product so the number on the box looks turnkey. The broader economics of who is owed what when a thirty-year-old game changes hands is a genuinely thorny history, one the Digital Antiquarian has chronicled at length, and none of that thorniness is resolved by a reseller stamping '25,000 games' on a listing. It is simply ignored, and passed to you.

How It Actually Plays

Law aside, the only test that matters is the one your thumbs run. Here is how the game list behaves across five real-world profiles, because '25,000 games' means something completely different depending on who is holding the device.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player, the Mini Plus is close to perfect, and this is the profile the marketing accidentally serves best. You want to sit on a couch and play Sonic, Super Mario World, or a Metal Slug run for twenty minutes. The list delivers instantly, the save states forgive you, and you never once care that 24,700 of the other files exist. The commuter profile is the same story with a battery angle: the 3000mAh cell and instant suspend-resume mean the device lives in a jacket pocket and gets played in four-minute increments between stops. For these two people, the honest game count is 'more than enough,' and the device is a 9/10. They will never hit the ceiling because they are not looking for it.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist has a harder time, and it is instructive. This is the person who wants to actually finish Final Fantasy VII across all three discs, or 100% Symphony of the Night's inverted castle. For 2D and early-3D RPGs, the Mini Plus is a superb completion machine; the screen is sharp, the battery outlasts a dungeon crawl, and memory-card saves persist. But the completionist is also the person most likely to try Majora's Mask, hit the N64 wall face-first, and discover the '25,000' was never a promise the chip could keep. Their verdict swings entirely on which systems they target. The speedrunner, meanwhile, should mostly look elsewhere and knows it: emulation on a dual-core A7 introduces input latency and timing variance that serious runs cannot tolerate, and no leaderboard is accepting Mini Plus splits. As a practice toy for learning routes on GBA and SNES games it is fine. As a run device it is not, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's frames.

Co-op, and the things it can't do

Co-op is the honest weak spot, because the Mini Plus is a single-screen, single-controller device with no HDMI out and no realistic multiplayer path. Streets of Rage 2 and Contra are two-player games you will be playing alone, passing the device back and forth on death. This is the one profile where the peers genuinely pull ahead: an Anbernic RG35XX or a full Retroid handheld can drive a TV or pair controllers in a way this brick simply cannot. If your fantasy is couch co-op, the game list is technically full of two-player classics and practically incapable of running them as intended. That is not a bug in the list. It is a limit of the box the list ships in, and it is worth knowing before you picture a friend on the other pad.

The Price Is a Rumor

We promised the price was a rumor. Here is the evidence. There is no single 2026 price for the Miyoo Mini Plus; there is a probability cloud, and where you land in it depends on the color, the storage variant, the seller's mood, and whether a price tracker happened to catch a dip that afternoon.

The official price versus the street

Read that table and the spread is the story: the official page wants €109.90, and a US tracker logged $51.99 on the third of January 2026. That is better than a 2x gap on identical hardware. The official price is a ceiling nobody who reads reviews should pay; the street clusters in the $52 to $80 band; and the €110 figure exists mostly so a 'sale' can be printed against it. If you pay full official retail for this device in 2026, you paid the tax on not shopping around.

Why the number moves

The volatility is structural, not accidental. The Mini Plus is made by one manufacturer and sold by a hundred resellers, each assembling its own SD bundle and setting its own margin. Add currency conversion, add storage-variant confusion, add the fact that the 'game count' is a marketing lever rather than a cost input, and you get a price that behaves like weather. The clone at ~$25 is a separate warning entirely: at that price you are not buying a cheaper Mini Plus, you are buying a different, worse device wearing its silhouette, often with a dimmer screen and a mystery SoC.

What you are actually paying for

Strip the ROM count out of the value equation, because it is free and legally radioactive anyway, and you are paying for the hardware: a genuinely nice 3.5-inch IPS panel, a 3000mAh battery, Wi-Fi, a comfortable shell, and a mature custom-firmware scene in OnionOS. That package is worth somewhere in the $50 to $70 range in 2026, full stop. Everything above that line is you paying for a number that describes packing peanuts.

Who Should Actually Buy It

So who is this for? The game list is a specific tool with a specific shape, and matching it to the right owner is the difference between a 9/10 and a return. First, the peers, because context sets the price of everything.

Five people who should buy it

1. The 2D purist. If your canon is NES, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and sprite-based arcade, this device is a near-perfect delivery vehicle and nothing pricier will make Chrono Trigger better.
2. The pocket-first commuter. You want a real gaming device that vanishes into a jacket, survives a workday on one charge, and resumes instantly. The form factor is the whole point.
3. The PS1 nostalgic with a 2D bias. Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy VII through IX, Crash, Spyro. If your PS1 memories are the ones that survive a D-pad, you are the target buyer.
4. The gift-giver on a budget. At $52 to $70 it is a genuinely delightful, low-stakes present for someone who grew up on 16-bit and does not want a project.
5. The tinkerer who wants an OnionOS playground. The custom-firmware scene is mature, friendly, and rewarding, and the Mini Plus is its most beloved canvas.

Three people who shouldn't

The N64/DS/PS2 chaser should walk away; the chip cannot serve you and the marketing that says it can is the marketing this review exists to puncture. The couch co-op host should look at anything with video-out or controller pairing, because a single-screen brick will not host game night. And the person who genuinely wants the demanding libraries, real N64, PSP, Dreamcast, DS, should spend up. Our Retroid Pocket 5 versus 6 breakdown covers the tier where those systems actually run, and if that is your list, that is your aisle, not this one.

The peers worth a look

Two comparisons keep the Mini Plus honest. The original Miyoo Mini shares the identical SSD202D and identical list, so it is only worth hunting used if the smaller 2.8-inch screen and lack of Wi-Fi suit you and the price is meaningfully lower. The Anbernic RG35XX on the Allwinner H700, with a full quad-core A53 and 1GB of RAM, pushes selectively past PS1 into some Dreamcast and PSP; it is the natural next rung for the same money. And for the person who would rather run a full desktop emulation stack, our Batocera install walkthrough is the PC-shaped alternative to a brick with a bundled card. Different tool, same hobby.

Verdict: 7.5/10

The Miyoo Mini Plus game list is a magic trick performed with a real rabbit. The '25,000 games' is misdirection, and the rabbit, a few hundred genuinely excellent 8-bit through PS1 titles running beautifully on a tiny, charming, cheap handheld, is completely real. Score the trick and you get a 3. Score the rabbit and you get a 9. The truth lives between them.

What it gets right

• The 2D core is flawless: NES, SNES, Genesis, GB/GBC/GBA, and Neo Geo all run exactly as they should.
• PS1 punches far above the price, with a real spine of the canon (FF VII-IX, Symphony of the Night, Tekken 3, Crash, Spyro) running near-perfectly.
• Save states plus a 3000mAh battery turn brutal old libraries into pocket-sized, forgiving fun.
• OnionOS is one of the best custom-firmware experiences in the price bracket.
• At the street price of $52-$70, the hardware alone is worth the money.

What it gets wrong

• The headline count is inflated by arcade sets, regional duplicates, hacks, and files for systems the chip cannot run.
• N64 is a five-game impression, not a library; DS, GameCube, and PS2 are absent by physics.
• No analog sticks and no video-out cap the 3D and co-op experience regardless of what the ROM folder contains.
• The pre-loaded ROMs and BIOS files are a copyright liability the marketing never mentions.
• The price is a rumor, and the official €109.90 is a number you should never actually pay.

The score

The Miyoo Mini Plus earns a 7.5 out of 10 as a game-list proposition in 2026. It loses points for a dishonest headline number, a hard ceiling it pretends not to have, and a legal posture it declines to acknowledge. It keeps most of them because, once you stop counting files and start playing the few hundred that matter, it is one of the most genuinely joyful cheap machines in the hobby. Buy it for the rabbit. Ignore the trick. And whatever the box says, remember that the honest number was never twenty-five thousand.