Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 25,966 Games, PS1 Ceiling, 7.5/10

Type miyoo mini plus game list into any search box and you are handed a wall of numbers. Twenty-five thousand games. Twenty-eight thousand games. One storefront, with the false precision of a man counting grains of sand on a beach he has never visited, promises exactly 25,966. These figures are presented as though they were specifications, sitting alongside battery capacity and screen size as if 'number of games' were a hardware attribute. They are nothing of the sort. They are marketing copy, and most of what they describe is a copyright violation wearing a price tag.

Here is the single fact that reorganises everything else in this review: the Miyoo Mini Plus, as Miyoo actually sells it, ships with no games at all. The official firmware boots to a near-empty menu with a handful of built-in utilities and not one commercial ROM. Every '25,000 games included' banner you have ever seen bolted to this handheld was written by a reseller who copied a bulk ROM set onto the bundled microSD card and then advertised the resulting file count as a feature. The device is real, cheap, and genuinely one of the nicest small things you can put in a pocket. The 'game list' is a stranger's hard drive of other people's work.

That makes this an unusual assignment, because the object under review is neither a single game nor precisely a device. It is a proposition: buy this handheld and it arrives pre-loaded with tens of thousands of games. I intend to review that proposition exactly as I would review any game, with play-through impressions, a specifications table, genre comparisons, pricing, real-world scenarios, a verdict, and a score out of ten. For the impatient, the score is 7.5. Everything between here and there is the argument for it.

The List That Ships Empty

A search term, not a product

'Miyoo Mini Plus game list' is a query people type expecting a manifest, the way you might look up the track list of an album or the roster of a fighting game. There is no such manifest, because there is no such product. What exists instead is a floating population of listings, each with a different number attached, none of them sanctioned by Miyoo, and all of them describing the contents of a microSD card that a middleman filled before shipping. The number is not a promise about the console. It is a boast about the card.

Understand that and the entire category stops being confusing. The reason one seller says 13,056 and another says 27,549 and a third says a round 28,000 is not that the hardware changed. It is that they used different ROM dumps, different padding, and different card capacities. The console is identical in every box. Only the crime scene attached to it varies in size.

What 'game list' actually means here

When a normal review talks about a 'game list' it means a curated body of software that defines a platform, the way the Neo Geo means Metal Slug and King of Fighters, or the way the PlayStation means a specific 1997 to 2000 golden age. For the Mini Plus, 'game list' has been hijacked to mean something duller and shadier: the raw file count of a bulk ROM archive. The two meanings are worth keeping apart, because one of them is a legitimate reason to buy the device and the other is a reason to be careful.

The good news, which the rest of this piece will earn, is that the honest, playable, defensible version of the Mini Plus game list is superb. It is small, it is well-defined by the hardware, and it contains some of the best games ever made. The bad news is that you will almost never be sold that list. You will be sold the boast about the card.

How this review is structured

I will treat the proposition as the product. First, what the silicon decides, because the chip, not the seller, writes the real game list. Then the firmware, because the difference between the stock experience and Onion OS is enormous. Then the honest system-by-system library, the bundle-count fictions, the PlayStation ceiling that defines the whole device, five real-world play scenarios, a comparison against rival libraries, the 2026 pricing chaos, use-case recommendations, a pros and cons ledger with the legal asterisk it deserves, and a verdict. Twelve stops. Bring the card you were going to wipe anyway.

What the Silicon Actually Decides

One SoC, one ceiling

The game list is not decided by the seller. It is decided by a chip. The Miyoo Mini Plus runs a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2 GHz, 128 MB of DDR3, and a 2D-only GPU with no meaningful 3D acceleration. This is the identical silicon used in the original Miyoo Mini. The Plus is an ergonomics refresh, not a performance one, a point I made at length in the Mini versus Mini Plus breakdown and one that bears repeating because it is the single most misunderstood thing about the device. Bigger screen, bigger battery, added Wi-Fi. Same brain.

That chip draws a hard, unmovable line. Eight-bit, sixteen-bit, arcade of the CPS and Neo Geo class, and the first PlayStation all run well. Everything above the PS1 stalls. Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PSP, and Nintendo DS either stutter into a slideshow or refuse to boot. Any 'game list' that ships you a folder of Super Mario 64 or God of War: Chains of Olympus is padding its count with files the hardware physically cannot play. That folder of dead ROMs is, in practice, the single fastest way to tell a padded list from an honest one.

The screen is the compromise

The panel is a 3.5-inch IPS display at 640 by 480, in a proper 4:3 shape that suits retro content. It is the same resolution as the original 2.8-inch Mini, which means the pixels are spread thinner: roughly 229 pixels per inch here against the original's roughly 286. That is not a rounding error, and it shows. Gizmodo's 2023 review was blunt about it, noting that on the larger panel titles like Yoshi's Island for the SNES still look 'muddy, undersaturated, and just plain ugly,' and that placed next to an Anbernic RG35XX the Plus display looks 'absolutely terrible, almost like I forgot to remove a tinted screen protector after opening it.'

That verdict deserves context rather than panic. The bigger panel was, per the same review, largely a supply-chain decision, because the tiny 2.8-inch screen 'was incredibly hard for the company to reliably source.' In hand, the Plus screen is perfectly pleasant for the content it is built for, and it only looks weak in a side-by-side. But it is the reason the device is a great value rather than a great display, and it is worth knowing before you fall for a listing that shows the panel under studio lighting.

The controls the list forgot

The Mini Plus gives you a D-pad, four face buttons, two shoulder buttons, and a menu cluster. That is the whole rig. There are no analog sticks, no rumble, no link cable, and no local multiplayer of any kind. This matters enormously to the real game list, because it silently disqualifies entire categories that the bundle counts happily include anyway. Any PS1 game that demands a DualShock stick, such as Ape Escape, is off the table. Any game built around a second controller, such as the true co-op in Secret of Mana, is single-player only. Any Game Boy title whose soul is trading, such as Pokemon, plays fine but severs the very feature that made it a phenomenon.

The lesson is consistent: the chip and the control layout are the real curators. The seller's number is noise layered on top of a signal that Miyoo's engineers fixed the day they chose the SSD202D. Treat the hardware as the game list's editor-in-chief, and everything the marketing says becomes easy to read.

Stock Firmware vs Onion OS

Two firmwares, one persistent confusion

People conflate two entirely separate pieces of software when they talk about this device, and the confusion costs them. The first is Miyoo's own base firmware, the low-level system that makes the hardware boot. The second is Onion OS, the community custom firmware that most owners actually live in. They are not the same thing, they update by different mechanisms, and one is a prerequisite for the other.

Per RetroCompass's 2026 firmware guides, updating the base Miyoo firmware still requires flashing Miyoo's official firmware package directly, which tells you the base layer remains a distinct, seller-independent thing from the custom firmware layered on top. The community's 2026 documentation describes Onion OS as the 'flagship CFW' for the Mini Plus, and it is the right description. Onion is what turns an empty Linux handheld into the polished, box-art-laden, save-anywhere machine that reviewers actually praise. Retro Handheld HQ put it plainly: 'OnionOS transforms this device,' calling it 'the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026.'

The Onion install, precisely

The install is refreshingly mechanical, and doing it yourself is how you convert a dubious bundle card into a clean, honest game list. A 2026 Onion setup guide specifies that the Mini Plus needs base firmware version 202305052130 or later for current Onion support, that the microSD card must be formatted as FAT32 with an MBR partition scheme, and that Rufus is the recommended tool on Windows for any card larger than 32 GB, because Windows will otherwise refuse to lay down FAT32 on large media. After formatting, you copy a specific set of seven folders to the root of the card, and Onion's installer runs itself on first boot.

# Miyoo Mini Plus / Onion OS SD prep
Format:  FAT32, MBR partition scheme
> 32 GB card?  Use Rufus (Windows) to force FAT32
Base firmware required:  202305052130 or later

# Copy these 7 folders to the SD ROOT, then boot the device:
.tmp_update/   BIOS/   Media/   miyoo/
miyoo354/      RetroArch/   Themes/
# Onion's installer runs automatically on first boot.

Onion sorts your library into short system tags under a Roms directory. Knowing them is the difference between a tidy, browsable list and a mess of unrecognised folders. The PlayStation folder in particular will do nothing without a BIOS file dropped into the BIOS directory, which is a legal and practical footnote we will return to.

/Roms
  FC/                 -> NES / Famicom
  SFC/                -> Super Nintendo
  MD/                 -> Genesis / Mega Drive
  GB/  GBC/  GBA/     -> Game Boy line
  PCE/                -> PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
  NEOGEO/             -> Neo Geo (MVS)
  ARCADE/             -> CPS-1 / CPS-2, MAME sets
  WS/                 -> WonderSwan
  PS/                 -> PlayStation 1  (needs BIOS in /BIOS)

Updates, OTA, and the saves you might lose

Wi-Fi is the Plus's one connectivity upgrade over the original Mini, and Onion puts it to work. The 2026 firmware guide notes that Onion updates can be installed over Wi-Fi through the built-in OTA Update app, pulling the current Onion-v4.x.x package without a PC in the loop. It is the closest this device gets to feeling modern, and it is genuinely convenient.

Two warnings from the same guide are worth tattooing somewhere. First, after any update you should press SELECT on the Games tab to force the library to re-scan, or your freshly added ROMs will appear to be missing. Second, and more painfully, the guide warns that some save states may not survive the update process. Native in-game battery saves are more durable than RetroArch's suspend-style save states, so if you are mid-run on something precious, finish to a real save point before you touch OTA. If you want to understand the RetroArch engine underneath all of this, the mechanics carry straight over from a standard desktop setup, which our RetroArch cores walkthrough covers core by core.

The Real Game List, System by System

The honest core

Strip away the padding and the unplayable folders, and what remains is a tight, coherent library defined by the systems the SSD202D runs at full speed. The arcade and Neo Geo shelf alone is a highlight: Hardcore Gaming 101 calls the original Metal Slug a fusion of 'gorgeous animated sprite artwork with dark comedy violence,' and it runs strong on this hardware. This is the list you should actually care about, and it is small enough to be knowable, which is a virtue the 25,966-game bundle can never offer. The table below is the real specification of the Mini Plus game list: what runs, from what era, how big the files are, how well the controls fit, how it saves, and the licensing reality of each.

The headliners: an RPG bench

A game list is only as good as its best entries, and here the Mini Plus is quietly stacked. Look at the role-playing shelf alone, a genre the device handles beautifully because it is turn-based, D-pad-driven, and forgiving of a modest screen. This is a comparison of five peer titles in the same genre, and how each behaves on the hardware.

The lore is part of the appeal, and this is where the Mini Plus earns its keep as a machine for the well-read. Chrono Trigger was the product of the so-called Dream Team of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama, and thirty years later it remains the game most often used to argue that the SNES, not the PS1, was the true summit of the JRPG. Final Fantasy VII, by contrast, is the game that dragged the genre into three dimensions and mainstream consciousness in 1997, and it is fitting that it is precisely the title that makes the Mini Plus flicker at its edges. The device runs the history and shows you its own limits in the same cartridge.

What the list quietly cannot do

An honest account of the game list has to include its silences. There is no N64, so no Ocarina of Time, no GoldenEye, no Mario 64. There is no Dreamcast, so no Shenmue and no arcade-perfect Marvel vs Capcom. There is no PSP and no DS, which erases a decade of portable classics. And there is no multiplayer of any kind, which means the arcade beat-em-ups and fighters that were built for a friend on the second stick are solo experiences here. The bundle counts will happily list all of it. The hardware will play none of it. That gap between the number and the reality is the whole story of this device, and it is where we turn next.

Bundle Math: 25,966 Games and Other Fictions

Where the numbers come from

The counts are not random, but they are not meaningful either. They are a function of which ROM archive a seller used and how big a card they bought. One official-style storefront listed the Mini Plus at 109.90 euro for a bundle branded '25000 jeux inclus', 25,000 games included, across multiple colours, with the page dated in January 2025. Other listings quote 13,056, 25,966, and 27,549 as three storage tiers of the same device. A 2026 game-list page advertises a 128 GB version with 28,000 games built in. None of these figures describes anything Miyoo authored. Each describes a card someone loaded.

The tell is that the numbers are uncorrelated with playable value and strongly correlated with price: the more games a listing brags about, the more it tends to charge. That is the inverse of how value works when the marginal cost of an extra ROM is zero. It only makes sense once you realise you are not paying for games. You are paying for the impression of games.

The dupes, the bad dumps, the padding

Where do tens of thousands of 'games' come from on a platform whose entire legitimate library across every supported system numbers in the low thousands of genuinely distinct, working titles? Padding. A single game appears as its USA, Europe, and Japan releases, then again as revision 1.0 and 1.1, then again as three fan translations and a handful of ROM hacks, then again as a bad dump that crashes on the title screen. Multiply that across a library and you manufacture a five-figure count out of a four-figure reality. Layer in the unplayable N64, DS, and PSP folders the hardware cannot run, and the number inflates further while the playable list does not move.

This is why I keep insisting the honest game list is small. The value of the Mini Plus is not 25,966 files. It is perhaps a few hundred games you will actually load, play, and finish, drawn from the systems in the table above. The rest is what I have called a browsing tax: a giant menu you scroll past to reach the twelve things you wanted.

The clone trap at the bottom

At the very bottom of the price chaos sits an active scam worth naming. Marketplace listings advertising a Mini Plus with '11,000 games' on a 128 GB card for around 25 dollars are, overwhelmingly, clones: lookalike hardware with worse screens, worse buttons, and firmware that is neither Miyoo's nor Onion. The genuine device does not sell for 25 dollars, and no legitimate seller needs to lead with a ROM count that low on a card that large. If the price looks like a rounding error and the headline is a game count, assume you are looking at a counterfeit and keep scrolling. The real thing is cheap. It is not that cheap.

The PlayStation 1 Ceiling

The crown jewel and the wall

Every emulation handheld has a ceiling, the most demanding system it runs credibly, and the Mini Plus's ceiling is the original PlayStation. This is simultaneously the best thing about the device and its firm boundary. A 2026 emulation guide states plainly that the device runs most PS1 games, and names a reliable roster that reads like a greatest-hits shelf: Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, Crash Bandicoot 1 to 3, Spyro 1 to 3, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 1 and 2, Resident Evil 1 and 2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2, Wipeout, and Ridge Racer. That is not a consolation prize. That is a serious library on a device this small and this cheap. I explored the boundary in more depth in the PS1 ceiling deep-dive, and it holds up.

What runs, and what flickers

The nuance is in the word 'most.' The SSD202D handles 2D-on-32-bit content beautifully and 3D content variably. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Koji Igarashi's 1997 masterpiece and the game that effectively defined the Metroidvania as a form, is the sweet spot: gorgeous, sprite-based, and rock-solid on this hardware. Final Fantasy VII, with its polygonal battle scenes layered over pre-rendered backgrounds, is where you start to see the edges, with the occasional flicker or transition hitch that reminds you the chip is working near its limit. Heavily 3D racers and fighters run, but they are the first to show frame-pacing wobble, and anything that assumed an analog stick is compromised by the missing sticks before emulation even enters the argument.

The practical guidance is to lean into the PS1's 2D and pre-rendered catalogue and treat its cutting-edge 3D titles as bonuses rather than the reason you bought the device. Buy the Mini Plus to play Symphony of the Night on the sofa. Enjoy Tekken 3 as a happy extra.

The BIOS and the save-state economy

Two technical footnotes govern the PS1 experience. First, PlayStation emulation needs a BIOS file placed in the BIOS folder; the PS folder is inert without it, and that BIOS is itself Sony's copyrighted code, which is the quiet legal wrinkle inside even a self-dumped setup. Second, the PS1 uses virtual memory cards for native saves, which are durable, alongside RetroArch's save states, which are convenient but, per the firmware guide, may not survive a system update. On a device where a single RPG can run sixty hours, the difference between a native memory-card save and a fragile state file is the difference between a finished game and a lost weekend. Save to the memory card at real save points, and treat states as a pause button, not a vault.

How the List Plays: Five Scenarios

The casual and the completionist

For the casual player, the one who wants to fire up Sonic or Super Mario World for twenty minutes on the couch, the Mini Plus and its honest list are close to ideal. The device boots fast, suspends instantly, and the pick-up-and-play systems, NES through GBA, run without a single compromise. GamesRadar captured this mode of use almost sentimentally: 'I used to insist nothing beat the real deal, but now nothing beats curling up with Miyoo Mini Plus handheld and my favorite retro games.' For casual play, the giant game list is actively a liability, because you spend more time scrolling than playing; a wiped card with fifty favourites serves this player far better than 25,966 files.

For the completionist, the one who intends to finish Chrono Trigger, then Final Fantasy IX, then Symphony of the Night back to back, the device is a genuine long-haul companion, with one asterisk. The 6-to-8-hour real-world battery, measured by Playhouse at 50 percent brightness, covers a serious evening of an RPG. The asterisk is save durability: this player must live on native saves, not states, and should think twice before an OTA update mid-campaign. The completionist gets more out of this device than anyone, precisely because the best games on the list are long, deep, and single-player.

The speedrunner and the co-op player

For the speedrunner, the Mini Plus is a practice tool, not a competition rig. It is fine for learning routes and grinding muscle memory on the bus, but the modest 640 by 480 panel, the absence of precise frame-timing displays, and the general uncertainty of frame pacing near the PS1 ceiling make it unsuitable for serious attempts. Runs are made on hardware or on frame-accurate PC emulators with input-lag tooling, not on a 60-dollar vertical handheld. As a portable dojo, though, it is legitimately useful.

For the co-op player, the honest answer is brutal: there is no local multiplayer, no link cable, and no second controller input, so the entire cooperative and competitive dimension of the library is off the table. Streets of Rage 2, one of the finest two-player brawlers ever made, is a solo experience here. The Wi-Fi enables Onion's conveniences, box-art scraping and clock sync, but it does not resurrect couch co-op. If shared play is your reason for buying, this is the wrong device, and a rival with Bluetooth and HDMI, discussed below, is the correct one.

The commuter

For the mobile player, the daily-commute user, the Mini Plus is arguably the strongest case of all. It is roughly the size and weight of a deck of cards at around 121 grams, it slips into a coat pocket in a way that no wider handheld manages, and it draws no attention on a train. Handheld Picker's summary fits this player exactly: the device 'knows exactly what it is: a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming.' For the pocket, small is the whole point, and the Mini Plus is the smallest good option left standing in 2026.

The List vs the Competition

The device-library table

Because the product under review is a curated library, its true peers are other devices' libraries rather than other single games. The comparison that matters is what each platform's honest, playable game list actually contains, what it costs, and where its ceiling sits. Five contenders, from the Mini Plus itself up to a full PC.

Against the RG35XX

The Anbernic RG35XX in its H700 generation is the Mini Plus's most direct rival, and it wins on paper: a quad-core Cortex-A53 with a real Mali GPU, a full gigabyte of RAM, Bluetooth, mini-HDMI, and a nicer screen. Its game list reaches selectively into Dreamcast, N64, and PSP, which the Mini Plus cannot touch. DROIX put the raw comparison bluntly: 'The H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor,' and noted that 'one thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port.' The same reviewer, tellingly, also defended the Miyoo: it 'only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need.' That is the whole argument in miniature. The RG35XX has the bigger list; the Mini Plus has the better pocket. If you want output to a TV or a few 3D systems, the Anbernic is the pick. If you want the smallest genuinely good device, the Miyoo still wins.

Against the upgrade path

The moment you want the game list to include GameCube, PS2, or credible Dreamcast, you are no longer shopping in this weight class or this price bracket. You are shopping for an Android handheld, and the 2026 Retroid Pocket lineup is where that conversation goes, at roughly 139 to 244 dollars. Retroid gives you a real GPU and a library that dwarfs the Mini Plus, at two to four times the price and a good deal more bulk. The Mini Plus is not competing with those devices. It is competing with the idea of not carrying anything at all, and against that competitor it is very hard to beat.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

The price table

Pricing on the Mini Plus is genuinely chaotic, and the chaos is instructive: it tracks the bundle marketing, not the hardware. The device is identical in every one of these listings. Only the card and the story change.

What you should actually pay

The honest target is roughly 55 to 65 dollars, or 55 to 60 pounds, for a genuine device. The price-tracker floor of 51.99 dollars, with a lowest-ever of 49.50, is the number to anchor to; the 56.99 holiday sale against a 79.99 regular is a reasonable everyday buy. Everything above about 70 dollars is you paying a premium for a larger ROM count, which is to say paying more to receive more of something that is both free to copy and legally dubious to sell. That is the exact inversion of value, and it is worth refusing on principle as well as on economics.

The bundle tax

My standing recommendation, and it has not changed, is to buy the device as bare as you can find it, then wipe the card and build your own list. The 25,000-game bundle is not a gift; it is a browsing tax you pay every time you open the menu and scroll past ten thousand duplicates to reach Chrono Trigger. A wiped 64 GB card, formatted FAT32 with Onion installed and a few hundred deliberately chosen games, is a better product than any bundle, and it is the version of this device I actually rate.

Who Should Load This List

Clear yeses

Several buyers should absolutely own this device, understanding it as a curated pocket machine rather than a 25,966-game vault.

• The pocket purist. If your single most important criterion is that the device disappears into a coat pocket, nothing good beats the Mini Plus in 2026. Buy it, wipe it, load your fifty favourites, and never think about the game count again.
• The 2D and PS1 devotee. If your love is 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and the PlayStation golden age, this device runs your entire wishlist at full speed, from Metal Slug to Symphony of the Night, and asks very little money to do it.
• The long-game RPG player. The best entries on this list, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI through IX, are exactly the kind of turn-based, single-player epics the hardware handles perfectly and the battery sustains for an evening at a time.

Qualified maybes

• The tinkerer. If you enjoy the setup as much as the play, the Onion install, the FAT32 and MBR card prep, the folder tagging, the box-art scraping, is a genuinely satisfying afternoon, and it converts a dubious bundle into a clean, honest library that is entirely yours.
• The gift-giver. A Mini Plus is a lovely, cheap gift for a lapsed gamer, provided you set expectations: it plays the classics, not the last fifteen years, and you should hand it over with a card you built rather than one a reseller filled.

Clear nos

Some buyers should look elsewhere, and it is kinder to say so plainly. If you want to play with another person in the same room, the Mini Plus has no multiplayer and is the wrong device. If your wishlist includes N64, GameCube, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS, the chip cannot help you and a Retroid Pocket can. If you want output to a television, the missing HDMI rules it out and an RG35XX does not. And if you were drawn in purely by a 28,000-game headline, the honest news is that the number was never the product, and you would be happier knowing that before you buy than after.

Pros, Cons, and the Legal Asterisk

The pros

• Superb honest library. The playable core, NES through PS1, is one of the best small game lists in handheld history, and the device runs all of it well.
• Pocketability. At around 121 grams and deck-of-cards dimensions, it is the smallest genuinely good emulation handheld you can buy in 2026.
• Onion OS. The flagship custom firmware is polished, actively maintained, updatable over Wi-Fi via OTA, and it transforms the empty stock experience into something that feels premium.
• Price. A real floor near 50 dollars for a device that plays Symphony of the Night on the sofa is remarkable value.
• Focus. It knows exactly what it is, in Handheld Picker's phrase, and does that one thing extremely well.

The cons

• The hard PS1 ceiling. No N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS, ever, on this silicon.
• No multiplayer. No link cable, no second controller, no local co-op, so entire genres are solo-only.
• The screen. A capable but unremarkable panel that Gizmodo found could look 'muddy, undersaturated, and just plain ugly' next to a rival, and 'absolutely terrible' in a direct comparison.
• No HDMI, no Bluetooth. Wi-Fi is the only radio, and it is 2.4 GHz; there is no TV output and no wireless audio.
• The bundle fiction. The five-figure game counts are padded, seller-dependent, and legally fraught, and they actively worsen the day-to-day experience by burying the good games.

The legal asterisk

This is the part the marketing never mentions, and it is the reason the score is not higher. The bundled game lists are, as sold, distributions of copyrighted ROMs, which is copyright infringement regardless of how many colours the console comes in. The emulator software itself is entirely legal; the games are not, unless you own and dump them yourself, and even a self-dumped PlayStation setup relies on Sony's copyrighted BIOS. The clean path is real and worth taking: dump your own cartridges and discs, build your own list, and treat the bundle count as the red flag it is. For a serious, humane treatment of why preservation and legality pull against each other in exactly cases like this, Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian remains the best long-form writing on the history and stakes of the software we are busy re-copying, and it is worth an evening of anyone's time who cares about where these games came from.

The Verdict: 7.5 out of 10

The device is a nine

Judged purely as hardware and firmware, the Miyoo Mini Plus is close to a nine. It is tiny, cheap, well-built for the money, superbly served by Onion OS, and it runs the greatest 2D and PlayStation library ever assembled without breaking a sweat. Playhouse called it 'the sweet spot for sub-100-pound retro handhelds in 2026' and scored it 4.5 out of 5; Retro Handheld HQ called it 'the most polished sub-70-dollar emulation handheld you can buy in 2026.' Those are the correct verdicts on the object. I do not disagree with a word of them.

The list drags it down

But this is a review of the game list, the proposition, and the proposition is compromised in ways the hardware is not. The five-figure bundle counts are padding wrapped around infringement; the PS1 ceiling permanently caps the ambition; the missing sticks and missing multiplayer amputate whole genres; and the padding actively degrades the experience of finding the good games. A curated Mini Plus is a nine. The Mini Plus 'game list' as it is actually marketed and sold, 25,966 games and all, is a 7.5. The gap between those two numbers is the browsing tax, the copyright murk, and the hardware wall, and it is real.

The move

So here is the move, and it is the same one I have recommended from the first paragraph: buy the device near its honest 55-to-65-dollar price, ideally bare. Wipe the card. Format it FAT32, install Onion, and build your own list of a few hundred games you will genuinely play, weighted toward the 2D and PS1 catalogue the chip loves. Do that and you convert a padded, dubious bundle into one of the most likeable pocket machines in existence. If your appetite outgrows the PS1 ceiling, an Android handheld waits above it and a Batocera build waits above that. But for what it is, honestly assembled, the Miyoo Mini Plus game list is a 7.5 out of 10, and a curated one is better than the number on the box will ever be.