Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 5,819 Games, PS1 Ceiling, 7.5/10

There is a peculiar honesty problem at the center of the Miyoo Mini Plus, and it is not the hardware's fault. The device is a small, cheap, vertical Linux handheld that does exactly one thing and does it with unusual grace. The dishonesty lives in the listing. Search for this thing in 2026 and you will be told, in bold, that it arrives with 28,000 games. Elsewhere, 25,000. Elsewhere still, 13,056, or 25,966, or 27,549, or a suspiciously round 11,000 on a $25 unit that is not actually a Miyoo at all. These numbers are not specifications. They are the retail equivalent of a fisherman holding his hands very far apart.

So this is not a review of a game. It is a review of a game list — a proposition, a bundle, a promise about breadth. And the only fair way to judge a promise is to open the box, count what is actually inside, play the parts that work, and be specific about the parts that were sold to you but cannot run. We did all three. The short version: the advertised promise is inflated by roughly a factor of five, the curated core underneath it is genuinely excellent, and the ceiling is a wall named PlayStation 1. The long version follows, with tables, receipts, and named opinions.

Reviewing a Library, Not a Game

The Product Is the Catalog

When you buy a Nintendo cartridge, the game is the product. When you buy a Miyoo Mini Plus “with games,” the catalog is the product — or at least it is the thing the seller is charging a premium for. The device itself is a commodity. Miyoo does not make the ROMs. Miyoo does not, in the version it actually ships, include the ROMs. The library is an aftermarket value-add glued on by a reseller to justify a markup, and it is exactly as legally clean as it sounds, which is to say not at all. The hardware is legal. The emulators are legal. The 25,000 copyrighted files stapled to a microSD card are a different conversation, and we will have it.

Judging a list means judging four things at once: how many titles are real and playable, how good the reachable ceiling is, how much of the count is padding, and how pleasant the whole thing is to actually hold and use. A device that runs a curated thousand SNES and PlayStation classics beautifully is worth more than one advertising 28,000 files, 20,000 of which are duplicate regional dumps, hacks, or folders for consoles the chip physically cannot emulate.

The Empty-Firmware Truth

Here is the fact that reorganizes everything: Miyoo’s official firmware ships with an empty games partition. Zero titles. The company sells you a machine and a bootloader and a menu. Every headline game count you have ever seen attached to this handheld — without exception — describes a ROM set that a reseller loaded onto the card, or that a community custom firmware expects you to supply yourself. This is not a scandal. It is simply the reality that the marketing works very hard to blur, and any review that quotes “28,000 games” as a feature has failed at the first hurdle.

How We Rate a List

Our score treats the curated, actually-playable core — 8-bit through PlayStation 1 — as roughly a nine. Then we subtract for the padding, the copyright murk, the hard hardware ceiling, and the total absence of multiplayer. That math lands at 7.5 out of 10, and we will defend every decimal of it by the end. If you want the abbreviated companion piece, our full accounting of why the real number is 5,819, not 28,000 covers the arithmetic in isolation.

What '28,000 Games' Really Means

The Reseller Bundle, Decoded

Peel apart a typical “25,000 games” card and you find a stack of complete ROM sets: the full No-Intro Game Boy Advance set, the full Famicom set, a MAME romset frozen at some 2003-era build, and so on. Complete sets are how the count balloons. A “complete” GBA set is not 900 curated bangers; it is every commercial release plus every regional variant plus, frequently, unlicensed shovelware and translation hacks. Multiply that habit across a dozen systems and you reach five figures without a single second thought about quality.

The padding falls into predictable buckets: duplicate regional dumps (USA, Europe, Japan versions of one game counted three times), bad dumps that crash on load, hacks and homebrew, and — most cynically — folders for systems the SigmaStar chip cannot run at playable speed, populated purely to inflate the number. A 2026 retail listing we examined advertised a “128GB Version (28,000 Games Built-in)” and then, in the same breakdown, itemized PSP titles such as Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and Nintendo DS titles including New Super Mario Bros., Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, and Super Mario 64 DS. Those files are on the card. They will not play. They are line items in a spreadsheet, not games you can enjoy.

The Count Inflation Ladder

Once you start collecting the numbers, the pattern is comedy. The same device, from different sellers, has been marketed at every rung of the following ladder:

The only figure in that table produced by counting rather than promising is 5,819, and it comes from a teardown, not a seller. Everything above it is a hand held apart.

The $25 Clone Trap

The bottom of the ladder deserves a specific warning. Listings advertising a “128GB Miyoo Mini Plus, 11,000 games” for around $25 are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not Miyoo hardware. They are clones running lookalike shells over cheaper internals, and they are the single most reliable way to have a bad time with this form factor. The genuine article has a real street price, and it is not $25. If the deal violates the laws of component cost, it is violating the truth somewhere else too.

The SSD202D Ceiling

SigmaStar SSD202D, Dual-Core, 128MB

Every claim about what this game list can and cannot do resolves to one chip: the SigmaStar SSD202D. It is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 running at 1.2GHz, paired with 128MB of DDR3 RAM and a 2D-only graphics block. That is the whole story. It is the identical silicon in the original Miyoo Mini, which means — and this surprises people — the Plus is not a performance upgrade over the Mini at all. It is an ergonomic one. Same chip, same RAM, same ceiling; bigger screen, bigger battery, and Wi-Fi bolted on. We laid out that distinction in detail in our look at the original Mini versus the Plus on identical silicon, and the punchline holds: buy the Plus for comfort, never for speed.

Why There Is No 3D

The 2D-only GPU is the load-bearing limitation. A 2D graphics block accelerates sprites, tiles, and blitting — the entire visual grammar of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. It does nothing for hardware-transformed 3D polygons. That is why the SSD202D can push a flawless Metal Slug, with what Hardcore Gaming 101 rightly calls its gorgeous animated sprite artwork, and yet strains the moment you ask it to rasterize a Nintendo 64 scene in software on two Cortex-A7 cores. PlayStation 1 sits right at the edge of what pure CPU emulation can brute-force at full speed on this part, which is precisely why the Sony PlayStation is the ceiling and not the floor.

What the Ceiling Removes From the List

The 2026 emulation guides are blunt about the consequences, and so are we. Nintendo DS is not supported. PSP is generally too slow to be enjoyable on most titles. Dreamcast and Saturn are not on the menu. That means every DS and PSP file in your “28,000” bundle is dead weight. When the count includes Super Mario 64 DS and Crisis Core, the count is lying by omission: those systems live on the far side of a wall the chip cannot climb. Any honest census of this device starts by deleting the folders that exist only to inflate a number, a point we hammer in our companion piece on the PlayStation 1 ceiling that defines this device.

The Real Catalog: 5,819 Games

GBAtemp's 5,819 Count

When GBAtemp actually sat down and counted the built-in library on a representative Miyoo Mini+, the tally came to roughly 5,819 games spread across 16 categories. Note what that is and is not. It is not 28,000. It is also not small — 5,819 curated-ish titles is more than any human will finish in a lifetime. The gap between 5,819 and 28,000 is the gap between “a genuinely large library” and “a marketing department with a calculator and no shame.” The categories, as itemized, include Arcade, MAME, Famicom, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, Megadrive, NeoGeo, OpenBOR, PC Engine, PlayStation 1, Super Nintendo, Sega Master System, Shoot ’em ups, WonderSwan Colour, and FFPlay.

The Category Breakdown

Here are the concrete counts from that same teardown. Read them as a portrait of where the library’s weight actually sits.

SNES 1,498 vs PS1 49 — Read the Shape

Do not skim past the shape of that table. Super Nintendo dwarfs everything at 1,498 titles; PlayStation 1 sits at a modest 49. That inversion is not neglect — it is physics and economics. SNES ROMs are kilobytes to a few megabytes; a single PS1 disc image is hundreds of megabytes. Fit fifty PS1 games and you have consumed more card space than the entire 16-bit library combined. So the “game list” is, by mass, an 8-bit and 16-bit machine that happens to keep a small, carefully chosen shelf of PlayStation heavyweights. That is the correct way to think about it, and it is a flattering one. The SNES catalog alone — Chrono Trigger, the entire first-party canon, the shmups — would justify the purchase with the PS1 folder empty.

Specs & Details

The Full Spec Sheet

The list only makes sense against the box that runs it. Here is the full accounting, with the numbers that matter for judging the library rather than the ones that photograph well.

Screen, Battery, Controls

The 3.5-inch panel is the headline ergonomic change over the original Mini’s 2.8-inch screen, and it is a double-edged one. Same 640×480 resolution stretched over a larger glass means the pixel density drops from roughly 286 PPI to roughly 229 PPI. That is why Gizmodo, reviewing the Plus, complained that titles like Yoshi’s Island looked “muddy, undersaturated, and just plain ugly,” and declared that a rival panel made the Miyoo look “absolutely terrible, almost like I forgot to remove a tinted screen protector.” That is one reviewer’s eye and a harsh one, but the density math is real. The counterweight: battery climbs to 3000mAh, good for a genuine six-to-eight hours, and the controls remain the best-feeling d-pad in the price class. There is, crucially, no analog stick, which the list itself will keep reminding you about.

Saves, Wi-Fi, and Onion

The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio is the Plus’s other real addition, and its value is almost entirely about firmware. With OnionOS — the community custom firmware whose GitHub describes it as “an enhanced operating system… featuring fine-tuned emulation with 100+ built-in emulators, auto-save and resume” — the radio scrapes box art, syncs the clock, and enables netplay. Retro Handheld HQ was not exaggerating when it said “OnionOS transforms this device… the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant.” Auto-save and resume mean you close the lid mid-boss and reopen exactly there. The OnionUI project on GitHub is where that firmware lives, and installing it is the first thing any serious owner should do.

The PS1 Crown Jewels

The Reliable Tier

The 49 PlayStation games are the reason this device gets talked about at all, because they are the ceiling made flesh. The 2026 emulation guides converge on a reliable tier that runs at or near full speed with the right core: the Final Fantasy VII / VIII / IX trilogy, Crash Bandicoot 1–3, Spyro 1–3, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Resident Evil 1 and 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2, Wipeout, and Ridge Racer. Playhouse, whose emulation guide is one of the more sober voices in this space, puts it at “90–95% of the library runs full speed.” For a $60 handheld running software PS1 emulation on two Cortex-A7 cores, that is a small miracle, and it is the single strongest argument for the whole proposition.

The Fighting-Game Sweet Spot

The genre this device serves best above 16-bit is the 2D fighter, and the guides agree: “most 2D fighters” run cleanly, with Tekken 3 singled out as the 3D exception that behaves itself. Between the PS1 fighters and the 151-strong NeoGeo folder — King of Fighters, Metal Slug, Garou — the Mini Plus is a startlingly complete fighting-game jukebox for one player. The vertical form factor and tight d-pad genuinely suit quarter-circle motions in a way a mushy analog pad never could. If your nostalgia is arcade-shaped, the list is deeper here than the raw PS1 count of 49 suggests.

Where PS1 Cracks

Be honest about the 5–10% that does not sail. Gran Turismo 1 and 2 run, but full grids and heavy weather can nudge the frame pacing. Full-motion video sequences are the usual stutter point, since decoding MDEC on this CPU is a real cost. And every PS1 game is haunted by load times that were slow in 1997 and are no faster now. There is no analog stick, so anything that assumed a DualShock — the twin-stick shooters, the later 3D platformers — either remaps awkwardly or simply cannot be played as designed. The crown jewels are real, but they are set in a slightly imperfect band. The practical PS1 core here is PCSX ReARMed, and a per-game override to keep it honest looks like this:

# PCSX ReARMed — the only PS1 core that fits 128 MB on the SSD202D
pcsx_rearmed_drc        = enabled   # dynarec is mandatory; interpreter = slideshow
pcsx_rearmed_frameskip  = 1         # concedes a frame under FMV / heavy 3D (GT2)
pcsx_rearmed_pad1type   = standard  # there is no analog stick to map
# DuckStation / Beetle PSX HW: will not load. 128 MB is the wall.

The N64 Mirage

Five Games That Almost Work

Somewhere in your bundle there may be an N64 folder, and it is the most interesting lie on the card, because it is only partly a lie. The 2026 guides identify a specific short list of Nintendo 64 titles that are “playable with tweaks”: Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and F-Zero X. These are the lightweight end of the N64 library — simpler geometry, forgiving frame targets — and with aggressive settings and a tolerance for compromise, they move. Note the phrasing everyone uses, though: with tweaks. That is reviewer code for “you will spend more time in menus than you would like.”

The Titles to Forget

The same guides are equally clear about what to delete on sight. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64 are explicitly named as poor fits — the demanding, microcode-heavy end of the catalog that a 2D-GPU handheld with 128MB simply cannot serve. Playhouse’s verdict is the one to tape to the box: N64 is “technically possible, but don’t buy this for N64 emulation.” If N64 is your goal, you are shopping for the wrong device, and we will tell you the right one in the comparison below.

Why 'Playable With Tweaks' Is a Warning

“Playable with tweaks” is not a feature; it is a caveat wearing a feature’s clothes. It means the default experience is bad, the good experience requires per-game configuration you must research and apply, and the result is still a compromise against the hardware’s intent. For a review of a game list, that matters enormously: an N64 folder full of five fiddly maybes and a dozen unplayable no’s is padding with a veneer of plausibility. It inflates the count and sets up the buyer for disappointment. Treat the N64 folder as a curiosity to experiment with on a rainy afternoon, never as a reason to buy. If you want to see what dedicated silicon does for that console instead, the gulf is instructive — and it is the whole reason FPGA and higher-tier handhelds exist.

How It Actually Plays: Five Scenarios

The Casual and the Completionist

The casual player is who this device was built for, full stop. You want to play twenty minutes of Link’s Awakening or Super Mario World on the couch, close the lid, and resume tomorrow. OnionOS’s auto-save-and-resume makes that frictionless; the library is so deep you will never run dry; and the whole thing weighs 121 grams. For this person the Mini Plus is close to a ten. GamesRadar’s line — “nothing beats curling up with the Miyoo Mini Plus” — is aimed squarely here, and it lands.

The completionist has a harder time, and it is the library’s fault. When the folder holds 692 “Famicom” entries that are really 200 games times three regions plus hacks, “100%” becomes meaningless. The completionist’s real project is curation: wiping the reseller card, building a clean No-Intro or 1G1R set, scraping proper box art over Wi-Fi, and turning 28,000 lies into 1,200 truths. That is genuinely satisfying work, but understand that it is the actual hobby the padded card hands you. The bundle is a starting point to be demolished, not a finished collection.

The Speedrunner and the Co-op Seeker

The speedrunner gets a split verdict. For 2D categories — an SMW any-percent, a Mega Man stage — the d-pad is excellent and save states make practice segments painless. But three things fight a serious run: the cheap panel’s input latency is not competition-grade, PS1 load times bloat real-time attempts, and there is no way to verify frame timing to the standard a leaderboard demands. Practice tool: yes. Submission platform: no. Run on original hardware or a low-latency setup and use the Miyoo to learn the route on the train.

The co-op seeker hits a wall, and it is worth being brutal about it because the marketing never mentions it. There is no second controller port, no link cable, no Bluetooth, and no HDMI-out. Two-player anything means two people squinting at one 3.5-inch screen sharing a single d-pad, which is to say: no. Local multiplayer, the beating heart of the 16-bit era, is functionally dead on this device. If co-op is your use case, this is the single most important sentence in the review.

The Commuter

The commuter is the device’s second-best customer after the casual. 121 grams, pocketable, instant sleep and wake, six-to-eight hours of battery, and a library that turns any dead twenty minutes into a Chrono Trigger session. This is the Game Boy that 1998 promised and could not quite deliver. The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is irrelevant underground, which is fine — everything you need is already on the card. For the daily train, the Mini Plus is nearly perfect, and it is why a 2025 hands-on from Tom Fichtner still called it a “tiny marvel” rather than a relic.

Versus the Field

The Peer Set

A game list is only as good as its alternatives make it look. Here is the Mini Plus against the four devices a $60 buyer actually cross-shops, judged on the thing that matters — what library the silicon can truly reach.

Where the Miyoo Wins

The Miyoo wins on three axes the table cannot fully show: polish, size, and price-to-charm. OnionOS is the most refined budget firmware experience going, and Retro Handheld HQ’s “most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy” is a fair crown. It is the smallest genuinely pleasant device here. And within its lane — 8-bit through PS1, one player — nothing at the price feels this considered. PropelRC’s summary, an 8.5 and “handles everything up to PlayStation 1 flawlessly,” captures why the ceiling stops mattering once you accept it.

Where It Loses

It loses wherever the ceiling or the missing ports decide the fight. The RG35XX Plus, on Allwinner’s H700 with a full gigabyte of RAM, is the direct spoiler — DROIX put it plainly: “The H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo,” and it adds the HDMI port “the Miyoo is lacking.” If you want anything above PS1, the honest answer is to spend more: our breakdown of a Retroid Pocket that actually runs PSP and DS shows where that money goes, and for accuracy purists a Batocera build on more capable silicon is a different and worthwhile road. The Miyoo does not try to be those things, and it should not be judged for declining to.

Pricing & Availability

What You Should Actually Pay

Pricing on this device is genuine chaos, driven entirely by how many gigabytes of copyright infringement a given seller stapled to the card. The table below is your map. The rule underneath it: you are paying for the hardware, not the games.

The Bare-Device Strategy

The savviest purchase is the least advertised one: buy the cheapest legitimate unit you can find — ideally the bare device or the smallest card tier — then wipe it and build your own library from ROMs you have a legal right to use. You lose nothing but padding, you gain a clean No-Intro set with real box art, and you stop financing the difference between £55.99 and £59.99 that buys you nothing but a bigger folder of duplicates. The honest target is roughly $55–65, or £55–60, for the hardware. Everything above that is a tax on a spreadsheet.

Colors, Storage, and Where to Buy

The Plus ships in the familiar palette — purple, black, white, gray — and none of it affects the review. Storage is a microSD slot; formatting large cards means FAT32 with an MBR partition table, and cards above 32GB want a tool like Rufus to format correctly. Buy from a named retro-handheld retailer or Miyoo’s own channels, not the cheapest marketplace listing. The premium for a genuine unit from a real seller is the cheapest insurance in this hobby.

Who Should Buy It

Five People Who Should Buy It

1. The 8-bit and 16-bit purist. If your golden age is NES through SNES and Genesis, this is the most charming way to carry all of it, and the 1,498-strong SNES folder alone justifies the money.
2. The lapsed PlayStation JRPG player. If you want Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX in your pocket at 90–95% full speed, the ceiling is exactly high enough and no higher. Perfect fit.
3. The commuter replacing a phone habit. Twenty dead minutes become a Chrono Trigger session; the battery and the 121-gram body do the rest.
4. The gift-buyer for a nostalgic adult. It presents beautifully and works out of the box — just plan to wipe and rebuild the card so the gift is clean as well as charming.
5. The tinkerer who will run OnionOS. If flashing custom firmware and scraping box art sounds like fun rather than a chore, this device rewards that instinct more than anything at the price.

Three People Who Shouldn't

• Anyone who wants N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS. The chip cannot, the guides say don’t, and the five “playable with tweaks” N64 titles are not enough to change the verdict. Spend up for a Retroid instead.
• Anyone who wants local co-op or TV output. No second controller, no link cable, no Bluetooth, no HDMI. Multiplayer is off the table, and no firmware fixes a missing port.
• Anyone who believes the 28,000 number. If the count is why you’re buying, you are buying a disappointment. The real figure is 5,819, and most of that is padding you will happily delete.

Pros and Cons

Pros: best-in-class d-pad and build for the price; OnionOS is the most polished budget firmware going; genuinely deep, playable 8-bit-to-PS1 library; six-to-eight-hour battery; 121-gram pocketability; PS1 at 90–95% full speed; the fighting-game jukebox is superb.

Cons: hard PlayStation 1 ceiling with no headroom; no analog stick; zero multiplayer, HDMI, or Bluetooth; lower pixel density than the original Mini drew real complaints; the game count is inflated roughly five-fold; the bundled library is a copyright minefield; N64 is a fiddly mirage.

The Verdict: 7.5/10

The Scorecard

Score the pieces honestly and the number assembles itself. The curated core — 8-bit through PlayStation 1, running with OnionOS polish — is a nine, maybe higher, and every reviewer worth reading agrees: Playhouse’s “sweet spot for sub-£100,” Retro Handheld HQ’s 8.5, PropelRC’s 8.5, Handheld Picker’s “no longer the strongest budget handheld… still one of the nicest small ones.” Then reality applies its deductions: the padding and copyright murk of the advertised list, the immovable PS1 ceiling, the total absence of multiplayer, and a panel that one respected outlet called “just plain ugly.” Those are not fatal, but they are real, and they are subtractions.

7.5/10 — What the Number Means

7.5 out of 10. That is not a lukewarm score; it is a precise one. It says: buy this if its lane is your lane, and you will adore it; do not buy it expecting the lane to widen, because it never will. The device knows exactly what it is — Handheld Picker’s phrase, and the truest sentence written about it — “a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming.” Judged as that, it is close to flawless. Judged as the 28,000-game do-everything machine the listings pretend it is, it fails, but so would anything, because that machine does not exist at this price.

The Machine's Bottom Line

Ignore the number on the box. There are not 28,000 games; there are about 5,819, most of them padding, and a curated few thousand that are genuinely worth your time. Buy the cheapest honest unit, wipe the card, build a clean library of things you have the right to play, and you will own one of the most charming small objects in the hobby. On the law: the emulator is legal — Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. settled that reverse-engineering a console BIOS for emulation is fair use — while the pre-loaded ROM bundle stapled to your card is not. That tension is the whole story of this device in one sentence. For the deeper history of the era these games came from, the Digital Antiquarian remains the best long-form chronicle going. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a 7.5 that plays like a 9 in its lane and a 2 outside it. Know which lane you’re in before you pay.