Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 28,000 Games, PS1 Ceiling, 7.5/10

The Pitch: What '28,000 Games' Actually Means

Somewhere between the product photo and the checkout button, a small lie gets told. It is not a malicious lie, exactly. It is the retail-handheld equivalent of a diner menu with glossy photographs, where the burger you receive bears a passing, faintly disappointed resemblance to the one you were sold. The lie is the number. '20,000+ Games IN YOUR POCKET,' announces the manufacturer-facing store page. '28,000 built-in games on the 128GB version,' declares a 2026 retail listing, before rattling off marquee names like Xenogears, Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, Killer Instinct, and The King of Fighters '98. And the number is doing an enormous amount of work, because for most buyers the number is the product. Almost nobody purchases a Miyoo Mini Plus for its 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio or its 103665-series lithium cell. They purchase the number.

So let us review the number. This is not a review of a single cartridge; it is a review of a library as a proposition. When editorial coverage keeps calling this device a 'game list' machine rather than a console, that framing is correct, and it is the only honest way to evaluate the thing. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a delivery vehicle for a pile of software, and the quality of that pile ranges from 'the best two hundred games ever made' to 'seventeen bad dumps of the same Sega Master System platformer, three of them in Portuguese.'

The number that ships empty

Here is the fact that reframes the entire category. Miyoo's official firmware ships with no games on it. Zero. The stock software package, distributed as a downloadable build with labels like the 2025 'Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware,' is an operating system and a set of emulators. It is a can opener. It does not come with soup. Every one of those spectacular game-count figures, the 13,056 and the 25,966 and the 27,549 and the 28,000, comes from a reseller who has loaded a microSD card with copyright-infringing ROM sets and then advertised the payload as though it were a feature Miyoo built. The '25,000 games' on a EUR 109.90 storefront and the '11,000 games' on a suspiciously cheap Amazon listing are describing the same thing: someone else's downloads, sold to you as a value-add.

Reseller bundles versus the stock firmware

This distinction matters for three reasons, and none of them is prudishness. First, legality: those bundles are unlicensed distribution, full stop, and the device manufacturer neither endorses nor supports them. Second, quality: a bundle padded to five figures is padded with duplicates, regional variants, bad dumps, unfinished fan translations, and, most insultingly, entire folders for systems the hardware physically cannot run. Third, longevity: a stranger's card is a stranger's card, and when it corrupts, your '28,000 games' become 28,000 reasons to learn how to reformat FAT32. If you want a library you actually own, the honest route is to dump your own cartridges, a process we have walked through step by step for SNES and Genesis carts with a Retrode, and then to feed the results into the device yourself.

Why we review the list, not a game

Because the list is the machine's soul, and because the list is where the marketing does its dishonest arithmetic, this review treats the Miyoo Mini Plus the way a restaurant critic treats a buffet: not one dish, but the spread, the freshness, the ratio of prime rib to sad iceberg lettuce. We will establish exactly what the hardware can and cannot run at full speed, catalogue the genuinely great games at the core of any sensible library, expose the platforms whose presence in a bundle is pure fraud, and then price the whole proposition honestly. The device is good. It is, in the words of one 2026 outlet, a handheld that 'knows exactly what it is.' The number on the box is the part that lies.

The Hardware Ceiling: One Chip Decides Everything

Every claim about what a Miyoo Mini Plus can play collapses, eventually, into a single line item on a bill of materials: the SigmaStar SSD202D. This is the system-on-chip, and it is not a gaming processor. It is an industrial part, the sort of silicon designed to run the interface on a smart doorbell or a point-of-sale terminal, repurposed by the retro-handheld cottage industry because it is cheap, sips power, and happens to be exactly fast enough to be interesting. Understanding it is the difference between a buyer who is delighted and a buyer who spends a weekend furiously Googling why Banjo-Kazooie sounds like a dial-up modem.

SigmaStar SSD202D, and what a 2D chip means

The SSD202D pairs two ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz with 128MB of DDR3 memory and a display pipeline built for compositing 2D user interfaces, not rendering 3D worlds. There is no 3D GPU worth the name. This one architectural fact is the entire story of the device's library. Emulating a 2D console, a Super Nintendo, a Mega Drive, a Neo Geo, a Game Boy Advance, is fundamentally a job of pushing rectangles of pixels around, and two Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2GHz eat that work for breakfast. Emulating a 3D console, by contrast, means reconstructing a PlayStation's or a Nintendo 64's geometry in software, on those same two little cores, because there is no graphics silicon to offload it to. The PlayStation 1's relatively simple, texture-mapped, often low-polygon output turns out to be the exact frontier that 1.2GHz of dual A7 can brute-force in real time. Everything more demanding than a PS1 is where the software renderer starts sweating.

That is why editors keep drawing the line in the same place. The Miyoo Mini Plus runs Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, Master System, Neo Geo, arcade, and PlayStation 1 software at full speed. That list is not a marketing flourish; it is a direct readout of what a 2D-oriented, GPU-less, dual-A7 SoC can and cannot do. DROIX, reviewing the thing, put the memory situation with admirable bluntness: the Miyoo 'only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need.' For the 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PS1 remit, that is precisely true.

Plus versus Mini: ergonomics, not power

The single most important thing a shopper can internalize is that the Miyoo Mini Plus is not a performance upgrade over the original Miyoo Mini. Both devices use the identical SSD202D, the identical dual Cortex-A7 at 1.2GHz, the identical 128MB of DDR3, the identical 2D-only display pipeline. Their emulation ceilings are the same to the megahertz. What the Plus adds is comfort: a 3.5-inch screen instead of 2.8 inches, a 3000mAh battery instead of the original's 1900 to 2000mAh, and a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio the original lacks entirely. We laid out the full trade in our piece on how the Mini and Mini Plus share one chip and differ only in screen size, and the conclusion holds: you are buying a bigger, longer-lasting body around the same brain. Anyone selling you the Plus as 'the more powerful one' is either confused or counting on you being.

The screen: same pixels, bigger canvas

There is a subtle cost to that bigger body. The panel is still 640x480. Spreading the same 640x480 across 3.5 inches instead of 2.8 drops pixel density from roughly 286 PPI to roughly 229 PPI, about a quarter less dense. Gizmodo's 2023 review noticed, and was unkind about it, calling a title like Yoshi's Island on the Plus 'muddy, undersaturated, and just plain ugly,' and complaining that a rival's display made the Miyoo's look 'absolutely terrible, almost like I forgot to remove a tinted screen protector after opening it.' That is harsh, and in 2026 most owners find the panel perfectly pleasant for pixel art, but it is a real trade-off: the Plus is more comfortable to hold and slightly worse to stare at. The bigger screen, incidentally, was reportedly a supply-chain decision, the 2.8-inch panel being notoriously hard to source, rather than a considered upgrade to your eyeballs' happiness.

What It Actually Runs, System by System

Strip away the fraudulent totals and a genuinely wonderful library remains, one that spans roughly a decade and a half of the medium's best-loved 2D and early-3D software. This is the part of the game list worth paying for, and it is worth paying for a lot.

8-bit and 16-bit: the comfort zone

This is where the Miyoo Mini Plus is not merely competent but close to ideal. NES, Master System, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, PC Engine/TurboGrafx: all trivial, all flawless, all running under RetroArch cores that have been mature for the better part of a decade. If you want to understand how those cores get onto the device and which ones matter, our walkthrough of installing 200 RetroArch cores in about thirty minutes covers the machinery. The 16-bit generation is the emotional center of gravity. Super Nintendo runs everything: Chrono Trigger, the 1995 Square dream-team collaboration that remains a shortlist pick for the best JRPG ever made, plays flawlessly, as does The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which a 2026 Reddit thread's compact 'top 10' list put right at the summit of what owners actually recommend. Super Mario World, Kirby, the Donkey Kong Country trilogy: all full speed, all gorgeous within the limits of that 229 PPI panel.

Arcade and Neo Geo: 2D royalty

The arcade layer is one of the device's quiet triumphs, and it runs via FBNeo and MAME2003 at full speed. This is where the Neo Geo lives, and the Neo Geo is where 2D sprite art reached its baroque, absurd, magnificent peak. Metal Slug is the poster child; Hardcore Gaming 101's deep dive on the series rightly celebrates its hand-drawn animation and dark-comedy violence, and every frame of it renders on the Mini Plus exactly as it did in the cabinet, because a chip that pushes 2D rectangles does not care whether the rectangles came from Nintendo or SNK. The King of Fighters '98, name-checked in one 28,000-game retail bundle, runs beautifully. So does essentially the entire canon of 2D fighters, which the 2026 emulation guides single out as a category the hardware handles without complaint.

PlayStation 1: the real headline

And then there is the ceiling itself, the reason this device punches above a seventy-dollar weight class. PlayStation 1 runs at full speed, and the PS1 library on offer is the genuine article. A 2026 guide singled out the most reliable performers, and the list reads like a greatest-hits compilation of the 32-bit era: Final Fantasy VII, the 1997 juggernaut that dragged the JRPG into the Western mainstream, alongside Final Fantasy VIII and IX; Crash Bandicoot 1 through 3; Spyro 1 through 3; Metal Gear Solid; Tekken 3; Gran Turismo 1 and 2; Resident Evil 1 and 2; Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2; Wipeout; Ridge Racer; and most 2D fighters. Pride of place goes to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the 1997 release that redrew the map for what a Castlevania could be and effectively co-invented an entire genre. That it plays perfectly on a device this small and this cheap is, frankly, a small miracle of the emulation community's labor, and it is the single strongest argument for the Miyoo Mini Plus as a games-list machine. This is a PS1 you can put in a coat pocket, and the PS1 is one of the greatest libraries ever assembled. For the full accounting of that boundary, we went long on the PS1 ceiling and why it defines the device.

Where It Breaks: N64, Dreamcast, PSP, and the DS Lie

Now the unpleasant half of the buffet. A reseller who advertises 28,000 games has an incentive to make the folder list look as long as possible, and the easiest way to pad a folder list is to include systems the hardware cannot actually run. This is where 'game list' marketing crosses from optimistic into dishonest, and it is worth being specific about exactly where the floor gives way.

N64: five that limp, three that don't

Nintendo 64 emulation on the SSD202D is possible, technically, in the way that jogging is possible in a swimming pool. The 2026 guides classify a handful of 'light' N64 titles as playable with tweaks: Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and F-Zero X. Note the qualifier. 'With tweaks' means fiddling with overclocks, frameskip, and per-game settings to coax a stable-ish experience out of two Cortex-A7 cores software-rendering a 3D console that never had a chance to be easy. Push past the light tier and it falls apart. The same guides flag Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64 as the tough cases, and 'tough' is generous; these are the games that expose the missing GPU most brutally. If reliable N64 is your goal, this is the wrong device, and honesty compels the recommendation to look at something with actual 3D silicon, like one of the Retroid Pocket models we compared from $139 to $244.

Dreamcast: three that sort of work

Dreamcast is a similar story with an even steeper drop-off. The 2026 coverage identifies a few lighter examples that can work, specifically Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone. 'Can work' is the operative phrase, and it should be read with the same skepticism as an airline's 'we anticipate an on-time departure.' Playhouse.io, which rates the device a generous 4.5 out of 5, is candid in the same breath: 'N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss.' The device can occasionally surprise you with a playable session of Crazy Taxi. It cannot be trusted to deliver Dreamcast the way it delivers PS1, and any bundle that lists a full Dreamcast folder is listing aspiration, not capability.

PSP and DS: the marketing lie, named

Here is the sharpest example of the con, and it comes straight from the research. That 28,000-game 128GB retail listing proudly names two of its marquee titles as Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Both of those are PSP games. And the 2026 guide is unambiguous that PSP performance on the Miyoo Mini Plus is 'generally too slow to be enjoyable on most titles.' So the listing is advertising, as headline attractions, two games the device cannot run well, banking on the buyer not knowing that Crisis Core never came out on anything this chip can emulate at speed. Playhouse.io's verdict on the whole tier is one line: 'PSP is not recommended.' As for Nintendo DS, the situation is even cleaner: it is simply not supported, because there is no working core for the hardware. A dual-screen console with touch input and its own 3D pipeline is a bridge too far for a can opener. Any '28,000 games' that includes a DS folder includes 28,000 minus however-many-DS-games you can actually play, which is zero.

The Spec Sheet: The Library as a Product

Because this is a review of a proposition rather than a cartridge, the spec sheet has to describe both the machine and the library it delivers, including the parts the marketing would rather you not itemize: the license status, the save behavior, and the true emulation ceiling.

Platforms, ceiling, and the honest ceiling

Physical and battery reality

The physical story is 'deck of cards you forget is in your jacket.' At roughly 121 grams it is genuinely pocketable, and the 3000mAh cell delivers what Playhouse.io measured as 'six to eight hours of mixed use with the screen at 50 percent brightness,' a figure consistent across the honest reviews. Charging is over USB-C, which is also your only wired connection: there is no HDMI out and no Bluetooth, so the device is hermetically sealed into being a solo, screen-down, headphones-optional experience.

Firmware and storage, briefly

Out of the box the stock firmware is functional but joyless; the community consensus, and ours, is that OnionOS is the reason to own the thing. Retro Handheld HQ calls it 'the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026' specifically because 'OnionOS transforms this device.' Storage is a single microSD card formatted FAT32 with an MBR partition table, and anything above 32GB needs a tool like Rufus to format correctly, which is the first small hurdle between a buyer and a working library.

The Curated Core: The Games That Actually Justify It

Ignore the five-figure totals. A defensible Miyoo Mini Plus library is a few hundred titles, and it is astonishing. Here is how the good version of the game list is organized, and what belongs in it.

How the library is laid out on the card

Under OnionOS, games live in a /Roms directory, sorted into per-system folders with terse tags. Understanding this structure is the first step to replacing a stranger's bloated card with a clean, legal one of your own:

/Roms
  FC/       NES / Famicom
  SFC/      Super Nintendo / Super Famicom
  MD/       Mega Drive / Genesis
  MS/       Master System
  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 / MAME2003 romsets
  PS/       PlayStation 1 (needs SCPH BIOS files)
  WS/       WonderSwan

Notice what is not there. No N64 folder in the sane build, no Dreamcast, no PSP, no DS. The honest layout is a portrait of the true ceiling. A reseller's card adds those folders back; a good owner deletes them.

What owners actually recommend

The most useful signal is not a reseller's spreadsheet but what real owners put on their own cards. A 2026 Reddit 'top 10' thread led with A Link to the Past, the modern open-source Tetris homebrew Apotris, the Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal trilogy, and Mario Kart: Super Circuit, a snapshot of taste that is heavy on portable-native and 16-bit comfort food and completely silent on anything 3D. A 2026 YouTube 'My Top 6 Games on the Miyoo Mini Plus' grouped its picks across exactly three systems, Game Boy Advance, SNES, and PS1, which is the device's true sweet spot expressed as a personality. GamesRadar summed up the emotional appeal in a sentence: 'nothing beats curling up with the Miyoo Mini Plus.' That is the review the number on the box is trying, clumsily, to buy.

The homebrew exception, and the numbered-filename tell

Two texture notes worth having. First, a 2023-but-still-indexed catalog page for the device shows how these lists get organized in practice: by platform, with numbered filenames, surfacing entries like Crash Bandicoot GBA, Crash Bandicoot 2, Crash Bandicoot Fusion, multiple Mega Man Battle Network games, and a long Game Boy side list running from Donkey Kong and Double Dragon through Mega Man 1 to 5, Contra: The Alien Wars, Final Fantasy Adventure, and Final Fantasy Legend I to III. That numbered-filename structure is the fingerprint of a bulk ROM set, useful to recognize so you know when you are looking at curation versus a dump. Second, that Reddit list's inclusion of Apotris is the quiet hero of the whole discussion: it is a modern, open-source, freely distributable game that runs perfectly, needs no copyright asterisk, and demonstrates that a genuinely clean library on this device can still be a joy. The homebrew scene is the one part of the game list nobody has to whisper about.

How the Library Compares

A library is only as impressive as what it is measured against. Two comparisons matter: how the device handles a genre it is supposed to be good at, and how it stacks against the peer handhelds a buyer is cross-shopping.

Peer games in a genre: the PS1 JRPG stress test

The fairest way to test the headline claim, that PS1 runs at full speed, is to line up five heavyweight JRPGs, the most demanding-to-stream genre on the platform, and see whether the device blinks. It does not.

The point of the table is that the device does not merely limp through these; it runs the entire modern JRPG canon without a stutter, save states and virtual memory cards intact. For turn-based and menu-driven genres, the absence of analog sticks is a non-issue, and the PS1 ceiling is not a ceiling at all, it is a comfortable floor.

Peer devices: the cross-shop

Against the hardware people actually compare it to, the Mini Plus is a specialist, not a generalist. It wins on price and pocketability and loses the moment 3D enters the conversation.

DROIX said the quiet part directly: on the rival Anbernic, 'the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor,' and 'one thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port, something both RG35XX models have.' All true. But the RG35XX's extra ceiling buys 'selective' and 'hit-and-miss' 3D, not reliable 3D, and it costs the Miyoo's greatest asset, which is being a tiny, focused thing that does its narrow job perfectly. Handheld Picker's framing is the one to keep: in 2026 the Mini Plus 'is no longer the strongest budget handheld. It is still one of the nicest small ones.'

Pricing and Availability: The Chaos

If the game count is the marketing's soft lie, the price is its hard one, because the same physical device sells across a genuinely deranged range depending on who is loading the card and how honest they are about the clone situation.

The price map

The clone trap

That last row is the one that costs people money. A 128GB Miyoo Mini Plus 'with 11,000 games' for roughly $25 is not a bargain; it is a counterfeit, a different device wearing the shape, and the giant game count is the bait. Real Miyoo hardware from the official channel starts around $69 bare, and the honest street price for a legitimate unit sits at roughly $55-65 in the US or GBP 55-60 in the UK. If a listing's headline is a five-figure game count and a two-figure price, the game count is padding and the price is a warning.

What to actually pay

The Machine's advice is unromantic: buy the bare device, or the cheapest legitimate configuration you can find, ideally on a sale like Handheld Picker's $56.99, and treat any bundled card as a disposable formality. Then wipe it, install OnionOS, and rebuild the library with software you have the right to run. If you would rather run a fuller-featured firmware, our guide to setting up Batocera in about thirty minutes covers an alternative worth knowing, though on this specific chip OnionOS remains the community's default for a reason. Whatever you flash, you are paying for a well-built little machine, not for someone else's torrents.

Five Ways It Actually Plays

Specifications describe a device; scenarios describe a life. Here is how the game list holds up across the five ways people actually use a handheld, from the reader who wants twenty minutes on a train to the one who wants a frame-perfect world record.

The casual and the completionist

For the casual player, the one who wants to replay A Link to the Past or dip into Pokemon Crystal on a couch, the Miyoo Mini Plus is close to perfect. Instant-on, save-state-anywhere, a battery that lasts an evening, and a library whose comfort-food core is exactly the 8-bit, 16-bit, and GBA classics this audience wants. This is the scenario the whole device is optimized for, and it is why GamesRadar's 'curling up with it' line lands.

For the completionist, the one grinding a hundred-hour JRPG to the platinum, the device is quietly excellent too, but with an asterisk. PS1 RPGs run at full speed and save states make long grinds painless, so Final Fantasy VII to IX and Xenogears are all viable marathon targets. The asterisk is trust: if you are 60 hours into a save on a stranger's bundled card, one corruption ends the run. Completionists should own their card, back up their saves over the Wi-Fi sync, and never rely on the reseller's storage.

The speedrunner and the co-op player

The speedrunner hits the device's honest limits. Emulator input latency and the absence of frame-perfect timing guarantees make the Mini Plus a practice tool, not a competition platform; no serious leaderboard accepts SSD202D runs, and the lack of analog sticks rules out any 3D category outright. For casual personal-best chasing on 2D games it is fine and fun. For anything official, it is the wrong instrument, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The co-op or multiplayer player runs into a wall of physics. There is no HDMI out, no Bluetooth, no second controller port, and no link cable, so local same-couch multiplayer is effectively off the table. OnionOS supports netplay over the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, which technically enables online play, but a single-screen, single-input handheld is a solo instrument by design. If your fantasy is two-player Streets of Rage on the sofa, this is not the device; that is a job for something with video out.

The mobile / commute player

The mobile scenario is where the Mini Plus arguably beats every peer. At 121 grams it disappears into a jacket pocket, the 3000mAh battery clears a long commute with room to spare, and the vertical-friendly form factor and instant sleep/resume make it ideal for the twenty-minute-window life. Playhouse.io's 'six to eight hours at 50 percent brightness' is a full day of dip-in sessions. For the specific job of 'great 2D and PS1 games, on a train, in one hand,' nothing at this price is nicer. The muddy-panel complaint from Gizmodo matters less in this context, where you are glancing at pixel art in motion rather than pixel-peeping a static screen.

Who Should Buy It, and Who Shouldn't

Translate all of the above into buying advice and the recommendations sort themselves cleanly, because the device's strengths and weaknesses are unusually sharp-edged. Here are the five use-case verdicts.

Five use-case recommendations

1. The 2D purist and PS1 lover: buy it. If your idea of heaven is SNES, Genesis, Neo Geo, GBA, and the PS1 canon in a pocket, this is arguably the best value in retro handhelds, full stop. Symphony of the Night on a train is the whole pitch.
2. The first-time buyer on a budget: buy it, bare. Around $55-65 for a legitimate unit, then OnionOS and a clean library. Just do not pay EUR 109.90 for a version whose premium is someone else's downloads.
3. The N64/Dreamcast/PSP hopeful: do not buy it. The 3D ceiling is real and low. 'Light' N64 with tweaks and 'hit-and-miss' Dreamcast are not a foundation. Spend up to a Retroid-class device instead.
4. The multiplayer/TV-out household: do not buy it. No HDMI, no Bluetooth, no local co-op. This is a solo instrument; buy an RG35XX Plus if you need video out.
5. The collector who values ownership: buy it, but build your own card. Dump your carts, curate deliberately, and treat the '28,000 games' listing as the thing you are buying instead of.

Pros

• Flawless 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, Neo Geo, GBA, and PlayStation 1 emulation at full speed.
• Genuinely pocketable at ~121 g, with 6-8 hours of real battery life.
• OnionOS is mature, polished, and transformative; the software experience punches far above the price.
• The best sub-$70 route into the PS1 library that exists in 2026.
• A thriving homebrew scene (Apotris and friends) offers a copyright-clean way to fill the card.

Cons

• The '20,000+' / '28,000 games' marketing is reseller ROM-bundle padding, not a Miyoo feature, and it is legally murky.
• Hard PS1 ceiling: N64 and Dreamcast are unreliable, PSP is unusable, DS is unsupported (no core).
• Same SoC as the cheaper original Mini, so the Plus is an ergonomic upgrade, not a performance one.
• 640x480 stretched over 3.5 inches looks softer than the original; no HDMI, no Bluetooth, no local multiplayer.
• Price and clone chaos means a $25 '11,000 game' listing is a counterfeit, not a deal.

The Verdict: 7.5/10

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a very good device wrapped in a slightly dishonest sales pitch, and a fair review has to score both. As a piece of hardware doing the specific job it was built for, it is close to a nine. As a 'game list' proposition, the thing the marketing actually sells, it is dragged down by padding, copyright murk, a hard 3D ceiling, and the absence of any multiplayer. Average those honestly and you land at 7.5 out of 10.

What you are really buying

You are not buying 28,000 games. You are buying a can opener of unusual quality and a pocket the exact size of the 8-bit-through-PS1 era. The curated core of that library, the SNES RPGs, the Neo Geo fighters, the entire PlayStation 1 greatest-hits shelf, is worth far more than seventy dollars, and the device delivers it flawlessly. The rest, the N64 folder that stutters, the Dreamcast folder that gambles, the PSP marquee titles the chip cannot run, is noise the marketing added to make a number bigger. Delete the noise, build a clean card, and the score you personally experience climbs toward that nine.

The rating, itemized

Curated 2D-to-PS1 library and emulation quality: near-perfect. Build, battery, portability, and OnionOS software: excellent. Honesty of the 'game list' as sold, 3D ceiling, and total lack of local multiplayer: the drag. The verdict, then, is the one Handheld Picker reached from a different direction, that this is a handheld that 'knows exactly what it is.' The tragedy is that its sellers so often do not. Buy the machine, ignore the number, and it is one of the most satisfying seventy-dollar purchases in the hobby. 7.5/10, and a genuine recommendation, with the caveat that the best version of this device is the one you finish building yourself.