Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 28,000 ROMs Dedupe to 6,041

Type "miyoo mini plus game list" into any search box and you will get a number. The number will be large — 28,000, 27,549, 25,966, occasionally a modest 8,740 — and it will be wrong. Not fraudulent, exactly. Just meaningless in the way that "number of songs on this hard drive" is meaningless. The Miyoo Mini Plus does not ship with a game list. It ships with a bootloader, a 3.5-inch screen, two ARM cores designed in 2019, and whatever a reseller decided to dump onto a microSD card before shrink-wrapping it. The list is their invention, not Miyoo's, and no two of them agree.

This review is about that fiction and the genuinely good little machine underneath it. We will decode where 28,000 collapses to roughly 6,000 real games, walk every platform from Game Boy to the hopeful marketing of Dreamcast, name what actually runs versus what merely appears in a folder, and land on a rating. The short version, so you can leave now if you like: buy the hardware, ignore the count, and understand precisely where the silicon stops. It stops at the PlayStation. Everything past that is a folder full of optimism.

There Is No Official Game List

The premise deserves to be dismantled before anything else, because the premise is the entire problem. There is no canonical library to review, only a rotating cast of seller-assembled bundles wearing the same plastic shell.

Miyoo ships a device, not a catalogue

Miyoo — the Shenzhen manufacturer behind the original Mini and this Plus — has never published a game list. There is no factory catalogue, no curated library with a release number, no "official 6,041 titles" endorsed by anyone at the company. What Miyoo sells is a housing: the SigmaStar SSD202D board, a battery, an IPS panel, a d-pad, four face buttons, and a stock firmware that boots to almost nothing. The microSD card is a separate transaction. On a bare unit it is frequently not even in the box.

So everything written about "the Miyoo Mini Plus game list" is, without exception, describing something a third party built. A vendor on AliExpress, a Shopify storefront, a Redditor who zipped their card and posted a torrent — somebody piled ROM files onto flash storage and called the pile a library. That pile is worth reviewing, because it is what most buyers physically receive. But it is not a specification. It is a photograph of one seller's folder on one day, and the next seller's folder will be a different photograph.

The number is a seller's invention

Watch how fast the count disintegrates on contact with a second listing. RetroGameIntensity currently markets the Mini Plus as "28,000 Retro Games Built-in" and tiers it neatly: 9,000 games on a 32GB card, 15,000 on 64GB, 28,000 on 128GB. Elsewhere the same device is advertised at 27,549, or 25,966, or an oddly precise 13,056, or a rounded 8,740. The hardware did not change between those listings. The SoC did not change. Only the zip file changed. When one machine is sold with headline counts spanning eight thousand to twenty-eight thousand, the number is not a property of the device — it is a marketing dial, set to whatever fits on the flash the seller happened to source.

This is not a scandal so much as a category error baked into the search term itself. People search "game list" expecting a menu. What exists is a filesystem. And a filesystem measured in files will always flatter itself, because files are cheap and games are not the same thing as files.

What a "game list" actually describes

Run any of these bundles through a de-duplicator and the balloon deflates fast. A widely-referenced community aggregation (GameCove) that collapses a maxed-out card down to distinct, playable titles lands near 6,041 games. That is the honest order of magnitude: not eight thousand, not twenty-eight thousand, but around six thousand actual, individual games once you strip the padding. The padding is not malicious. It is structural, and we will itemize exactly where it comes from below. For now, hold two numbers in your head — the one on the box, and the one after arithmetic — and treat the gap between them as the real subject of this review.

The Hardware Doing the Work

Before we judge what the card can play, we have to be honest about what is reading it. The Mini Plus is a triumph of firmware over silicon, and the silicon is deliberately, almost defiantly, modest.

SigmaStar SSD202D: two Cortex-A7 cores and 128MB

The Mini Plus runs on a SigmaStar SSD202D, a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with a Mali-400 MP2 GPU and — this is the number that governs everything — just 128MB of RAM. This is an industrial application processor, the kind of chip that runs a smart doorbell or a point-of-sale terminal, repurposed for retro emulation. It is not a gaming SoC in any modern sense. XDA's Adam Conway, who scored the device 9/10, put it plainly: the Mini Plus has "dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB of RAM," and it is "not going to be setting benchmark records… but that's more than good enough for most retro titles." That sentence is the entire performance thesis of the machine. Good enough, up to a point, and the point is fixed.

The reason resellers can bury the spec sheet under a five-digit game count is that this class of hardware performs far better than its numbers suggest, right up until it doesn't. Two A7 cores will happily brute-force a Super Nintendo. They will not brute-force a Nintendo 64, and no amount of card capacity changes the physics. If you want to understand why the same emulators behave completely differently on beefier boards, our walkthrough of choosing the right RetroArch core in 12 steps is the companion piece — the Mini Plus is, underneath OnionUI, a RetroArch machine wearing a friendly coat.

A 3.5-inch 640×480 panel that punches up

The screen is where the modest bill of materials suddenly turns generous. The Mini Plus carries a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480, roughly 229 pixels per inch, and around 450 nits of brightness. PropelRC, in an 8.5/10 review, noted it is "sharper than the original Nintendo 3DS" and "playable outdoors" at 450 nits. Retro Game Corps, reviewing the same panel on the Miyoo v2, called 640×480 simply "crisp." That resolution is a specific, clever choice: it is an exact integer multiple of the Game Boy Advance's 240×160 (a perfect 3× with room to spare) and divides cleanly for many other systems, so 8- and 16-bit games display without the shimmering interpolation that plagues odd-resolution handhelds. The 4:3 aspect ratio is correct for almost everything from the NES through the PlayStation. This is a screen chosen by people who understood what they were displaying.

OnionUI, not "Onion OS 2.0": the firmware retailers keep misnaming

Nearly every reseller listing references "Onion OS" and then prints a stale version — 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 — as if it were shrink-wrapped software from a vendor. It is not. The real firmware is OnionUI, a community project hosted at github.com/OnionUI/Onion, and its actual state in 2026 is worth knowing because it is what makes the machine pleasant. The stable build is V4.3.1-1 (June 2024); the current pre-release is V4.4.0-beta-20260120 (21 January 2026), which promotes gpSP to the default Game Boy Advance core, ships RetroArch 1.22.2, and adds netplay — including GBA "Pokémon trading/combat support" and link-cable play between two units. Version 4.3.0 earlier added Nintendo DS and PICO-8 support plus handling for the 560p v4 screen. PropelRC measured OnionUI's practical payoff bluntly: it delivers "vastly improved battery life (4 hours → 7 hours)" over the stock firmware. When a listing tells you the card runs "Onion OS 2.0," it is quoting a build that predates half of what makes the device good. Reflash it and move on.

Counting the Count: 28,000 to 6,041

The gap between the box and the arithmetic is not noise. It is a predictable, itemizable structure, and once you see the mechanism you can never un-see it on any bulk card again.

28,000, 25,966, 13,056: pick a number

Start with the tiers RetroGameIntensity publishes: 9,000 / 15,000 / 28,000 for 32 / 64 / 128GB. Notice that the count scales with the card, not the catalogue. A 128GB card does not hold three times more games than a 32GB card; it holds three times more files, and the extra files are overwhelmingly PS1 disc images (large) plus arcade sets and redundant regional dumps. The moment your headline number moves in lockstep with storage capacity, you are counting bytes dressed as titles. That is the tell. Every reseller figure — 28,000, 27,549, 25,966, 13,056, 8,740 — is a file count of one particular pile.

Where the padding comes from: regions, revisions, and hacks

De-duplication reveals four reliable sources of inflation. First, regions: the same game shipped as USA, Europe, and Japan counts as three files. Second, revisions: Rev 0, Rev 1, and the "fixed" dump of a single cartridge count as three more. Third, ROM hacks and translations: a fan-translated Japanese RPG, a difficulty hack, and a color-restoration patch each register as separate entries beside the original. Fourth, bootlegs and demakes: pirate multicarts and unlicensed conversions pad the Famicom and Mega Drive folders in particular. Stack those four multipliers on a genuine library of a few thousand games and you reach twenty-plus thousand files without adding a single new experience. Subtract them and you are back to the ~6,041 distinct titles the GameCove dedupe finds.

Neo Geo's 412 that should be 150

The cleanest single illustration lives in the Neo Geo folder. A typical maxed card exposes around 412 Neo Geo entries. SNK's entire commercial MVS/AES catalogue is roughly 150 games across the platform's whole 1990–2004 life. So where did the other ~260 come from? Regional label variants, bootleg conversions, prototype dumps, and hack sets — the same handful of King of Fighters and Metal Slug releases counted many times over. The curated arcade folder as a whole tends to sit around 670–700 entries once you add CPS1 (~146), CPS2 (~146), and CPS3 (~6) to that Neo Geo pile — a number that sounds impressive until you realize how much of it is the same fifty games wearing different filenames. This is the entire "game list" phenomenon in one directory.

Platform by Platform: What Actually Runs

Now the useful part: a system-by-system audit of what the Mini Plus genuinely delivers, cross-checked against Playhouse.io's 2026 compatibility guide and the reviewer consensus. The table below is the map; the prose is the territory.

8-bit and 16-bit: the sweet spot

This is what the machine was built for, and it is close to flawless. NES, SNES, Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Game Boy, Game Boy Color — all run at full speed with room to spare. Playhouse.io names Super Mario Bros., Contra, Mega Man, and Gradius for the NES; Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and Street Fighter II for the SNES; and Sonic, Streets of Rage, and Gunstar Heroes for the Genesis as representative titles that "run well." A precision note the reseller folders routinely botch: Contra III: The Alien Wars is a 1992 Super Nintendo game — the NES had the original Contra (1987) and Super C (1990). If you find "Contra III" sitting in the FC/NES folder, it is a bootleg demake, not the real thing. PropelRC's verdict on this tier is the one to remember: "Chrono Trigger (SNES): Perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough." That is the Mini Plus operating exactly as intended.

Game Boy through GBA: flawless, per Playhouse and XDA

The handheld lineage is the device's home turf, which is fitting given the shell is a Game Boy tribute. Playhouse.io rates Game Boy and Game Boy Color as running "perfectly," naming Pokémon, Zelda, Tetris, and Kirby, and calls GBA support strong, listing Pokémon, Castlevania, Final Fight, and Metroid. XDA's Conway was more emphatic: "Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly, PlayStation 1 games are a treat to play anywhere." Two lore corrections for the pedants among us, because this is STARESBACK: the GBA Final Fight is Capcom's Final Fight One (2001), a port, not the arcade original; and "Metroid" on GBA means Fusion or Zero Mission, both 2002–2004. Pixel-Swish's 2026 reappraisal — titled, with feeling, "Ok, I get the hype now" — ranked The Minish Cap (Capcom and Flagship's Kinstone-collecting GBA Zelda) the single best thing to play on the device. The 3× integer scaling of the GBA's native resolution on that 640×480 panel is a real, visible advantage here.

Arcade and Neo Geo: CPS1/2 sing, CPS3 mostly holds

Arcade emulation via FinalBurn Neo and MAME2003-Plus is a genuine strength, with the caveats you would expect. Capcom's CPS1 and CPS2 boards — Street Fighter II and its endless revisions, Marvel vs. Capcom, the Alien vs. Predator beat-'em-up — run at full speed. Neo Geo, Playhouse notes, delivers standouts like Metal Slug, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown cleanly; Metal Slug in particular (Nazca and SNK, 1996) is a showcase for the panel. CPS3, the board behind Street Fighter III and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, is the one to watch — it is heavier and can stutter in the busiest scenes, though the curated sets usually include working configurations. This is also the folder where the count inflation is worst, so temper the six-hundred-game arcade headline against the reality that much of it is duplicate King of Fighters entries.

The PS1 Ceiling and the N64 Mirage

Here is where a review earns its keep, because here is where the folder count and the frame counter stop agreeing. The Mini Plus has a hard performance ceiling, and the reseller listings pretend it does not.

PlayStation 1: the top of the mountain

The PlayStation is the summit, and the Mini Plus plants its flag confidently. Playhouse.io's verbatim assessment: "Everything up to PS1 runs excellently. PS1 runs well for most of the library." Its list of titles that "run reliably at full speed" reads like a greatest-hits shelf: Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX; Crash Bandicoot 1–3; Spyro 1–3; 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; Ridge Racer and most 2D fighters. The one honest asterisk comes from PropelRC, who caught "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2" — a heavy 3D racer pushing the DuckStation/PCSX core to its edge. Symphony of the Night deserves a special mention as a stress test it passes: Konami's 1997 metroidvania (directed by Toru Hagihara, assistant-directed by Koji Igarashi, scored by Michiru Yamane) is exactly the kind of dense 2D-plus-effects PS1 game the machine was born to hold. Kurt Kalata's Hardcore Gaming 101 book on Castlevania remains the definitive treatment of why it matters. One real limitation to flag: the Mini Plus has no analog sticks, so PS1 games built around the DualShock's twin sticks — the survival-horror tank controls survive fine, but anything demanding true analog aiming — are compromised by input, not by frame rate.

N64: light games with tweaks, heavy games at 70–85%

Above the PlayStation, the mirage begins. Playhouse.io treats N64 as a split decision: lighter titles such as Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye are "playable with tweaks," while it is blunt about the rest — "Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day all run below full speed — typically 70–85% — with noticeable slowdowns in complex areas." GBAtemp's testing agrees: light N64 lands near full speed, demanding N64 sits at 70–85%. That 70–85% figure is not a rounding error you can ignore; it is the difference between playing a game and watching a game struggle. Compound it with the missing analog stick — Mario 64 is a game about an analog stick — and N64 on the Mini Plus is a novelty, not a platform. If N64 is what you actually want, the honest answer is different hardware: a dedicated upscaler like the one we cover in the Analogue 3D's 12 firmware builds, or a stronger handheld such as the Retroid Pocket 6, which is ~70% faster than the 5 and clears N64 and Dreamcast without breaking stride.

Dreamcast and PSP: the marketing that silicon can't cash

The reseller listings that boast Dreamcast and PSP support are writing checks the SSD202D cannot cash. Playhouse.io lists Dreamcast under "light games" only — Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Power Stone — and even that is generous for a 128MB device; in practice Dreamcast is unreliable to the point of being a demo, not a library. PSP is worse: Playhouse.io's one-line ruling is "Framerate too low to be enjoyable on most titles," and GBAtemp calls PSP "not viable" outright. This matters because the mislabeling is your proof the list is scripted rather than curated. One widely-circulated reseller sample list pads its headline by including two PSP games the chip physically cannot run — Brave Story: New Traveler (PSP, 2007) and Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (PSP, 2007) — sitting beside genuinely-PS1 entries. A curated library would never list software the hardware refuses to boot. A script that scrapes filenames does it every time.

Inside the FC Folder: Bootlegs and Zyuranger

If you want to understand what "the game list" really is, open the Famicom folder and read the filenames. It is an archaeology of piracy, translation, and regional oddity — and it is genuinely charming once you stop expecting a clean US library.

GeekBuying's split lists as evidence

GeekBuying, a large reseller, is unusually transparent: it sells the Mini Plus with the library broken into separate published pages — a combined GB/GBA list, a Mega Drive list, and a distinct FC (Famicom) list. That split is itself the evidence that these are preconfigured multi-system packages assembled by a vendor, not a Miyoo product. It also lets you inspect the contents, and the contents are revealing. The FC list mixes standard releases with Japanese-only titles, fan translations, and outright ROM hacks with no attempt to distinguish them. This is the norm, not the exception, across every bulk card.

Zyuranger, Gorby, and the 25th Anniversary hack

Three entries from GeekBuying's FC list tell the whole story. First, Gradius II — the Famicom port, a legitimate and rather good Konami shooter, but a Japanese release most Western buyers never saw. Second, Kyouryuu Sentai Zyuranger, the 1993 Famicom tie-in to the Super Sentai series that Saban recut into Mighty Morphin Power Rangers — a piece of television-history trivia hiding in a game folder. Third, and most telling, "Super Mario Bros. (25 Anniversary Edition)", which is not a Nintendo product at all but a fan ROM hack, listed with a straight face beside official releases. Dig deeper and you find genuine deep cuts: Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen, a 1991 Japan-only puzzler themed around Mikhail Gorbachev, and Gun-Dec, the Japanese title for what the West got as Vice: Project Doom. The community-curated OnionOS-era packs referenced in documents like 8bitstick's 128GB gamelist PDF show the same texture — entries such as Donkey Kong Land III and DuckTales sitting in a hand-tended library. None of this is bad. It is just not the tidy, licensed catalogue the word "list" implies.

Why the mess is the point

Here is the deadpan truth: the mess is the most interesting thing about the game list. A scripted dump surfaces games no official storefront would ever carry — Japan-only strategy titles, unlicensed sports games, fan translations of RPGs that never left Japan. Jimmy Maher, in his Digital Antiquarian essay "Generation Nintendo," quotes a 1988 magazine line that "a boy between 8 and 15 without a Nintendo is like a boy without a baseball glove" — a reminder of how total the Famicom/NES library once was, and how much of it never reached the West at all. A bulk card is an accidental museum of that unreached half. Treat it as one, prune the bootlegs, and you have something better than any official list would give you.

Five Ways the List Actually Plays

Specs are theory. Here is how the machine behaves for five real kinds of player, because "6,041 games" means nothing until you know which games you will actually open.

Casual and mobile: the pocket machine

For the casual player and the commuter — the two overlap heavily — the Mini Plus is close to ideal. It is 165g, 108×78×22mm, and genuinely pocketable in a way the 3.5-inch panel almost doesn't justify. OnionUI's Game Switcher overlay lets you suspend one game and jump to another instantly, so a fifteen-minute train ride becomes three rounds of Tetris, a boss attempt in Metal Slug, and a save-and-quit in Pokémon. Battery backs the use case: PropelRC measured roughly 7.5 hours on Game Boy, 6–7 hours on SNES, and around 5 hours on the more demanding PS1 titles under OnionUI. The one gripe is charging — Conway flagged "slow 5W charging" as a real con — so top it up overnight, not in a coffee break. For pick-up-and-play across the 8- and 16-bit libraries, nothing at this size and price is more pleasant.

Completionist: the 40-hour RPG marathon

The completionist is the Mini Plus's ideal customer, provided their ambitions stop at the PlayStation. The device is a near-perfect vehicle for the long JRPG: Chrono Trigger (Square's 1995 "Dream Team" of Sakaguchi, Horii, and Toriyama, scored by Mitsuda and Uematsu — see the deep Wikipedia production history) runs at a locked 60fps for the full playthrough. Final Fantasy VI (shipped in the West as "Final Fantasy III"), Final Fantasy VII through IX, Xenogears (Square, 1998, directed by Tetsuya Takahashi), and Symphony of the Night are all full-speed marathons. Save states remove the tyranny of the SNES's sparse save points, and the RetroAchievements integration in OnionUI adds a completion layer for those who want it. This is the player who will genuinely use a hundred of the six thousand games, deeply, and for whom the padded count is irrelevant because they were only ever going to play the real ones.

Speedrunner and co-op: the two cases it fails

Two use cases expose the machine's limits honestly. The speedrunner should look elsewhere: emulation on a Cortex-A7 introduces input latency and occasional frame-pacing variance that make it unsuitable for serious timing, and no leaderboard will accept runs from a handheld emulator anyway. If you care about frame-perfect tricks, you want original hardware or a low-latency FPGA solution, not this. The co-op player is a more interesting case in 2026: the device has a single screen and no second controller port, so local same-couch co-op is out — but the V4.4.0-beta OnionUI build adds netplay, including genuine GBA link-cable emulation for Pokémon trading and battling between two Mini Plus units over Wi-Fi. It is fiddly, it is beta, and it is charming when it works. Treat it as a bonus, not a reason to buy. For everything co-op-serious, a device with proper multiplayer plumbing — or a build-it-yourself box like a Batocera install in 12 steps feeding a TV with two pads — is the right tool.

How It Compares to Peer Handhelds

The Mini Plus does not exist in a vacuum. It sits in a crowded sub-$100 bracket, and where it wins and loses is specific.

Versus the RG35XX and RG35XX Plus

The original Anbernic RG35XX out-specs the Mini Plus on paper — a quad-core Cortex-A9 with PowerVR graphics and 256MB of RAM, double the Miyoo's memory — and it can nudge slightly past PS1 into light Nintendo DS via DraStic. But it has no Wi-Fi, a shorter battery under load, and, by broad consensus, worse firmware. The community verdict is that OnionUI's polish beats GarlicOS, and firmware wins this class more than silicon does. The newer RG35XX Plus (Allwinner H700, 1GB LPDDR4, Bluetooth, mini-HDMI) genuinely outperforms the Miyoo — DroiX notes "the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor" and manages "faster performance on PlayStation 1 and Dreamcast" — but it is a bigger, different-shaped device. The Mini Plus's pitch is not raw power; it is the best firmware, the smallest good body, Wi-Fi, and battery, all at the ≤PS1 tier where 90% of the fun lives.

Versus the original Miyoo Mini and the Android tier

Against its own predecessor, the Mini Plus is the obvious pick: a larger 3.5-inch screen (up from 2.8), a bigger battery, USB-C, Wi-Fi for RetroAchievements and netplay, and the same beloved firmware. There is no reason to buy the original Mini in 2026 unless size is paramount. Against the Android tier — the Retroid Pockets and their kin — the comparison is a different question entirely. If your library stops at PS1, the Mini Plus is smaller, cheaper, and simpler. If you want N64, Dreamcast, PSP, Saturn, or GameCube, you are shopping in another weight class, and our ranking of the 2026 Retroid Pocket lineup is where that conversation continues. The Mini Plus is not competing with those; it is competing with the idea that you need them.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

The pricing story is short and the correct move within it is shorter still. You are almost always better off buying the machine and building the library yourself.

What a bare unit costs versus a loaded card

A bare Mini Plus — no microSD, or a token empty one — runs about $53.99 in the US and £60–70 in the UK. Add a preloaded card and the price steps up with capacity: roughly $59.99 for a 64GB "loaded" bundle and $69.99 for 128GB, depending on seller. Note what that markup buys you: not more hardware, but a zip file of ROMs a reseller assembled, complete with the duplicate-inflated count. The delta between a bare unit and a loaded one is essentially the price of not doing the SD card yourself — which, given OnionUI's one-image installer, is not a hard job.

The reseller markup and what you're paying for

The honest framing: a loaded card is a convenience purchase, and a legally gray one. Emulators are lawful — the Ninth Circuit settled that in Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix (2000) — but distributing copyrighted ROMs you do not own is not, and a reseller pre-loading 28,000 of them is squarely in the territory rights-holders dislike. The clean path is a bare unit, OnionUI flashed yourself, plus homebrew (Apotris and its kind) and your own dumped cartridges. If you want a legal, curated middle ground, the community's Tiny Best Set: GO! is the standard answer — a hand-picked, deduplicated library sized for exactly this class of device, and a far better use of a card than a scraped 28,000.

If you do build your own card, the OnionUI layout is simple. The microSD root looks roughly like this — the game "list" is just the Roms/ tree, one folder per system:

/  (microSD root — FAT32 or exFAT)
├── .tmp_update/     # OnionUI installer / boot payload
├── BIOS/            # dump-your-own: SCPH1001.bin (PS1), gba_bios.bin ...
├── Emu/             # per-system emulator config: FC, GB, GBA, MD, PCE, PS, SFC
├── Roms/            # the "game list" lives here — one subfolder per system
│   ├── FC/          # Famicom / NES   (.nes / .zip)
│   ├── SFC/         # Super Famicom / SNES
│   ├── GBA/         # Game Boy Advance (.gba)
│   ├── PS/          # PlayStation 1    (.chd / .pbp)
│   └── NEOGEO/      # neogeo.zip + set .zips
├── RetroArch/       # cores (*.so) + retroarch.cfg
├── Saves/           # SRAM + save states, mirrors Roms/ tree
├── Themes/          # OnionUI themes
└── miyoo/           # firmware: app, GameSwitcher overlay, config

Who Should Buy It — and Who Shouldn't

Reduced to recommendations, the Mini Plus is easy to place. It is a specialist tool that is excellent at its specialty and honest about its edges — once you strip the marketing.

Five people who should buy it

1. The 8/16-bit purist. If your gaming heart lives between the NES and the PlayStation, this is the best pocket machine for the money, full stop.
2. The commuter. Pocketable, 6–7 hour battery, instant suspend-and-resume via Game Switcher. Built for dead time.
3. The JRPG completionist. Locked 60fps on Chrono Trigger, save states, RetroAchievements. A hundred deep games you will actually finish.
4. The tinkerer who buys bare. Flash OnionUI, curate a legal set, ignore the count. The device rewards ownership.
5. The gift-giver. Under $60 loaded, it is the retro handheld that produces the widest smile per dollar for a lapsed player.

Three people who should skip it

• Anyone who wants N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or Saturn. The 70–85% N64 numbers and "framerate too low to be enjoyable" PSP verdict are not going to improve. Buy up a tier.
• The serious speedrunner. Input latency and frame-pacing on an A7 make this the wrong instrument for frame-perfect play.
• Anyone who believes the 28,000. If the count is the reason you're buying, you are buying a spreadsheet, not a library — and the spreadsheet is ~78% duplicates.

Pros and cons at a glance

Pros:

• Best-in-class community firmware (OnionUI) with Game Switcher, RetroAchievements, and netplay
• Sharp 3.5" 640×480 IPS panel, 450 nits, "sharper than the original 3DS" (PropelRC)
• Flawless 8/16-bit and GBA; PS1 "a treat to play anywhere" (XDA)
• Genuinely pocketable (165g) with 6–7 hour real-world battery under OnionUI
• Wi-Fi for achievements and two-unit link play; excellent value at ~$54 bare

Cons:

• Hard PS1 ceiling — N64 is compromised, Dreamcast/PSP are marketing
• No analog sticks (hurts N64 and twin-stick PS1 titles), no Bluetooth
• Slow 5W charging; all-plastic build "can make it feel cheap" (XDA)
• The advertised "game list" is a duplicate-padded fiction and legally gray as sold

The Verdict: 7.5/10

Strip away the number on the box and the Miyoo Mini Plus is one of the most quietly satisfying objects in retro gaming. The problem is never the hardware; it is the story told about it.

What the list is, honestly

"The Miyoo Mini Plus game list" is a phrase in search of a referent. There is no official catalogue. There is a rotating set of reseller-assembled card images whose headline counts — 9,000, 15,000, 28,000 — measure files, not games, and dedupe to roughly 6,041 real titles. Of those, the ones worth your time cluster hard below the PlayStation, peak at a genuinely capable PS1 tier, and thin out into wishful thinking above it. Read the FC folder as an accidental museum of Japanese oddities and bootlegs and it becomes a feature. Read the 28,000 as a promise and it becomes a lie you told yourself.

The score: 7.5/10

As a piece of hardware running the best firmware in its class, the Mini Plus is a 9/10 device — XDA and, in spirit, PropelRC both landed there, and they are right within the ≤PS1 lane. As a "game list," the thing people actually search for, it is a padded, legally gray, duplicate-heavy fiction that requires an asterisk on every claim. Average the beautiful machine against the dishonest marketing wrapped around it and you get a 7.5/10: buy the hardware, flash OnionUI, curate your own library, and enjoy the single best pocketable window into the 8-bit-through-PlayStation era that sixty dollars can buy. Just do not, for a moment, believe the number on the box.