Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 5,819 Games, Not 28,000, 7.5/10

There is no game called Miyoo Mini Plus. There is no cartridge, no boot logo, no title screen. What you are actually buying, when you buy the "game list," is a proposition: a 121-gram slab of aluminium and plastic wrapped around a microSD card that some reseller has pre-loaded with a number so large it has stopped meaning anything. Twenty-eight thousand games. Twenty-five thousand. Thirteen thousand. Eleven thousand on the clones. The number is the product. The number is also, almost entirely, a lie.

This review treats the game list as the thing under test, because that is how the device is sold and that is what people search for. Not the aluminium. Not the D-pad. The library: what is really on the card, what of it actually runs, what of it is padding, and what a sober person should pay for the privilege. The short version, for readers who bounce before the first table: the honest count is closer to 5,819 than 28,000, the hardware caps out at the original PlayStation, and the whole package earns a 7.5 out of 10 that could have been a 9 if the marketing had any relationship to the firmware. The long version is below, and it is long on purpose.

The Proposition: You Are Reviewing a Library, Not a Console

Every other review of this device tells you how it feels in the hand. This one tells you what is on the card, because the card is the entire pitch. Search "miyoo mini plus game list" and you are not asking about ergonomics. You are asking whether the thousands of promised games are real, whether they run, and whether the whole thing is worth a fistful of dollars. Fair questions. Here are fair answers.

What a "game list" actually means here

The Mini Plus is a vertical Linux handheld built by Miyoo. It emulates old consoles. When a listing advertises "28,000 games included," it is not describing anything Miyoo shipped. It is describing a folder tree of ROM files that a third-party seller copied onto the bundled microSD before mailing it to you. Those ROM files are the game list. They are also, for the overwhelming majority, copyrighted works distributed without a licence. We will return to that in the law section, because it matters more than the marketing wants you to think.

So the correct mental model is this: you are buying a competent little emulation box, and separately, someone is throwing in a pirated library of wildly inconsistent quality and legality. The box is worth reviewing on its merits. The library is worth reviewing on its honesty. They score very differently.

The empty-box truth

Here is the fact that detonates half the product listings on the internet: stock Miyoo firmware ships essentially empty. Out of the box, running Miyoo's own software, there is no 28,000-game bonanza. The enormous libraries exist only because a reseller loaded them, or because you loaded them yourself. Miyoo sells a device and a firmware. The games are somebody else's decision.

This is not a technicality. It is the difference between "this product includes 28,000 games" (false) and "this product can run games you provide, and the seller pre-loaded a pile of them" (true, and legally radioactive). The moment you understand that the firmware is empty, every inflated count on every storefront reveals itself as what it is: seller marketing, not a spec.

How we scored it

We scored the proposition, not just the plastic. The curated core of this library, the 8-bit and 16-bit catalogue plus a slice of arcade and PlayStation, is genuinely excellent and would rate around a 9. Then reality applies its deductions: the padding, the duplicate dumps, the unplayable folders promising Nintendo 64 and PSP, the copyright murk, the total absence of local multiplayer, and a PlayStation ceiling that no firmware update will ever raise. Net result: 7.5/10. A very good little library sold under a very dishonest number.

The Hardware Ceiling: SSD202D and the PS1 Wall

You cannot review the game list without reviewing the silicon, because the silicon decides which half of the list is real and which half is decoration. Everything the Mini Plus can and cannot do traces back to one small, cheap, deeply capable chip.

The SoC that defines the list

At the centre sits a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2 GHz, paired with 128 MB of DDR3 memory and, crucially, a 2D-only graphics block with no 3D acceleration whatsoever. A February 26, 2026 review still leads with exactly these two figures, the SSD202D and the 128 MB, because they remain the two numbers that predict everything else. This is not a mobile gaming chip in the modern sense. It is an industrial SoC that found a second life running RetroArch, and it is astonishing what it does with so little.

The absence of a 3D GPU is the whole story. Two-dimensional systems, the NES, the SNES, the Game Boy line, the Genesis, the Neo Geo, run beautifully because they are sprite machines and the SSD202D is, in effect, a very fast sprite machine. Polygonal systems have to be brute-forced on the CPU, and two 1.2 GHz A7 cores can brute-force the PlayStation and almost nothing above it. That is the wall. It is a hardware wall, not a software one, and it is why every credible outlet describes the same ceiling.

What 128 MB of RAM buys you

128 megabytes sounds like a rounding error in 2026, and against a modern handheld it is. DROIX put it with admirable bluntness in their comparison: the Miyoo "only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need." That is exactly right for the library this device is built to run. A SNES game's working set is measured in kilobytes. A PlayStation game streams from disc. 128 MB is generous for the former and adequate, with emulator tuning, for the latter. It is nowhere near enough for an N64 texture cache or a PSP's working memory, which is the second half of why those systems are a mirage here.

The practical read: the RAM is not a bottleneck for the games that define the list. It becomes a bottleneck precisely at the point where the marketing starts lying to you, somewhere north of the PlayStation.

The screen, the battery, the grams

The Mini Plus carries a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640x480 in a 4:3 aspect, which works out to roughly 229 pixels per inch. That last figure is worth holding onto, because the original 2.8-inch Mini spread the same 640x480 over a smaller panel for about 286 PPI, a genuinely denser image. Gizmodo, reviewing the Plus in 2023 under the headline that bigger is not better, complained that titles like Yoshi's Island looked "muddy, undersaturated, and just plain ugly" on the larger screen, and that a rival's display made the Miyoo's look "absolutely terrible, almost like I forgot to remove a tinted screen protector." Harsh, and not entirely wrong: the bigger panel was a supply-chain decision, not an image-quality one.

A 2026 hardware review pins the body at 121 grams with a 3,000 mAh battery, which is the entire pocketability argument in two numbers. Battery life lands, per a 2026 review, at roughly 6 to 8 hours of mixed use under Onion OS, dropping closer to 5 hours once you lean on PlayStation emulation, which works the CPU hardest. Connectivity is 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and nothing else: no Bluetooth, no HDMI, no link cable, and no analog sticks. Every one of those omissions will matter to a specific buyer, and we will name them.

Specs and Details: The Full Sheet

Numbers first, prose second. This is the sheet that the storefronts bury under game-count confetti.

The table

The firmware floor, and why the version string matters

If you plan to run Onion OS, and you should, the stock firmware underneath has to be recent enough to support it. A 2026 setup guide sets the floor at stock build 20230505 and later; a separate 2026 firmware guide is more precise, naming 202305052130 or later as the minimum for a clean Onion install. Older stock firmware will fight you. The two guides worth trusting here come from RetroCompass and TechTactician, both of which walk the version-string mechanics rather than hand-waving them.

The update model has two independent layers, and confusing them is the single most common way people brick their evening. Onion OS itself updates over Wi-Fi through its built-in OTA Update app. The stock firmware beneath it is separate and must be reflashed from Miyoo's official package when it needs changing. Miyoo's own download page listed a "Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware" package in 2025, a useful milestone if you are dating a build. Here is the layout, once Onion is on the card:

# Stock firmware floor for Onion OS
Miyoo Mini+ stock build: 202305052130   (minimum)
Named 2025 package:      "Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware"

# microSD, top level, after installing Onion OS
/BIOS/          <- you supply PS1 SCPH***.bin here
/Roms/
  /FC/          Famicom / NES
  /GB/  /GBC/   Game Boy / Color
  /GBA/         Game Boy Advance
  /SFC/         Super Famicom / SNES
  /MD/          Mega Drive / Genesis
  /MS/          Master System
  /NEOGEO/      Neo Geo
  /PS/          PlayStation
/Saves/         save states live here
/.tmp_update/   <- Onion boot hook; do not delete

What the numbers omit

Two absences on that sheet do more damage than any spec on it. There are no analog sticks, which quietly disqualifies the entire class of games that need one, and there is no local multiplayer of any kind, no link cable, no Bluetooth pad support, which quietly disqualifies co-op. Neither omission shows up in a game-count number, and both will ambush a buyer who trusted the count. The flagship software layer, Onion OS, is the reason the device stays lovable despite all this. The OnionUI project describes itself, verbatim, as "an enhanced operating system for your Miyoo Mini and Mini+, featuring fine-tuned emulation with 100+ built-in emulators, auto-save and resume," and Retro Handheld HQ was not exaggerating when it said "OnionOS transforms this device." You can read the project's own OnionUI documentation on GitHub before you buy; it is the best free education on what this hardware can actually do.

The Real Count: 5,819, Not 28,000

Now the reckoning. If the firmware ships empty and the resellers ship a lie, what is actually on a representative loaded card? Someone did the honest work of counting, so we do not have to guess.

Where the inflated numbers come from

The count you see depends entirely on which seller shipped your card, and the ladder is almost comical: 5,819 on an honest firmware dump; three marketing tiers at 13,056, 25,966 and 27,549; a round 25,000 on a European storefront that wanted 109.90 euros for it in early 2025; 28,000 on a 128 GB card advertised on a 2026 game-list page; and, at the bottom of the barrel, 11,000 games on a roughly 25-dollar Amazon listing that is almost certainly a clone running counterfeit internals. None of these numbers describe Miyoo firmware. All of them describe how aggressively a given seller padded a folder tree.

Padding is the operative word. Inflated counts are achieved by including every regional variant of a game as a separate title, every bad dump alongside the good one, hacks and translations as distinct entries, and entire folders for systems the hardware cannot run, PSP, Nintendo DS, so that Crisis Core and New Super Mario Bros. can appear in a list they will never actually play in. Count the folder, ignore the silicon, and you can advertise any number you like.

The GBAtemp breakdown

The most useful count in the whole discourse comes from a GBAtemp hardware review that actually enumerated a stock loaded card: 5,819 games across 16 categories, with the receipts. The distribution tells you exactly where the real value sits, and it is not evenly spread.

Look at that shape. Nearly 1,500 SNES titles and a grand total of 49 PlayStation games. The library's centre of mass is exactly where the hardware is strongest, the 8-bit and 16-bit era, and it thins out to almost nothing at the PlayStation ceiling. That is not a flaw. That is the device being honest with itself even when its sellers are not. The 49 PS1 entries are a curated highlight reel, not a catalogue, and that is the correct call for a 5-hour battery.

The clone and scam tier

One number on the ladder is not marketing exaggeration but outright fraud: the roughly 25-dollar, "11,000 games," 128 GB Amazon listings. A genuine Mini Plus does not sell that cheap, and the giveaway is the price against the storefront. When the math cannot work, the hardware is a clone, the internals are counterfeit, and the warranty is fiction. Treat any Mini Plus priced like a takeaway meal as a scam, not a bargain. The real device is cheap. It is not that cheap.

The 8- and 16-Bit Core: Where the List Sings

Strip away the padding and the lie, and what remains is one of the best-curated retro libraries you can carry in a coat pocket. A 2026 emulation guide describes the Mini Plus as handling 8-bit and 16-bit systems well, with worked example lists for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Genesis, Master System and Neo Geo. This is the heart of the machine, and it is where every deduction from the score gets earned back.

Nintendo's side of the shelf

The Nintendo catalogue is the reason people fall in love with this thing. The same 2026 guide names the obvious pillars as playable: Pokemon, Zelda, Tetris, Kirby, Super Mario Bros., Contra, Mega Man, and, the one that makes 16-bit fans sit up, Chrono Trigger. On an SSD202D these run at full speed with power to spare, because a Super Nintendo is a 2D machine and so, functionally, is this. Save states and auto-resume, courtesy of Onion, turn a 40-hour JRPG into something you can dip into on a bus and abandon mid-battle without ceremony.

Chrono Trigger deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the quiet flex of this library. A 1995 collaboration between the people behind Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, it is routinely ranked among the finest games ever made, and it runs here without a hiccup. If you want the historical context before you sink a weekend into it, its Wikipedia entry is a genuinely good starting point. The point is not that the Mini Plus runs Chrono Trigger; a potato runs Chrono Trigger. The point is that it runs it beautifully, on a screen the size of a business card, for eight hours on a charge.

Sega's side of the shelf

Sega's 16-bit era is equally at home. The guide names Sonic, Streets of Rage and Gunstar Heroes among the playable Genesis highlights, and all three are showcases for what a 4:3 640x480 panel does with sprite art it was practically designed to display. Gunstar Heroes in particular, Treasure's 1993 run-and-gun, is the kind of screen-filling sprite chaos that would have brought a real Genesis to its knees and does not trouble the SSD202D at all. Master System, with its 127-title folder in the honest count, rounds out the Sega representation for the completists.

This is where the panel earns forgiveness for Gizmodo's "muddy" complaint. Undersaturation is real, but sprite art from 1993 was designed for CRT bloom and forgiving color, and it survives the transition to a modest IPS panel far better than the pre-rendered backgrounds of the PlayStation era do. The 16-bit library and this screen are a natural fit; the mismatch only shows up when you push the hardware past its comfort zone.

Neo Geo and the arcade

The arcade slice is small in count but heavy in prestige. The guide singles out Metal Slug, King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown, the SNK holy trinity, and they are exactly the sort of high-sprite-count 2D arcade titles this hardware was born to run. Metal Slug especially is a technical marvel of hand-drawn animation, and if you want to understand why it is revered rather than merely liked, Hardcore Gaming 101's history of the series is the definitive read. The honest count puts 151 Neo Geo titles and 254 arcade games on the card, which is more curated SNK and CPS-era arcade gaming than most people will exhaust in a year of commutes.

The verdict on the core is unambiguous. PropelRC scored the device an 8.5 and said flatly that it "handles everything up to PlayStation 1 flawlessly." For the 8-bit, 16-bit and 2D-arcade library, that is not hype. It is just true.

The PS1 Peak and the N64 Mirage

Above 16-bit, the library gets interesting, then aspirational, then dishonest, in that order. This is the section where the marketing and the hardware openly disagree, and the hardware wins every argument.

PlayStation, the real ceiling

The original PlayStation is the genuine top of this machine's range, and it clears the bar with room to spare on the right titles. Playhouse, in its emulation guide, reckons "90-95% of the library runs full speed," which matches the experience: Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, the Crash and Spyro trilogies, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 1 and 2, Resident Evil 1 and 2, both Tony Hawk games, Wipeout, Ridge Racer, and essentially every 2D fighter all run well. Symphony of the Night in particular is a 2D game wearing a PlayStation disc, which is why it runs flawlessly and looks gorgeous; its Wikipedia entry explains why it reset an entire genre. For the deeper history of the console itself and why its 2D-friendly, disc-streaming architecture emulates so gracefully on weak hardware, the PlayStation console overview is worth ten minutes.

Two caveats keep the PlayStation from being a free win. First, it is where the battery bleeds fastest, roughly 5 hours against 6 to 8 for the 16-bit stuff, because software-rendering polygons is the hardest work these cores ever do. Second, the honest card carries only 49 PS1 games, a highlight reel rather than a catalogue, so if your dream is a complete PlayStation library in your pocket you will be doing the loading yourself.

The five N64 games that limp

Here is where the mirage begins. The 2026 guide is careful and honest: some Nintendo 64 games run "in a limited way," and it names Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye as the "light" titles that are playable with compromises. Beyond that trio, and a couple of others like Star Fox 64 and F-Zero X that the community has coaxed into service with per-game tweaks, the N64 is effectively closed. More demanding titles, the guide names Majora's Mask and Banjo-Kazooie specifically, are "much less practical," which is a reviewer's polite way of saying do not bother. Playhouse is blunter: N64 and Dreamcast are "hit-and-miss," and "PSP is not recommended."

So the honest N64 story is five games, played at reduced frame rates, with a controller that has no analog stick, which brings us to the final indignity. Mario 64 without a stick is a curiosity, not a good time. If Nintendo 64 is genuinely what you want on the go, this is the wrong device, and you should read our take on the Retroid Pocket 6 versus the Odin 3, either of which does N64, Dreamcast and PS2 without asking you to lower your expectations first.

What the list simply cannot do

Let us be exhaustive about the ceiling, because the padding folders lie by omission. The Mini Plus does not do Nintendo DS in any real sense; the dual-screen requirement alone makes it a party trick. It does not do PSP; two A7 cores are not enough. It does not do Dreamcast beyond a handful of 2D exceptions. Any card advertising these systems as "included" is counting files, not games you will play. The moment a listing promises New Super Mario Bros. DS or Crisis Core, you are looking at padding designed to justify the number on the box.

If your ambitions genuinely stop at the PlayStation, none of this matters and the Mini Plus is close to perfect. If they do not, no firmware, no Onion update, no clever core will move the wall. The SSD202D is the wall.

The Library vs Its Rivals

A game list is only as good as what else your money could buy. Here is the Mini Plus library measured against the obvious alternatives, framed as competing propositions rather than competing spec sheets.

The table

Reading the comparison

The RG35XX Plus is the direct budget rival, and on paper it wins: an Allwinner H700 with four Cortex-A53 cores, a real Mali GPU, and a full gigabyte of RAM lets it reach selectively into N64, Dreamcast and PSP, and it adds an HDMI-out the Miyoo lacks. DROIX said as much, that "the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo," and that the missing HDMI port is a genuine gap. If raw reach per dollar is your only axis, the Anbernic wins.

The Retroids are a different conversation entirely. A Retroid Pocket 5 or 6 does everything the Mini Plus does and then keeps going, all the way through PlayStation 2 and GameCube, with dual analog sticks and HDMI, for three to four times the money. If your library ambitions extend past the PlayStation, that premium is the price of entry, and we lay out exactly what it buys in our comparison of the Retroid Pocket 5 versus the 6.

Why the Miyoo still wins its bracket

And yet. The Mini Plus wins the only comparison that actually matches its pitch: the smallest, cheapest, most pocketable way to carry a superb 8-bit-to-PS1 library. It is lighter than the RG35XX, a fraction of the Retroid's price, and its 3.5-inch 4:3 panel is a better shape for the sprite era than any widescreen. Handheld Picker put the sentiment precisely: in 2026 the Mini Plus is "no longer the strongest budget handheld" but remains "one of the nicest small ones," a device that "knows exactly what it is." The rivals have more reach. None of them fit this brief better.

Pricing and Availability: The Chaos

There is no single price for this device, only a spread, and the spread is itself a warning label. What you pay should track what you are actually getting: a legal box, or a legal box plus an illegal library, or an outright counterfeit.

The table

The honest target price

A 2026 retail review reported a holiday-sale price of $56.99 for 64 GB variants against a regular $79.99 on Miyoo's own store, and the same review noted Miyoo lists a 1-year warranty. Those are your anchor numbers. The honest target is roughly $55 to $65, or 55 to 60 pounds, ideally for a bare device or one where you intend to wipe the bundled card and rebuild it with content you are entitled to. Paying 109.90 euros for a padded 25,000-game bundle is paying a premium for someone else's copyright liability. Paying $25 is buying a fake. The device is worth around sixty dollars. Price your purchase accordingly.

Warranty, and what you actually get in the box

The 1-year warranty is real and covers the hardware, which matters, because the SSD202D is durable but the shoulder buttons and the charge port are the usual failure points on cheap handhelds. What the warranty does not cover, and cannot, is the microSD library, because that library is not Miyoo's product. If your card dies, your bundled 5,819 games die with it, and Miyoo owes you a device, not a re-download. This is another reason the bare-device purchase is the adult choice: your library should be something you control, back up, and can rebuild, not a mystery folder tree you are afraid to touch.

Five Ways It Actually Plays

Specs are theory. Here is the library in five hands it will actually end up in, because a game list is only good if it is good for you.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player and the commuter, this is close to the ideal machine, and it is the use case the whole design serves. The 121-gram weight and 6-to-8-hour battery mean it lives in a coat pocket and survives a week of train rides on a charge. Auto-save and resume mean you never lose progress to a closing door. GamesRadar captured the mood exactly: "nothing beats curling up with the Miyoo Mini Plus." Fire up Tetris, Pokemon or Streets of Rage, lose twenty minutes, pocket it mid-level. For this player the 5,819-game count is irrelevant; they will play forty of them and love it.

The completionist

The completionist is a more complicated customer. On one hand, a padded card promises a lifetime of games; on the other, the padding is exactly what a completionist hates, because a list riddled with regional duplicates and bad dumps is not a collection, it is a landfill. The honest move for this player is the bare device plus a hand-built library: a clean SNES set, a curated PS1 highlight reel, no duplicates, everything verified. Onion's box-art scraping over Wi-Fi rewards the effort with a shelf that looks like a shelf. The completionist should treat the reseller bundle as a starting insult, not a finished collection.

The speedrunner and the co-op crowd

The speedrunner should walk away, and the reason is timing, not power. Emulation on a dual-A7 chip introduces input latency and occasional frame-pacing wobble that a serious runner cannot accept, and there is no way to verify frame-accurate behaviour against console. For casual personal-best chasing it is fine; for a leaderboard, use original hardware or a FPGA solution. The co-op crowd should walk away for a simpler reason: there is no local multiplayer at all. No link cable, no Bluetooth pad, no second controller port. Streets of Rage 2 is a two-player game you will play alone. If couch co-op is the point, this is categorically the wrong device, full stop.

Who Should Buy This List (and Who Shouldn't)

Five specific recommendations, because "it depends" is not a review.

Buy it if

• You want a pocket 8-bit-to-PS1 library and nothing more. This is the machine's entire reason to exist, and it executes it better than anything at the price. Retro Handheld HQ still calls it "the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026," and for this buyer that is the whole review.
• You are a nightstand or commute player. Weight, battery and instant resume make it the best object on this list for five-minute-here, twenty-minute-there play. Playhouse rates it 4.5 out of 5 and calls it the "sweet spot for sub-100-pound retro handhelds."
• You are a tinkerer who enjoys the OS as much as the games. Onion OS, themes, box-art scraping and RetroArch configuration are a hobby in themselves. If you would enjoy building the library, you will love this device.

Skip it, buy something else, if

• You want N64, Dreamcast, PSP, DS or PS2. The SSD202D cannot, and no software will change that. Buy a Retroid or an Odin instead; nothing in the Miyoo's price class moves that ceiling.
• You need local co-op or a TV-out. No multiplayer, no HDMI. The RG35XX line has the HDMI; nothing in this bracket does casual co-op well.

The DIY route, for the principled buyer

There is a sixth buyer worth naming: the one who wants this library legally. Buy the device bare, wipe whatever card comes with it, and build a library from content you own, either by dumping your own cartridges or by running a full desktop-class frontend and copying only what you are entitled to. If you would rather run the whole thing from a proper emulation OS on a spare PC or single-board computer, our guide to installing Batocera in about 20 minutes and our look at RetroPie on PC in 2026 both cover the frontends that make a clean, self-built library painless. The Mini Plus is a wonderful player for a library you assembled yourself.

The Law and the Lore: Legal Device, Illegal Bundle

Every retro handheld review skips this part. This one will not, because with a "28,000 games" product the law is not a footnote, it is the whole ethical spine of the purchase. The good news is cleaner than you might fear.

The emulator is legal: Sony v. Connectix

The device and its emulators are lawful, and there is binding precedent to prove it. In Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., 203 F.3d 596, the Ninth Circuit held in 2000 that reverse-engineering the PlayStation BIOS to build an emulator was fair use. Emulation, as a practice, is legal. RetroArch is legal. Onion OS is legal. The Mini Plus running a PlayStation core is doing nothing a US federal appeals court has not explicitly blessed. If you want the primary-source version, the case summary on Wikipedia is accurate and readable.

The lore: Bleem! and the emulator wars

The companion story is Bleem!, the commercial PlayStation emulator Sony spent the turn of the millennium trying to litigate out of existence. Sony lost the part that mattered: courts held that using screenshots for comparative advertising was fair use, and the emulator itself was lawful. Bleem! survived the law and died of legal bills anyway, a distinction worth remembering. The lesson that echoes into 2026 is exact: the tool is legal; the copyrighted content is the liability. For the deeper history of how this era shaped what we now take for granted, the Digital Antiquarian is the best long-form writing on the period anywhere on the web.

Which means the bundle, not the box, is the problem

So here is the clean line. Distributing thousands of ROMs and a PlayStation BIOS without a licence is copyright infringement, and no amount of "for preservation" boilerplate on a storefront changes that. The Mini Plus is a legal device. The 28,000-game card that ships with it is not. The two are separable, and separating them is the entire point of buying bare. The principled, and frankly cheaper, path is to dump your own cartridges; our walkthrough on dumping SNES carts in 12 steps shows exactly how, and it produces a library you actually own.

# The legal path: dump what you own
1. Buy the Mini Plus BARE (skip the loaded card)
2. Dump your own carts     ->  .sfc / .gb / .md files
3. Dump your own PS1 BIOS   ->  /BIOS/SCPH***.bin
4. Wipe the reseller card, rebuild /Roms/ yourself
# Result: a legal device running a legal library

The Verdict: 7.5/10

Time to add it up. We reviewed a library sold under a false number, running on honest hardware, and the two pull the score in opposite directions.

Pros

• The curated 8-bit and 16-bit core is superb and runs flawlessly on the SSD202D. Chrono Trigger, Symphony of the Night, Metal Slug, all perfect.
• Genuinely pocketable: 121 g, 3,000 mAh, 6 to 8 hours of real battery, instant resume.
• Onion OS is transformative, 100-plus emulators, box art, save states, Wi-Fi tools, a real hobby in software form.
• Cheap and honestly priced at the source: $56.99 on sale, $79.99 regular, with a 1-year warranty.
• The PlayStation slice punches above the price, with 90 to 95 percent of the right titles at full speed.

Cons

• The game count is a lie. 28,000 is marketing; roughly 5,819 is real, and much of that is padding and duplicates.
• The bundle is legally infringing, and its value is inseparable from that fact.
• Hard PlayStation ceiling. No real N64, DS, PSP, Dreamcast or PS2, ever.
• No analog sticks and no local multiplayer, which quietly kills two entire categories of game.
• Panel is a step down from the original Mini, undersaturated by Gizmodo's account, and the price is chaotic across sellers.

The rating

The curated library, judged purely on what runs and how well, is a 9. The lie about its size, the copyright murk, the padding, the missing multiplayer and the immovable PlayStation ceiling drag it down to a 7.5 out of 10. That is a strong recommendation with the loudest possible asterisk: buy the device, distrust the number, own your library. The Mini Plus is one of the nicest small things you can put in a pocket in 2026. It is also being sold with one of the least honest numbers in consumer electronics, and you should walk in knowing both. Buy the box. Build the list yourself. Then it is a 9.