Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 5,819 Games, Not 28,000

Type miyoo mini plus game list into any search box and you are really asking two questions at once, only one of which the sellers want to answer. The first is reasonable: what can this sixty-dollar slab of plastic actually play? The second is the one the listings are engineered to exploit: how many games come on the card? The answer to the first is a clean, knowable set of systems. The answer to the second is a number somewhere between 5,819 and 28,000, depending entirely on which reseller is lying to you and by how much. A real specification does not swing by a factor of nearly five between vendors. A marketing figure does.

Let us be precise about what the Miyoo Mini Plus is, because the marketing is not. It is a vertical, deck-of-cards Linux handheld built on the SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, with 128MB of DDR3 and a 2D-only GPU. That last clause is the entire story. There is no 3D acceleration anywhere on this chip, which fixes the ceiling at the original Sony PlayStation, and everything the resellers stuff into the folder count above that line is decoration at best and fraud at worst. The device does not ship with 28,000 games. It does not ship with any games. Miyoo's stock firmware boots to an empty Linux menu. The game list is not a Miyoo product at all; it is a copyright-infringing ROM set that a third party crammed onto a microSD card and photographed for the listing.

This review treats that list as the proposition it actually is: a library, judged on what runs, what merely sits there, how it is organised, and whether the number on the box means anything. For the impatient: the honest count from a retail firmware dump is 5,819 titles across 16 categories, the practical ceiling is the PlayStation, and the software that turns a heap of ROMs into something resembling a menu is not Miyoo's either. It is OnionOS. Rating at the end, out of ten. Let us count the folders.

The 28,000-Game Lie

Every retro handheld sold with a preloaded card is sold with a number, and the number is always wrong. For the Miyoo Mini Plus in 2026 that number sits somewhere between 11,000 and 28,000, and the spread itself is the tell. A device with a fixed 128MB of RAM and a fixed 2D GPU does not gain or lose fourteen thousand playable games because a different storefront wrote the listing. What changes is the padding.

Where the number comes from

The counts you see are not Miyoo figures. There is 25,000 on a 109.90-euro European storefront, 28,000 on a 128GB game-list page, 11,000 on a twenty-five-dollar Amazon clone. Miyoo's own firmware ships with nothing; the device is inert until you supply a card. The preloaded bundles come from resellers such as Surwish and the grey-market shops that dominate the AliExpress and Amazon results, and the game list is simply whatever ROM set that particular seller decided to dump onto the microSD. Because there is no official storefront, no curation, and no accountability, the count is a pure function of how much junk the seller was willing to copy. We have taken the 28,000 claim apart before, and it does not survive contact with a file manager.

The real count is 5,819

When someone actually dumped a retail preloaded card and did the unglamorous work of opening every folder and adding them up, the number that came back was 5,819 games across 16 categories. That figure comes from a GBAtemp hardware review, and it is the only count in this entire market with an audit trail behind it. Here is where those titles live, folder by folder.

Read that PlayStation row again. The system the entire marketing campaign is built around - the one that justifies the hype - contains 49 games, because a single PS1 title is hundreds of megabytes while a Famicom ROM is tens of kilobytes. The 28,000-game fantasy is padded almost entirely with the cheapest, smallest, most duplicated 8-bit content precisely because it costs nothing to copy. The valuable part of the library, the part you actually bought the thing for, is the part with the fewest entries.

The count ladder, and why every number differs

Between the honest 5,819 and the fantastical 28,000 sits an entire ladder of intermediate claims - 13,056, then 25,966, then 27,549 - each corresponding to a different reseller tier, a different card size, and a different tolerance for garbage. The padding mechanisms are always the same four. First, regional duplication: the USA, Europe and Japan releases of one game counted as three. Second, bad dumps: corrupt, overdumped or hacked files that will not boot. Third, ROM hacks: fan translations and difficulty edits of games already present, counted as fresh titles. Fourth, and most cynical, entire folders for systems the SSD202D physically cannot run - PSP builds of Crisis Core, Nintendo DS copies of New Super Mario Bros - sitting there as unplayable count-inflation. Strip all four and you are back to roughly five to six thousand titles that boot, of which a few hundred are ones a sane person would keep. We laid out the full accounting in 28,000 claimed against 5,819 real; the short version is that the box is quoting you the size of a landfill, not a library.

What Actually Runs, and What Is Just Sitting There

Forget the count for a moment and ask the only question that matters: of the systems in those folders, which ones actually play the way you remember them, and which are there to make the number bigger? The answer is unusually clean, because the hardware draws a hard line and the emulation community has mapped it precisely.

The full-speed core

Everything from the 8-bit and 16-bit era runs flawlessly. Playhouse.io's 2026 review lists the confirmed full-speed set as Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Master System, Neo Geo, arcade through FinalBurn Neo and MAME 2003, and the PlayStation. That is the whole reason to own the device. Sprites, Mode 7, parallax scrolling, the entire vocabulary of the 2D era, all rendered at full frame rate with save-states and fast-forward on tap. On this class of hardware the phrase means what it says: there is no compromise, no frameskip, no per-game tuning required for the vast majority of the set.

The PlayStation ceiling and the SSD202D

The Sony PlayStation is where the machine stops, and it stops there for a concrete silicon reason. The SSD202D has a 2D-only graphics block, so PS1 emulation runs on the CPU cores in software, and those two Cortex-A7 lanes are just fast enough. Playhouse.io reports that 90 to 95 percent of the PS1 library runs at full speed, and the reliable roster is exactly the canon you would want: Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, Spyro one through three, 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 essentially every 2D fighter of the era. Battery cost is real - PS1 pulls the 3000mAh cell down to five or six hours against seven or eight for SNES - but it plays. This is the ceiling, and it is a generous one.

The dead folders

Above the PlayStation line, the folders are theatre. Nintendo 64 is technically present and technically hopeless: Playhouse.io measures it at 70 to 85 percent speed on a good day and concludes, in as many words, that you should not buy this for N64 emulation. In practice roughly five titles are worth attempting with per-game tweaks - Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and F-Zero X - while Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 are non-starters. Dreamcast is hit-and-miss to the point of novelty. PSP is not recommended, full stop. Nintendo DS, where it appears at all, is unplayable padding, and its presence in a folder is the clearest single signal that a seller is inflating the count. If your dream library lives above the PlayStation, this is the wrong device and no firmware will fix it.

The Hardware Under the List

You cannot review a game list without reviewing the machine that gates it, because on this device the library size is not a content decision, it is a silicon consequence. Here is the metal, and here is why it draws the line exactly where it does.

The SoC that sets the ceiling

The SigmaStar SSD202D is a dual-core Cortex-A7 at 1.2GHz, 128MB of DDR3, and 16MB of SPI ROM, with a graphics block that does 2D and only 2D. It is, notably, the identical chip inside the original 2021 Miyoo Mini. The Plus is not a performance revision; it is the same brain in a bigger body, which is why the two share a library and a ceiling to the exact title. We walked through that in detail in the piece on why the same chip still means the Plus wins. If a listing implies the Plus plays more demanding systems than the Mini, that listing is wrong.

Screen, battery, and the ergonomic upgrade

The panel is a 3.5-inch IPS running 640 by 480 in 4:3, which works out to roughly 229 pixels per inch - noticeably coarser than the original Mini's 2.8-inch version of the same resolution at about 286 PPI. Gizmodo caught the tradeoff at launch, complaining that titles like Yoshi's Island looked 'muddy, undersaturated, and just plain ugly' on the larger, less dense screen. For the 8-bit and GBA content that dominates the real library, though, it is a lovely little display. The 3000mAh cell (a 103665 pack) delivers a genuine six to eight hours at 50 percent brightness - Playhouse clocks seven to eight hours on GBA, SNES and NES, five to six on PS1 - in a body of about 121 grams. It is a deck of cards that plays Symphony of the Night. That is the pitch, and the hardware honours it.

What is missing

The omissions are as important to the game list as the inclusions, because they delete whole categories of play. There are no analog sticks, which alone disqualifies most of the N64 and PS1 3D catalogue from feeling right. There is no local multiplayer, no link cable, no second-controller port. There is no Bluetooth and no HDMI - DROIX's review flatly notes that the missing HDMI port is 'one thing lacking on the Miyoo' - so the list never reaches a television. Wireless is 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only, useful for box-art scraping and finicky netplay and little else. USB-C is charge-only. This is, by construction, a single-player handheld for 2D games, and the spec sheet below is really a map of that thesis.

What Is Actually on the Card

So what does one of these preloaded lists look like when you stop reading the marketing and start reading the filenames? Messy, unsorted, and legally radioactive - which is to say, exactly like a ROM set someone copied in bulk and never looked at again.

The GeekBuying artifact

A useful piece of evidence survives in GeekBuying's archived list page for the Mini Plus, which publishes the built-in Game Boy and GBA listings outright. What it shows is not a curated storefront but a raw ROM pack: titles appear with their sort-index prefixes intact, so you get entries reading '007 - The World Is Not Enough', then '2025 - Frogger's Adventures - Temple of the Frog', then '2026 - Shikakui Atama wo Marukusuru Advance'. Those leading numbers are not release years and not rankings; they are the position of the file in an alphabetised dump of thousands of ROMs. That is the entire character of the shipped list. Nobody chose these games, nobody ordered them, and nobody removed the Japanese brain-training title you cannot read. A machine sorted a directory and a seller photographed the result.

Duplicates, bad dumps, and ROM hacks

Dig into any of these cards and the inflation is structural. You will find the same game three or four times over as regional variants, a scattering of files that will not boot because they were overdumped or truncated, fan hacks of games already in the folder, and - the reliable red flag - directories for PSP, DS and other systems the chip cannot touch. None of it is curation and all of it is counted. The practical consequence for a buyer is that the shipped list is worse than useless as a browsing experience: the good 5,000 titles are drowned in noise, and you will spend your first evening deleting rather than playing. This is the strongest argument for treating the preloaded card as a starting liability rather than an asset.

The copyright reality

There is a legal line running straight through this product, and it is worth being exact about where it falls. Emulation itself is settled law: in Sony v. Connectix, the Ninth Circuit held that reverse-engineering a console BIOS to build an emulator is fair use, and the Bleem litigation reinforced it. The emulator on your Miyoo is legal. The history of software preservation is full of tools that are perfectly lawful to make and own. What is not lawful is the distribution: a seller who mails you a card holding 28,000 copyrighted ROMs and a stack of console BIOS files is mailing you a large quantity of unlicensed software. The device is clean; the preloaded bundle is the infringing part. If you care about that distinction - and the resellers are betting you do not - you buy the bare unit and supply your own dumps.

Under OnionOS, that self-supplied library lives in a flat, legible folder tree that looks like this:

/Roms
 |-- FC        Nintendo Famicom / NES            692
 |-- GB        Game Boy + Color                  715
 |-- GBA       Game Boy Advance                  908
 |-- SFC       Super Famicom / SNES            1,498
 |-- MD        Mega Drive / Genesis              635
 |-- MS        Sega Master System                127
 |-- PCE       PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16          77
 |-- NEOGEO    Neo Geo                           151
 |-- ARCADE    FinalBurn Neo                     254
 |-- MAME      MAME2003-Plus                     412
 |-- PS        Sony PlayStation                   49
 |__ PORTS     OpenBOR / shmups / WonderSwan  uncounted

 Each folder also holds:  Imgs/  (box art)  +  gamelist metadata
 # counted subtotal 5,518  ->  ~5,819 with the uncounted folders

OnionOS: Why the List Is a Software Problem

Here is the part the folder count never mentions: on this device, the game list is a software artifact, not a hardware one. The same 5,819 ROMs are either an unbrowsable dump or a polished console depending entirely on which firmware you run, and the correct firmware is not the one Miyoo shipped.

Stock Miyoo Linux versus OnionOS

The stock firmware is a bare Linux menu - functional, joyless, and the reason nobody who owns one of these keeps it. The community answer is OnionOS, and it is not a minor mod. The project describes itself as 'an enhanced operating system for your Miyoo Mini and Mini+, featuring fine-tuned emulation with 100+ built-in emulators, auto-save and resume, a wealth of customization options, and much more.' RetroHandheldHQ, which rates the hardware 8.5, is blunt about its importance: OnionOS 'transforms this device' and is 'the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026.' Handheld Gaming Community agrees that it 'elevates the user experience to a level far beyond the stock firmware.' You can pull it from the OnionUI repository, and you should, before you do anything else.

Firmware versions and the update package

Versioning on Miyoo hardware is a timestamp affair, and it matters if you buy secondhand. The Plus needs a base firmware of at least 20230505 to run current OnionOS builds; the later V4 panel wants 202310271401 or newer for its 752-by-560 mode with Onion 4.3 and up. Software maintenance is still live: the Takiiiiiiii/Miyoo-Mini repository was still hosting firmware resources, including a link to a current firmware update package, as of April 2026. For a device whose silicon dates to 2021, that ongoing community support is the whole ballgame - the hardware stopped improving years ago and the experience kept getting better anyway.

Turning a dump into a list

The actual work of making a game list usable happens here. OnionOS scrapes box art over that 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, builds per-folder metadata, hides the systems you do not want, and lets you sort the 8-bit ocean into something you can browse on a three-and-a-half-inch screen. This is why the bare-device-plus-OnionOS path beats any preloaded bundle: you end up with a curated few hundred titles you chose, wrapped in artwork, instead of five thousand alphabetised strangers. If you would rather build a library on hardware with room for a full desktop-class frontend, that is a different project entirely - see our Batocera install walkthrough - but for 128MB of RAM, OnionOS is the correct and only serious answer.

How the List Actually Plays

Specs and counts are abstractions. What matters is how the library feels in five different pairs of hands, because the same 5,819 games are a triumph for one kind of player and a dead end for another.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player, this is close to ideal. You wake it from sleep, OnionOS drops you back exactly where you left off via auto-resume, you clear a couple of Mega Drive levels, and you sleep it again. No boot times, no launchers, no updates nagging you. For the commuter the case is even stronger: 121 grams, genuinely pocketable, six to eight hours of battery, and a library that is all pick-up-and-play by nature. A subway ride is precisely the environment 8-bit and 16-bit games were built for, and nothing in this class does that job with more polish. GamesRadar's line that 'nothing beats curling up with the Miyoo Mini Plus' is aimed squarely at these two people, and for them it is fair.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist gets a real, if complicated, gift. Underneath the padding sit thousands of legitimate titles and a PS1 backlog that could swallow a year, all with save-states to smooth the grind. The catch is that completeness here means curation work: the shipped list is so duplicated and noisy that the first task is pruning it down to the games that exist rather than the files that boot. For the speedrunner, the verdict is narrower. Save-states and fast-forward make the device a decent practice pad, but it is not a verification platform - panel and emulator latency are fine for play and unfit for frame-perfect timing, and the absence of analog sticks rules out the 3D categories outright. Practice on it, submit from real hardware or a PC.

The co-op player

Here the news is simply bad, and it is worth stating plainly because no amount of firmware fixes it. There is no local multiplayer, no link-cable emulation, no second-controller support, no Bluetooth for a pad, and no HDMI to throw the picture on a television for a friend. The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi supports OnionOS netplay in theory, but it is finicky and latency-bound and nobody sensible relies on it. If your memory of these games is two people on a couch trading a controller, that memory is not available on this device. The Miyoo Mini Plus is, by design and without apology, a machine for one player at a time.

The List vs Its Peers

No handheld library exists in isolation, and the Mini Plus sits in a crowded budget bracket where the right question is not 'is the list good' but 'is it the right list for the money against these specific rivals'.

Against the original Miyoo Mini

This is the least interesting comparison and the most important to understand: they run the same SSD202D, so the library and the ceiling are byte-for-byte identical. Everything the Plus adds - the larger screen, the 3000mAh battery, the Wi-Fi - is ergonomic, not capability. The original is largely discontinued new in 2026 and lives on the used and collector market, occasionally at absurd out-of-production prices. For a fresh purchase the Plus is the obvious pick, and not because it plays more, but because it is more comfortable to play the same set.

Against the RG35XX H and the Anbernic H700 generation

This is the real fight in the price bracket. Anbernic's H700 devices pack a quad-core Cortex-A53 with a Mali GPU and a full gigabyte of RAM, which pushes their ceiling up into selective Dreamcast, N64 and PSP, and they add HDMI and Bluetooth the Miyoo lacks. DROIX's summary is honest: 'the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor.' What the Anbernic does not have is the Miyoo's screen quality or the sheer maturity of OnionOS. For the systems that both devices run - which is to say everything up to and including PS1 - the libraries are functionally the same size and the Miyoo often feels nicer. Above PS1, the H700 wins by default because the Miyoo is not competing.

Against the Retroid Pocket tier

This is a different league and a different budget. Android handhelds like the Retroid Pocket 5 and 6 run Snapdragon silicon with 8 to 12GB of RAM and reach selectively into GameCube, Wii, PS2 and Switch - but they cost three to five times as much, as we broke down in the piece on how the 8 Gen 2 wins at $244. If your library ambitions live above the PlayStation, that is where your money goes. If they do not, paying Retroid money to play Super Metroid is a category error.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

Pricing on the Mini Plus is nearly as chaotic as its game count, and for the same reason: multiple sellers, multiple configurations, and a bundle premium designed to make you overpay for files you should not be buying at all.

The bare device

The clean, sensible purchase - the device with a small card and no preloaded contraband - runs cheap. GamePadSquire's 2026 coverage puts it at $56.99 on Miyoo's official store during sales against a $79.99 regular, and $45 to $55 on AliExpress. HandheldPicker reported the same $56.99 for 64GB colour variants during a May 2026 holiday window. PropelRC reviewed it at $53 with 64GB included in October 2025 and scored it 8.5. As of late August 2026, LitNXT pricing cited by PocketRetroGamer listed the console-only unit at $65.99. In the UK, Playhouse.io pegs it at roughly 60 pounds. Whatever the exact figure that day, the device sits comfortably in the sub-$80 bracket it has occupied since launch.

The preloaded-bundle tax

Then there are the bundles, and this is where you should keep your wallet shut. LitNXT's preloaded Surwish OnionOS packages ran $109.99 for 128GB and $135.99 for 256GB - a premium of fifty to seventy dollars over the bare unit. What that premium buys is a bloated, duplicate-ridden, legally dubious ROM dump you will spend an evening pruning, on a card you could have flashed yourself in twenty minutes. You are paying extra for a liability. The correct move is to buy bare and build your own.

The clone trap

At the bottom of the market lurks the outright scam: sub-$40 Amazon listings advertising something like '11,000 games' on a 128GB card for around twenty-five dollars. These are clones, not Miyoo hardware, and the giant game count on a rock-bottom price is the bait. A genuine Mini Plus does not sell for $25, and anything claiming to be one at that price with a five-figure game count is not one. Treat the count as a warning label.

Who the List Is For

Strip away the count and the hype and the buying decision becomes unusually clean. This library serves a specific player extremely well and leaves several others cold. Here is who is who.

Buy it if

1. You want a pocket 8-bit, 16-bit, GBA and PS1 machine and nothing more. HandheldPicker's verdict is that the Mini Plus 'knows exactly what it is: a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming.' If that sentence describes your want, this is a near-perfect purchase.
2. You value screen quality and software polish over raw power. RetroHandheldHQ still calls it 'the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026,' and OnionOS is the reason.
3. You want the cheapest legitimate on-ramp to emulation and are content to supply your own ROMs and skip the preloaded bundle.

Skip it if

4. You need N64, Dreamcast, PSP or DS. The 2D-only GPU ends the conversation. Buy an Anbernic H700 device or a Retroid Pocket, and accept the price step.
5. You want co-op, TV output, or analog control. There is no local multiplayer, no HDMI, no Bluetooth and no sticks on this device, and no firmware conjures them.

The honest buying path

6. Buy the bare unit at $53 to $66, wipe the card, install OnionOS, and build a curated library yourself. You will skip the bundle tax, dodge the clone scam, stay on the right side of the law with your own dumps, and end up with a game list you actually chose. This is the recommendation.

Pros and Cons

The ledger, kept honestly, with the marketing subtracted out.

Pros

• Flawless 8-bit, 16-bit and GBA emulation, plus 90-95% of the PS1 library at full speed.
• The best screen in its class - a 3.5-inch 640x480 IPS panel - for the 2D content that matters.
• OnionOS: 100+ emulators, auto-save and resume, active maintenance into 2026.
• Genuinely pocketable at ~121 grams with six to eight hours of real battery life.
• Cheap and stays cheap: $53 to $66 for the bare device.
• Still positively reviewed in 2026 - 8.5, 8.5 and 9 out of 10 across RetroHandheldHQ, PropelRC and Handheld Gaming Community.

Cons

• The advertised game count is fiction: 28,000 claimed against roughly 5,819 real.
• A hard PlayStation ceiling - no meaningful N64, Dreamcast, PSP or DS.
• No analog sticks, no local multiplayer, no HDMI, no Bluetooth.
• 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only, useful for scraping and little else.
• Preloaded bundles are legally dubious and overpriced by fifty to seventy dollars.
• The same 2021 silicon as the original Mini - zero performance headroom left.

The Verdict: 7.5/10

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a good little machine wrapped in a bad big lie, and the score has to account for both.

What you are really buying

Not 28,000 games. You are buying roughly 5,819 real titles, most of them redundant, on a device whose ceiling is the original PlayStation - and, more usefully, you are buying the best small screen and the best software in the sub-$70 class for the systems this chip runs flawlessly. Judged as hardware, that is an easy recommendation, which is why the press sits it at 8.5 to 9. But this is a review of the list, and the list is where the padding, the copyright murk, the missing multiplayer and the aging silicon exact their toll.

The rating breakdown

The curated core - the real 8-bit, 16-bit, GBA and PS1 library once you have deleted the junk - is a genuine 9. Against that I subtract for the fraudulent count, the hard ceiling, the legally dubious bundles, the total absence of co-op, and a chip that has not improved since 2021. Net the two and the list lands at 7.5 out of 10. The hardware is better than that; the proposition the resellers actually sell you is not.

The Machine's bottom line

Buy the bare device. Ignore the number on the box - it was invented to be ignored. Install OnionOS, supply your own ROMs, curate down to the few hundred games you will really play, and you will own one of the nicest small handhelds money buys. In HandheldPicker's phrase, it is 'no longer the strongest budget handheld' but 'still one of the nicest small ones.' It just isn't 28,000 games. It never was, and it never had to be.