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

Type miyoo mini plus game list into any search bar and the autocomplete does something quietly dishonest: it fills in a number. 25,966 games. 28,000 games. 13,056 games. 11,000 games. Pick a listing, pick a card size, pick a reseller, and you are handed a different five-digit figure, each one printed with the false confidence of a spec sheet. None of them is a spec. None of them comes from Miyoo. And not one of them is a number you can legally own.

This is a review of that number as much as it is a review of the small vertical Linux handheld the number is bolted to. Because the honest truth about the Miyoo Mini Plus in 2026 is that the device is very good and the game list is a marketing fiction, and the gap between those two facts is where every buyer gets confused. So we are going to separate them. We will treat the bundled library as the proposition it actually is, weigh it against the hardware ceiling that governs it, and hand down a verdict with a number attached. Spoiler, because this site does not do suspense: it is a 7.5 out of 10, and the missing 2.5 points are almost entirely about the fiction, not the machine.

The Machine's position, stated up front and defended below: buy the device, ignore the game count, wipe the card, and build a library you can describe in one sentence. The 25,966 is a browsing tax, a padding exercise, and a copyright liability dressed up as generosity. The hardware underneath it is one of the nicest small things you can put in a pocket. Both of those can be true at once, and this review exists to hold them apart.

The 25,966-Game Lie

The single most-searched fact about this handheld is a lie of omission. The listings that promise you tens of thousands of games are describing a microSD card, not a product feature, and the card was imaged by a reseller, not by Miyoo. Understanding that one distinction inoculates you against roughly ninety percent of the nonsense written about this device.

Where the number comes from

The counts float around like debris. A thread in the r/MiyooMini community reports that the official store once printed 25,966 games for a 64GB card, a figure worth quoting precisely because it is so absurdly specific and so obviously reverse-engineered from a ROM folder. Storefronts list tiered cards at 13,056 / 25,966 / 27,549 depending on capacity. RetroGameIntensity advertises a 128GB version with 28,000 built-in games. A EUR 109.90 storefront brags about 25,000. Cheap Amazon clones claim 11,000 for around twenty-five dollars. GeekBuying even published a page listing hundreds of visible ROM filenames across the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance libraries, apparently as proof of value. Every one of those numbers is a reseller's number. The manufacturer's number is zero. You can read the community's own confusion about what actually ships and watch people arrive at the same conclusion in real time.

Padding, duplicates, and bad dumps

A 25,000-plus "game list" is not 25,000 games. It is a ROM set counted the way a used-car lot counts wheels. Every regional variant is a separate line: (USA), (Europe), (Japan), (World). Every revision is a separate line: (Rev A), (Rev 1), (Rev 2). Every translation patch, every ROM hack, every proto and every bad dump gets its own row in the tally. The entire licensed Game Boy library, cover to cover, is roughly 1,500 titles. The entire licensed SNES library is under 1,800. Add up every system this device can actually run and deduplicate honestly and you land at a few thousand games worth playing, most of which you will never touch. The other twenty-thousand-odd entries are the browsing tax: you scroll past forty near-identical builds of the same puzzle game to reach the one you wanted, and you call that a feature because the box told you to.

The empty box Miyoo actually sells

Here is the part the listings bury in the footnotes, if they mention it at all. Miyoo's own official firmware ships essentially empty. The games are not part of the product; they are a favor performed on your behalf by whoever imaged the card, and that favor is copyright infringement. BoundByFlame's 2025 review notes that most buyers wipe the stock setup and move to OnionOS almost immediately anyway, which means the celebrated "game list" is a disposable artifact you will delete within a week of purchase. GamesRadar captured the emotional pitch well: "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." Note the phrase: my favorite retro games. Not twenty-six thousand of them. A dozen, maybe two. That is the review the marketing does not want you to internalize, and it is the correct one.

What You Are Actually Buying

Strip the card out of the conversation and you are left with a small piece of hardware whose every strength and every limitation flows from a single chip. Understand the chip and you understand the device completely.

The SoC is the whole story

The Miyoo Mini Plus runs on a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2 GHz, 128 MB of DDR3, 16 MB of onboard SPI ROM, and a graphics block with no 3D acceleration at all. That last clause is the entire review compressed into six words. Everything the Mini Plus can and cannot do descends from a GPU that was never designed to rasterize polygons. It is a 2D machine that happens to be very good at pretending otherwise for exactly one 32-bit console. The provenance is well documented on the Miyoo Mini Wikipedia page, and DROIX put the RAM situation charitably in their review: it "only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need." That is true, right up until it isn't, and the place where it isn't is called Nintendo 64. Crucially, the Plus is not a faster Mini. It is the same silicon in a bigger shell, so the jump from the original 2.8-inch Mini is ergonomic rather than performance-related, a point we take apart in detail in our companion breakdown of the same-chip, bigger-screen situation.

No stick, no link cable, no HDMI

What the Mini Plus lacks is as defining as what it has. There is no analog stick. None. It is a D-pad-only device, which is perfectly fine for 2D and a genuine handicap for anything that wants a stick, which is to say every 3D game the chip could theoretically attempt. There is no link cable and no local wireless multiplayer in most cores, which quietly kills the Pokemon-trading and Four-Swords fantasies before they start. There is no Bluetooth for a second controller and no HDMI output for a television. What the Plus adds over the original Mini is a single item: 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, used for box-art scraping, clock synchronization, over-the-air firmware, and the occasional finicky RetroArch netplay session. DROIX again, dry as ever: "One thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port." Correct, and it is not coming.

Screen, battery, and the body

The good news is genuinely good. The 3.5-inch IPS panel runs at 640x480 in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and it is a lovely, sharp thing for 8-bit and 16-bit content in particular, where pixel-perfect integer-ish scaling makes sprites sing. The 3000 mAh battery is honest: Playhouse measured "6 to 8 hours of mixed use with the screen at 50% brightness," which matches our five-to-eight-hour experience depending on system and brightness. The body weighs about 121 grams, sits comfortably in the palm with a deck-of-cards footprint, and charges over USB-C. Handheld Picker's summary is the truest sentence written about this device: it is "a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming." That sentence is the product. Everything else is noise.

The Real Game List, System by System

Forget the twenty-six thousand. Here is the game list that matters: the systems the SSD202D runs well, the one it runs as its party piece, and the ones the padded folders lie about. This is the section to bookmark.

What runs at full speed

Per Playhouse's 2026 testing and our own bench time, the following run at full speed with no drama: Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES and Famicom, SNES and Super Famicom, Sega Master System, Mega Drive and Genesis, PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo on the MVS side, WonderSwan, and arcade titles through FBNeo and MAME2003-Plus, with CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards being especially happy here. Playhouse's own review reaches for the same benchmark titles reviewers always do: Pokemon, Zelda, Tetris, Kirby, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter II, Sonic, Streets of Rage, Metal Slug. All of them run, and most of them run flawlessly. This is the device operating in its comfort zone, which is to say most of the greatest 2D games ever made. Chrono Trigger, the 1995 SNES landmark built by the so-called Dream Team of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, is exactly the kind of title this hardware was born to carry. And on the arcade side, Hardcore Gaming 101's verdict on the first Metal Slug still applies to how it feels on this screen: it combines "gorgeous animated sprite artwork with dark comedy violence," a "side-scrolling action game not unlike Konami's Contra." On a 640x480 IPS panel, that artwork holds up beautifully.

The PlayStation 1 crown and its ceiling

PlayStation 1 is the crown jewel and the wall in the same breath. The device's single best trick is 2D-forward PS1 software: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Koji Igarashi's 1997 opus, is the sweet spot, its hand-drawn sprite work running on 32-bit hardware near-flawlessly. Push into heavy 3D and the ceiling reveals itself. Final Fantasy VII runs, but the polygonal field maps and some battle transitions surface slowdown and the occasional flicker, because you are asking a 2D GPU to fake perspective. Remember also that PlayStation 1 emulation needs a BIOS, an SCPH file you are supposed to dump from your own console, which the padded cards helpfully and illegally include for you. If your standard is good-enough emulation, PS1 here is a delight. If your standard is cycle-accurate, frame-for-frame behavior, that is a job for an FPGA board like a MiSTer, not a sixty-dollar handheld, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

N64, Dreamcast, PSP, DS: the honest verdict

Do not buy this device for anything above PS1. Playhouse states it plainly: "N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss. PSP is not recommended." The best N64 core available here is Mupen64Plus-Next through OnionOS, and with tweaks a short list of lighter titles will boot and sort of play: Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and F-Zero X. Emphasis on sort of. That is a party trick, not a platform, and it is worth remembering there is no analog stick, so Super Mario 64 is fighting your thumb before the framerate even joins the argument. Dreamcast is a coin flip that mostly lands on tails. PSP is a slideshow. Nintendo DS is not supported at all. The fastest way to spot a dishonest "game list" is to check whether it ships full N64, PSP, and DS folders: those folders are decoration, unplayable ballast padding a number. If you genuinely need N64, Dreamcast, or above, the correct move is a different machine entirely, such as a Retroid Pocket with a real GPU.

OnionOS Is the Actual Product

If the hardware is the body, OnionOS is the soul, and it is community-made rather than Miyoo-made. In 2026 the software story is arguably the entire reason to still recommend this device over newer, faster rivals, and every serious reviewer says so.

Stock firmware vs OnionOS

Two firmwares matter. Stock MiyooCFW is functional and forgettable, a menu you tolerate. OnionOS is why anyone still talks about this handheld. RetroHandheldHQ's 2026 review does not hedge: "OnionOS transforms this device," they write, calling it "the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026," and crowning the combination "the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026." Handheld Gaming Community agrees that OnionOS "elevates the user experience to a level far beyond the stock firmware." When independent reviewers converge on the same superlative, it is usually because it is true. You can read RetroHandheldHQ's full argument if you want the long version.

What OnionOS actually adds

The OnionUI documentation describes the firmware running "its own build of RetroArch, with a custom display driver made for maximum precision and performance," bundling well over a hundred emulators with auto-save and resume, box-art scraping, themes, and per-game configuration overrides. In practice this means sleep and resume that genuinely work, a clean vertical interface designed for one-handed browsing, and the full power of RetroArch waiting underneath whenever you want to tune shaders, latency, or scaling. If you want to push past the default emulator set entirely, a full RetroArch core installation opens cores the stock image omits, though most people never need to. The point is that OnionOS turns a cheap Linux board into something that feels considered, and "considered" is not a word you often get to use about a device this inexpensive.

The folder layout you will live in

Once you are on OnionOS, everything lives on the microSD card, mounted at /mnt/SDCARD, with a Roms directory tagged by system. Learn these tags once and you never think about them again. Here is the layout you will actually navigate:

/mnt/SDCARD/
├── Roms/
│   ├── GB/       Game Boy
│   ├── GBC/      Game Boy Color
│   ├── GBA/      Game Boy Advance
│   ├── FC/       NES / Famicom
│   ├── SFC/      SNES / Super Famicom
│   ├── MD/       Mega Drive / Genesis
│   ├── PCE/      PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
│   ├── NEOGEO/   Neo Geo (MVS)
│   ├── ARCADE/   FBNeo / MAME2003-Plus
│   ├── PS/       PlayStation 1   <-- the ceiling
│   └── WS/       WonderSwan
├── BIOS/         (PS1 SCPH BIOS goes here)
├── RetroArch/    (cores + configs)
└── .tmp_update/  (OnionOS boot hook)

Drop legally acquired ROMs into the matching folder, put your dumped PS1 BIOS in BIOS, and OnionOS handles the rest on next boot. That is the entire maintenance burden. It is also, notably, how you build the honest game list the marketing refused to.

Specs, Firmware, and the Fine Print

Here is the device on paper, followed by the firmware situation and the legal reality nobody selling you a 25,966-game card wants to discuss.

The full spec sheet

Firmware builds and where to get them

To run OnionOS you need a base firmware of build 202305052130 or newer. Named builds still circulate, and they still matter to owners. The lomiyoo firmware page, updated in 2025, lists a dedicated "Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware" entry, and a community GitHub resource maintained by Takiiiiiiii, last updated on 2026-04-16, points users to the "Latest Firmware Update Package" and describes itself as a home for firmware updates, software files, and other important resources for the Miyoo Mini handheld. The version strings you will encounter look like this:

Base build (minimum for OnionOS):  202305052130
Named community build (lomiyoo):   Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware
GitHub package (Takiiiiiiii):      Latest Firmware Update Package  (updated 2026-04-16)
OnionOS release referenced here:   v4.2.3

Grab firmware from the community GitHub resource or the lomiyoo firmware downloads page, apply it, then let the on-device Update app pull further patches over Wi-Fi. That the firmware ecosystem is still being actively maintained in 2026 is, quietly, one of the strongest arguments for the device: the community has not moved on.

The legal fine print

Emulators are legal. Sony learned this the hard way, losing to Bleem and to Connectix over the Virtual Game Station around 1999 and 2000; running someone else's console in software is settled, lawful ground. What is not lawful is the 25,966-game card. Those are copyrighted ROMs distributed without a license, full stop. The widespread belief that owning a cartridge entitles you to a downloaded copy of the same game is folklore, not statute; there is no clean personal-backup exemption that covers grabbing a ROM set off the internet because you once owned the box. Even format-shifting a cartridge you physically own sits in a legal gray zone. The defensible path, the one The Machine will actually endorse, is dumping your own cartridges and your own PS1 BIOS from hardware you paid for. If you care about why any of this matters beyond the courtroom, the preservation-and-legality essays over at the Digital Antiquarian are the best long-form reading on how these histories get lost and who gets to keep them.

How It Actually Plays: Five Scenarios

Specs are theory. Here is the device measured against five real ways people use a handheld, because a machine that is perfect for one buyer is useless to the next.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player, this device is close to perfect. Pull it out, sleep-and-resume drops you straight back into your Link's Awakening save, twenty minutes disappear, back in the pocket it goes. No launcher fatigue, no updates nagging, no fan noise. This is the Mini Plus operating exactly as intended, and it is the reason GamesRadar's reviewer confessed that "nothing beats curling up with Miyoo Mini Plus handheld and my favorite retro games." For the commuter or mobile player, the six-to-eight-hour battery covers a long-haul flight, the body is genuinely pocketable at 121 grams, it makes no sound, and it needs no internet whatsoever. The one real knock outdoors is glare: the IPS panel is reflective, and bright sunlight will fight you. Indoors, on a train, on a couch, it is faultless.

The completionist and the speedrunner

For the completionist, the bundled 25,966-game list is a trap aimed directly at your psychology. You will spend more hours curating and scrolling than completing. Wipe it, build a want-list, and enjoy the fact that native SRAM saves plus RetroArch save states make missable-heavy JRPGs and 100 percent runs completely safe. The caveat: there is no cloud sync, so back up your saves folder yourself, because a corrupted card takes your 80-hour file with it. For the speedrunner, save states make practice and routing trivial, but two hard truths apply. First, emulation here is good-enough rather than cycle-accurate, so timings can drift from original hardware and most leaderboards will reject Miyoo runs outright. Second, input latency on the stock display driver is fine for casual play but not competition-grade. For frame-accurate practice you want original hardware or an FPGA solution, which is precisely the accuracy gap we cover in the MiSTer piece linked earlier.

The co-op problem

This is where the fiction collapses entirely. There is no link cable, no Bluetooth, and no local wireless multiplayer in most cores. Pokemon trading, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, any splitscreen fantasy: all off the table. The OnionOS Wi-Fi does enable RetroArch netplay in theory, but it is fiddly, latency-sensitive, and requires two identically configured devices on a cooperative network; it is a tech demo, not a couch-co-op solution. Treat the Mini Plus as a single-player machine and you will never be disappointed. Buy it expecting to trade Pokemon with a friend and you will be furious. If shared play is the point, the RG35XX family at least offers HDMI out for the big screen and Bluetooth for a second pad, and a Retroid handles netplay far more gracefully than this chip ever will.

Versus the Field

The Mini Plus does not exist in a vacuum. It sits in a crowded sub-$70 field, and in 2026 it is no longer the fastest option in it. Here is how it stacks up against its most direct peers.

The comparison table

Where the RG35XX wins

On raw capability, the Anbernic H700 generation wins, and it is not especially close. DROIX measured it directly: "The H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor." The RG35XX Plus and H bring a quad-core Cortex-A53, a Mali-G31 GPU, a full gigabyte of RAM, HDMI output, Bluetooth, 5 GHz Wi-Fi, dual microSD slots, stereo front-facing speakers, and a real, if selective, reach into Dreamcast, N64, PSP, and even Nintendo DS. They also include an analog stick, toggled, as Retro Game Corps notes, by holding the POWER button to "swap between a d-pad and left analog stick input." Pocket Retro Gaming's pricing guidance is the sober take: the RG35XX Plus is "only a smart buy when found in the $45 to $55 range." Below the wall, it does more; above the wall, it at least tries and sometimes succeeds. We compare the higher tiers in the Retroid Pocket generation matchup if you want to keep climbing.

Where the Mini Plus wins

And yet. The Mini Plus wins on the three things that make a device get picked up rather than admired on a shelf: polish, size, and focus. RetroResolve, having tested the field, still concluded: "For the price, I'll happily admit the Miyoo Mini is easily the best budget handheld available." OnionOS remains a more coherent, more polished experience for a casual user than GarlicOS or Knulli; the vertical form factor is smaller and nicer in the hand for 2D libraries; and the screen is a genuine pleasure. Handheld Picker's verdict is the fairest summary of the standoff: "In 2026, it is no longer the strongest budget handheld. It is still one of the nicest small ones." If your library ends at PS1 and you value how a device feels over what it benchmarks, the Miyoo still wins the argument that matters.

Price, Availability, and Provenance

Pricing on this device is chaos, and the chaos is instructive: it tracks the game-count fiction almost perfectly. The more games a listing brags about, the more it tends to charge, which should tell you everything about what the number is actually for.

The pricing table

The clone trap

The tell is at the bottom of that table. The twenty-five-dollar Amazon listings advertising roughly 11,000 games are not bargains; they are clones or repackaged units, frequently with worse panels, off-brand internals, and unofficial firmware you cannot easily fix. Genuine Mini Plus hardware does not sell that low, because it cannot. At the other end, note the inverse-value law in action: a storefront wants EUR 109.90 for a "25,000-game" card, charging a premium for a bigger copyright liability. PropelRC's "unbeatable $53 price point" and BoundByFlame's $53.99 listing are your sane anchors. Target roughly $53.99 to $65, or £55 to £60, for the bare device, and treat any wildly higher or wildly lower figure as a flag rather than a deal. If you want a second opinion from the mainstream press on where budget handhelds sit in the broader market, outlets like Engadget and Ars Technica cover the category regularly, though rarely with this much contempt for the game-count marketing.

Where the games should come from

Buy the device, not the library. Then build the library yourself, legally, which is the only version of "game list" that is both honest and defensible. Dump the cartridges you own, dump your PlayStation's BIOS, and drop the results into the OnionOS folders from earlier. The reward is a lean, personal, curated set of a few hundred games you actually chose, instead of 25,966 lines of someone else's copyright problem that you will resent scrolling through. A defensible library is smaller, faster to browse, and yours in every sense. That trade is not close.

Who Should Actually Buy One

This device is superb for a specific person and a poor fit for another. Sorting yourself into the right bucket is the whole decision.

Buy it if

• You want the best pocketable 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PS1 experience available under $70, and your library genuinely ends there.
• You are a lapsed player who wants pick-up-and-play with reliable sleep and resume, not a weekend configuration hobby.
• You are a 2D pilgrim, JRPGs, metroidvanias, shmups, Chrono Trigger, Symphony of the Night, Metal Slug, who prizes screen quality and portability over raw power.
• You want a cheap, near-disposable second device for travel, a bag, or a nightstand, where losing it would sting for about a day.
• You are willing to run OnionOS and assemble your own curated, legally sourced library rather than trusting a reseller's card.
• You need a gift for someone who keeps saying they miss their Game Boy, because this is that sentence made physical.

Skip it if

Skip the Mini Plus if you want reliable N64, GameCube, PS2, PSP, or DS; if you need co-op, link-cable features, or trading; if you want to play on a television via HDMI; if you require an analog stick for 3D comfort; or if you were genuinely expecting a legal, preinstalled library of thousands of games, because that product does not exist and never did. For any of those needs you are shopping in the wrong tier, and no firmware update will change the chip.

The upgrade path

Above the PS1 wall, the ladder is short and clear. For real 3D and GameCube- or PS2-class emulation, step up to a Retroid Pocket with an actual GPU. For cycle-accurate behavior and competition-grade timing, an FPGA board like a MiSTer is the destination. For a wider budget field that adds HDMI and Bluetooth without leaving the sub-$70 bracket, the Anbernic RG35XX family is the obvious cross-shop. But be honest with yourself about why you would leave: none of those devices is smaller, none is more charming, and none nails the it-just-works casual loop quite like this one does inside its lane.

Pros, Cons, and the Verdict

Everything above, compressed into a ledger and a number.

The pros

• Excellent 3.5-inch 640x480 IPS panel, a joy for 2D content.
• Superb, full-speed performance from 8-bit through arcade to PlayStation 1.
• OnionOS polish that reviewers uniformly call the reason it stays relevant in 2026.
• Honest six-to-eight-hour battery at 50 percent brightness.
• Genuinely pocketable at ~121 grams, silent, no fan.
• Cheap and stable at roughly $54-65 for the device itself.
• Wi-Fi for box-art scraping, clock sync, and over-the-air firmware.

The cons

• No analog stick, a real handicap for anything 3D.
• No HDMI, no Bluetooth, and no link cable, so no TV-out and no co-op.
• Hard PS1 ceiling: no reliable N64, Dreamcast, or PSP, and no DS at all.
• The "25,966-game" list is padded, partly unplayable, and legally toxic.
• Reflective screen struggles in direct sunlight.
• No cloud save sync; back up your own saves.
• Market is polluted with clones and wildly inconsistent pricing.

The verdict: 7.5/10

Here is The Machine's ruling, and it comes in two numbers that we then reconcile into one. The device, judged as a small 2D-to-PS1 handheld running OnionOS, is a 9: focused, polished, charming, and priced right. The proposition as sold, the breathless "25,966 games!" printed on the box, is a 4: padded with duplicates, unplayable in its upper reaches, and, crucially, not yours to own. Average the machine against the marketing, weight the result toward what buyers actually keep and use, and you land at a 7.5 out of 10. The recommendation follows directly: buy it, delete the number, dump your own carts, and build a game list you can name from memory. Do that and the 7.5 quietly becomes a 9 in your hands, which is the highest compliment this review can pay a device whose worst feature is the lie printed on its packaging. Nothing, as GamesRadar put it, beats curling up with your favorite retro games. The operative word remains favorite, not all 25,966 of them.