Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: 27,549 ROMs, 7.5/10

You typed miyoo mini plus game list into a search box expecting a catalogue — a tidy, official manifest of everything this $54 slab of plastic can play. There isn't one. There has never been one. What you found instead was a wall of retailers shouting numbers at you: 13,056 games, 25,966 games, 27,549 games, each figure bolted to a different microSD card and a different markup. This review is about that list — what is really on it, what is marketing vapour, what the hardware can and cannot do with it, and whether the whole arrangement is worth your money.

The short version, for the impatient: it is worth it, at 7.5 out of 10, but not for any of the reasons the product photos claim. The 27,549 is a lie of omission. The real, playable, worth-your-thumb number is closer to 6,041, and the hardware slams a hard door shut at the PlayStation 1. Everything else in this article is the argument for why that is still a very good deal, and where the sellers are quietly counting the same game nine times to inflate a spreadsheet.

There Is No Official Game List

Let us dispose of the premise first, because the premise is the whole trick. Miyoo — the Shenzhen outfit that actually manufactures the Mini Plus — publishes no game list. It ships hardware. The idea that the device "comes with" tens of thousands of titles is an invention of the third-party sellers who image a microSD card, screenshot the folder counts, and print the biggest number they can find on the listing.

The number on the box is a seller's number, not Miyoo's

Every count you have seen is inventory, not curation. It is a tally of ROM files sitting on a card someone else prepared. Playhouse.io, in its 2026 write-up, states the obvious thing the marketing photos never do: the ROMs are not legally included by the manufacturer, and the "game list" is a product of third-party bundling rather than any licensing arrangement. Bubbleretro cheerfully notes that its stock cards carry "10,000–20,000+" titles, which is a range wide enough to drive a truck through. Retro Game Intensity markets a 128GB card as roughly 28,000 games. Somebody else's listing swears it is 8,740. When the vendors cannot agree on the size of the library to within a factor of three, you are not looking at a catalogue. You are looking at a sales figure.

This is now the norm in the retro-handheld world, not the exception. The manufacturer builds a box; volunteers and shopkeepers fill it. The chronicler Jimmy Maher has spent years, over at the Digital Antiquarian, documenting how fiercely Nintendo once policed its own approved-game list in the 8-bit era — the seal of quality, the licensing lock-out, the whole apparatus. Half a century later the canon it once guarded is curated by anonymous hobbyists and dropshippers on hardware Nintendo never sanctioned. The wheel has turned all the way around.

27,549 files, roughly 6,041 games

Here is the mechanism that manufactures a five-digit number out of a four-digit library. A single game is counted many times. There is the NTSC-U release and the PAL release and the Japanese release. There is v1.0 and v1.1 and the revision that fixed one crash. There are the ROM-hacks, the translations, the [b] bad dumps and [h] hacked dumps and [!] verified dumps that the old GoodTools naming left behind. A PlayStation RPG on three discs is three files. A MAME romset counts the parent board and every regional clone as separate entries. Stack all of that up across a dozen systems and 6,000 distinct games balloons into 27,549 line items without a single new experience being added.

De-duplicate honestly — one canonical version per game, per system — and community aggregation lands the 128GB card at around 6,041 genuinely distinct, worth-playing titles. We did the tedious thing and counted a card folder-by-folder in a separate teardown of the 27,549-ROM claim, and the arithmetic holds: the marketing number is roughly four-and-a-half times the real one. That is not fraud, exactly. Every file is really there. It is just that "27,549 games" and "6,041 games" describe the same card, and only one of those sentences is true in the way you assumed.

Who actually assembled your card

Curation quality varies wildly from seller to seller, and this is the part nobody benchmarks. A thoughtful vendor prunes the bootlegs, picks the best revision, matches the arcade romset to the emulator core, and scrapes clean box art. A lazy one dumps a No-Intro full set plus an FBNeo full set, bolts a theme on top, and ships it. Both listings will advertise "20,000+ games." One is a library; the other is a landfill with a search function. The device cannot tell you which you bought until you are three folders deep and staring at Super Mario Bros. (JU) (PRG0) [!] next to Super Mario Bros. (JU) (PRG1) [T-Eng] and wondering why you have two.

The Hardware Draws the Line at PS1

No amount of card-stuffing changes what the silicon can execute. The Mini Plus is a modest little machine built around a chip that was never designed to play games at all, and understanding that chip tells you exactly why the list stops where it stops.

SigmaStar SSD202D, Cortex-A7, 128MB of RAM

The brain is a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked around 1.2 GHz, paired with an ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU and just 128 megabytes of RAM. This is a system-on-chip built for smart-home displays and IP cameras, repurposed by clever firmware into a games console. XDA's Adam Conway put it plainly in his 9/10 review, describing the SoC as "dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB" and noting it is "not going to be setting benchmark records… but that's more than good enough for most retro titles." That last clause is the entire thesis of the device.

The 128MB ceiling is the wall everything crashes into. A PlayStation 1 has 2MB of main RAM plus 1MB of video RAM; emulate it with overhead and you still fit comfortably. A Nintendo 64 needs a wide-bus RDRAM setup and a graphics pipeline that this Mali cannot fake. A PSP or a Dreamcast wants an order of magnitude more memory and a GPU with actual shader muscle. There is no firmware update, no overclock, no "unlock" that conjures RAM and floating-point throughput out of a camera chip. The hardware is the hardware.

What runs at full speed

Inside its lane, the Mini Plus is excellent. It runs, at full speed: Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, Game Gear, PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo, arcade boards via FBNeo and MAME2003, the Bandai WonderSwan line, the Neo Geo Pocket line, and PlayStation 1. Conway again: "Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly, PlayStation 1 games are a treat to play." PropelRC clocked Chrono Trigger at a "Perfect 60fps" and found only "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2" — which is the exact PS1 game that stresses this class of emulation and the exact place you would expect a hiccup.

A couple of asterisks. The heavier SNES enhancement chips — SuperFX in Star Fox, SA-1 in Kirby's Dream Land 3 — can dip below full speed depending on the emulator core. And there is no analog stick anywhere on the device, only a D-pad, four face buttons and four shoulders. Games that require the DualShock's twin sticks — Ape Escape being the notorious example — are compromised or unplayable regardless of how fast the CPU runs. The list contains them. The controls cannot honour them.

What will never run, no matter the card

Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Saturn, PSP: not happening. The GBAtemp and playhouse.io testing lines up with everything above — light N64 titles limp along near full speed on beefier siblings, demanding ones sit at 70–85%, and PSP is simply "not viable" on this tier of chip. On the Mini Plus specifically, treat the PS1 as the absolute ceiling and anything above it as fiction.

Which brings us to the funniest category of listing dishonesty. Some seller descriptions and slapdash "game lists" for these cards include titles that are physical impossibilities. If you see Call of Duty or the modern indie CrossCode promised on a 128MB Cortex-A7, you are reading a copy-paste error or an outright fabrication — those are current-generation games, a category error the width of two decades. Watch, too, for placement howlers inside the folders themselves: Contra III: The Alien Wars is a 1992 Super Nintendo game. If a card lists it in the NES / Famicom folder, what you actually have is a bootleg demake, not the real thing — the genuine article lives one folder over in SFC. Dump quality is the tell nobody prints on the box.

The Collection, by the Numbers

Enough thesis. Here is the anatomy of a representative card and the machine it runs on, laid out so you can see where the 6,041 real games actually live.

The device, spec by spec

Where the games actually live

A representative 64GB card breaks down roughly like the table below. A word of honesty on the figures, since honesty is the whole point of this review: only four of these folder counts are firmly documented from card audits — NES (1,498), PS1 (400–412), the arcade folder (670–700) and WonderSwan Color (89). The rest are rounded community estimates and are marked as such. Anyone quoting the others to the exact digit is guessing.

The card as the machine sees it

Strip away the storefront and this is what a filled card's game directory looks like from the file system — the audited counts firm, the remainder lumped, the totals as advertised versus as they actually shake out:

/mnt/SDCARD/
├── miyoo283_fw.img          <- OnionOS boot image (not a game)
├── Emu/                     <- emulator + core configs
├── RetroArch/               <- libretro cores, BIOS, shaders
├── miyoo/                   <- stock firmware bits
└── Roms/
    ├── FC/       NES / Famicom ......... 1,498 files   [audited]
    ├── PS/       PlayStation 1 ......... 400-412 files [audited]
    ├── ARCADE/   FBNeo + MAME2003 ...... 670-700 files [audited]
    ├── WSC/      WonderSwan Color ...... 89 files      [audited]
    └── SFC · GB · GBC · GBA · MD · PCE · GG · NGPC .... remainder
    ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    box total: 25,966 files   ->   de-duplicated: ~6,041 games

Note the top four entries. Three of them are not games at all — they are the firmware image and its support directories. The single most important thing on the card is the folder you will never brag about: RetroArch/, which is where the emulator cores and BIOS files that make any of this run actually live.

OnionOS Is the Real Product

Here is the quiet truth that the game-count marketing buries: you are not really buying a list of 6,041 games. You are buying a piece of software called OnionOS, and the games are what it happens to display. Strip Onion off and the Mini Plus is a fiddly, clumsy toy. Put Onion on and it becomes one of the best-loved handhelds of its generation. DROiX, reviewing this class of device, has flatly called the firmware "simply phenomenal," and that is not hyperbole — it is the difference between a returned parcel and a keeper.

What OnionOS actually is

OnionOS — properly the OnionUI project — is community custom firmware, built and maintained by a volunteer developer group that coordinates on Discord. It is not Miyoo's software and Miyoo did not commission it. What it delivers is everything the stock experience lacks: a fast game-browsing front-end with scraped box art, RetroArch save states layered on top of native saves, sleep-and-resume that picks up exactly where you left off, per-system and per-game core overrides, RetroAchievements, themes, and a quick-launch overlay Onion calls the Game Switcher that lets you hop between recently-played titles without backing out to a menu. PropelRC credits OnionOS specifically with adding "3 hours of battery life" on top of the improvements above — the firmware is more power-efficient than the stock OS it replaces.

The version numbers retailers get wrong

This is where the sellers embarrass themselves. Preloaded cards routinely ship with a stale, months-or-years-old build of Onion, and the listing rarely says which. The current stable release is OnionUI v4.3.1-1, which froze in June 2024 and has been rock-solid since; the newest tag is a beta, v4.4.0-beta-20260120, dated 21 January 2026, which makes gpSP the default GBA core and — notably for a handheld this size — adds netplay, including Game Boy Advance link-cable play between two units over Wi-Fi. If your card arrives on a 3.x build or, heaven help you, a 2.x build, the first thing to do before you play anything is update it. Newer Onion means better PS1 compatibility, current cores, and the bug fixes of two years. The seller who charged you a premium for "the latest firmware" frequently shipped you last year's.

Saves, states, and why the front-end matters

A 6,041-game library is only usable if you can navigate it and never lose progress, and that is precisely what Onion buys you. Every core supports RetroArch save states in addition to the game's own battery-backed SRAM or PS1 memory-card saves, so you can suspend a SNES RPG mid-boss and resume it three days later from the couch. Under the hood these are the same libretro cores you would otherwise install by hand on a PC or a Pi — Onion just wraps them in a controller-friendly shell and hides the configuration. Without that shell, the "game list" is an unnavigable heap. With it, the heap becomes a library you can actually live in.

What's Actually Worth Playing

Reviewing a curation means reviewing the curation, not the file count. So set the marketing aside and let us walk the shelves the way a person who owns one actually does — system by system, looking for the games that justify the purchase. The Machine's standing bias, stated up front: breadth is worthless; the value of this device is the two or three hundred canonical titles it carries beautifully.

The PS1 shelf is the reason to care

The 400-odd PlayStation files are the smallest folder proportionally and the most important one absolutely. This is where the Mini Plus stops being a Game Boy in a nicer case and starts being a genuine portable time machine. The headliners: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the 1997 Konami masterpiece — assistant-directed by Koji Igarashi, scored by Michiru Yamane — that codified the entire "Metroidvania" template the genre now runs on; Xenogears, Square's sprawling 1998 RPG from director Tetsuya Takahashi, famous to this day for a second disc so budget-starved that half of it is narrated exposition delivered from a chair; Final Fantasy IX, the deliberate return to the series' fairy-tale roots; and the twin combat showcases Tekken 3 and Brave Fencer Musashi. Pixel Swish, in a 26 February 2026 review, confirmed both of those last two "run without hiccups" on the device — and they are exactly the kind of games that expose a weak PS1 emulator, so that is a meaningful clean bill of health.

Practical note: multi-disc games such as the Final Fantasy titles and Chrono Cross are handled through Onion's in-menu disc-swap or an .m3u playlist, so a three-disc epic behaves as one entry despite counting as three files in the marketing tally. The core is PCSX ReARMed, tuned for exactly this ARM hardware.

Game Boy and GBA are the sweet spot

If the PS1 shelf is the reason to care, the Nintendo handheld shelves are where you will spend most of your hours. The 3.5-inch 640×480 panel is close enough to 4:3 that Game Boy and Game Boy Color games fill it gorgeously, and while GBA's native 3:2 gets slightly letterboxed, it renders sharp and bright. Pixel Swish's 5 June 2026 editorial singled out the homebrew Tetris-like Apotris and Mario Kart: Super Circuit as top-tier picks on the device — and it is worth dwelling on Apotris, because homebrew is the one genuinely uncomplicated, fully legal thing on this whole card.

The GBA canon is deep and it is all here: the Metroid duology of Fusion and Zero Mission, Advance Wars, the Golden Sun pair, the Castlevania GBA trilogy, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap — the Capcom-and-Flagship-developed 2004 entry that GameSpot named its 2005 GBA Game of the Year. That Minish Cap is one of the specific titles Retro Game Intensity advertises on its 128GB card is telling: the good sellers lead with the games that matter, not the file count.

16-bit, the arcade dump, and the deep cuts

The SNES and Genesis folders are the comfort food: Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, the 16-bit Castlevanias that Hardcore Gaming 101 wrote a whole book about, the Sonic run, Streets of Rage 2, Gunstar Heroes. Note that the SNES Final Fantasy VI is likely filed under its original Western title, Final Fantasy III — a 1994 quirk of Square's US numbering, not a mislabelled bootleg.

The arcade folder is where the seller earns their keep, and also where the dupe-counting is most brazen. Those 670–700 files are the CPS1, CPS2 and CPS3 Capcom boards (Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom) plus the Neo Geo library (Metal Slug, The King of Fighters, Garou: Mark of the Wolves). Here is the editorial knife: the Neo Geo folder alone often holds around 412 entries, but SNK only ever released roughly 150 official MVS titles. The other ~260 are regional duplicates, bootlegs and hacks — padding, counted as games. What the good seller genuinely does add here is compatibility work: matching each romset to the correct FBNeo or MAME2003 core version so the games actually boot, a tedious chore they have spared you.

And then the oddities, which are where a collection shows its soul. The 89-strong WonderSwan Color folder is a small museum: the WonderSwan was Bandai and Koto's handheld, the last design of the late Gunpei Yokoi — the man who invented the Game Boy — released in 1999, the year after his death. Nearly all of it is Japan-only and fan-translated. Filed nearby you may find Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, the 2001 tri-Ace RPG that Hardcore Gaming 101 calls "one of the most technically impressive RPGs ever to grace the Game Boy Color" — a Game Boy Color game, note, not a GBA one, and one you will only ever play in English because volunteers translated it. These deep cuts are the argument for a big card. You will play thirty of the 6,041 games. The other 6,011 are there so that the thirty you want are guaranteed to be among them.

How the List Stacks Up

The Mini Plus does not exist in a vacuum. Its game list competes with every other preloaded handheld and every other approach to carrying the retro canon in a pocket. Here is how the collection measures against its natural rivals.

The like-for-like field

The like-for-like rival: Anbernic's RG35XX line

The original RG35XX out-specs the Miyoo on paper — a quad-core Cortex-A9 with a PowerVR GPU and double the RAM — and it can nudge slightly past PS1 into light Nintendo DS via DraStic. And yet the Miyoo is the one people keep. The reason is the firmware, again: OnionOS is more mature and more pleasant than GarlicOS, whose 2.0 rewrite has been stalled in early alpha while its developer recovers his health. The newer RG35XX Plus, built on the Allwinner H700, genuinely does out-muscle the Miyoo — DROiX notes its processor "runs faster than the Miyoo processor" and that it adds an HDMI-out the Miyoo lacks — but at this tier, as the saying goes, firmware beats silicon, and Onion is still the software to beat.

The step up: Retroid and MiSTer

If the PS1 ceiling is a dealbreaker, you are no longer shopping in this price class. A Retroid Pocket is an Android handheld four times the price that will happily run PS2, GameCube and beyond — a different league, a different philosophy, and a card you fill yourself. At the opposite pole sits a MiSTer Multisystem 2, which throws out software emulation entirely in favour of FPGA hardware that reconstructs the original chips cycle-for-cycle. The MiSTer has no giant "game list" and cannot do PS1 at all; what it offers is accuracy the Cortex-A7 can only approximate. Count, power, accuracy — pick one axis, because no single device wins all three, and the Miyoo's axis is unbeatable value on the count-and-convenience end.

Price and the Storage Upsell

The pricing of this device is a small master-class in where a margin hides. The hardware is honestly cheap. The card is the markup.

What the configurations actually cost

A note on these numbers: Miyoo sets no rigid MSRP, so the bundle prices float by seller and by storage and should be read as street prices, not fixed figures. The one firm anchor is the bare unit at around $53.99 in the US.

The base price is honest; the card is the tax

Look at the ladder. The device costs roughly $54. The 128GB preloaded version costs roughly $70. You are paying about sixteen dollars for a microSD card and the labour of someone else copying files onto it — and remember that most of those files are the duplicates we spent the first third of this review dismantling. It is not a rip-off, exactly. A well-curated card with matched arcade romsets and clean box art is worth something. But you are paying a premium for a spreadsheet's worth of padding.

The DIY path is cheaper and cleaner

The honest, and incidentally more legal, route is a bare unit plus a blank card you fill yourself with games you have dumped from your own cartridges and discs. Flash OnionOS, add the same libretro cores by hand, and drop in only the ~200 games you will actually play. It costs less, it runs faster because the browser is not paging through 27,000 entries, and it sidesteps the whole ROM-bundling question. If you want a ready-made honest starting point, the community's answer to the bloated bulk card is a hand-curated set like Tiny Best Set: GO! — one great version of each great game, nothing padded. This is the same philosophy that keeps distributions like Batocera honest, and it is the reason projects like RetroPie — which likewise ships no fresh official image and expects you to supply your own content — have aged so gracefully. The list is best when you are the curator.

Five Ways It Actually Plays

Numbers are one thing; thumbs on the D-pad are another. Here is how the game list behaves across the five ways people actually use a handheld like this.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player, the Mini Plus is close to ideal. Sleep-and-resume means you flip it open, play a level of Sonic, and snap it shut, exactly like a phone. The breadth of the list works as a buffet: you will graze thirty games and never think about the other six thousand. For the mobile / commuter player, the ~165-gram body genuinely pockets, the battery clears a workday of Game Boy at 7.5 hours or a solid five hours of PS1, and the headphone jack means you are not fighting Bluetooth latency on a train. GBA and PS1 RPGs — long, save-anywhere, turn-based — are the perfect commute fuel, and this is where the device shines brightest.

The completionist and the speedrunner

For the completionist, the full No-Intro sets are a gift and a curse. Every regional variant and revision is technically at your fingertips, which is heaven if you are chasing a full library and clutter if you just want to browse — expect to spend an evening pruning duplicates before the collection feels navigable. For the speedrunner, temper expectations: save states are a superb practice tool for drilling a tricky segment, but this is emphatically not a run-submission platform. Emulator input latency, the D-pad-only controls, and the lack of frame-perfect timing verification mean a time set here will not be accepted by any leaderboard. Practise on it; submit from a verified setup.

Co-op and the couch

For co-op, the Mini Plus is the weakest. There is one screen, one D-pad, no second controller port and no HDMI-out to a television, so genuine two-player couch play is off the table — the one exception being the GBA link-cable netplay that the January 2026 Onion beta added between two separate units, which is a delightful trick but requires two of the things. If shared-screen party gaming is your priority, this is the wrong device; buy an RG35XX Plus for its HDMI port instead. The Miyoo is, and always will be, a solitary pleasure.

Who Should Buy Into It

Reduced to recommendations, the game list serves some buyers superbly and fails others completely. Be honest with yourself about which one you are.

Buy into it if…

• You want emulation that just works. First-timers who do not want to learn about cores, BIOS files and romset versions get a working library out of the box. This is the device's single best use case.
• You are a Game Boy / GBA / PS1 RPG hoarder or commuter. The sweet-spot systems plus the form factor plus the battery make this the best sub-$90 way to carry that specific canon in a pocket.
• You love 4:3 arcade and fighting games. The 640×480 screen is tailor-made for CPS and Neo Geo, and the compatibility-matched arcade folder saves you real grief.

Skip it if…

• You need N64, Dreamcast, Saturn or PSP. The Cortex-A7 will never run them. Buy a Retroid Pocket and pay four times as much.
• You want couch co-op or TV output. No HDMI, one screen, one gamepad. Wrong tool.
• You are chasing frame-perfect accuracy. Software emulation on a camera chip is not the same as FPGA. A MiSTer is your machine.

The honest recommendation

For most people the ideal purchase is not any of the fat preloaded cards. It is the bare unit plus a blank card you fill yourself — ideally with games dumped from hardware you own, plus legal homebrew like Apotris. You will spend $54, get a faster-browsing device, land on the right side of the law, and skip paying a premium for 21,000 duplicate files. The list is a feature. Curating it yourself is the upgrade nobody sells you.

The Ledger: Pros and Cons

Everything above, distilled to a balance sheet.

What the list gets right

• Genuinely deep, canonical coverage of everything from the NES through the PlayStation 1 — the classics are all present.
• OnionOS turns ~6,041 games into a navigable, save-state-backed, box-art-scraped library that is a joy to browse.
• The 3.5″ 640×480 IPS panel is excellent for 4:3 systems and makes PS1 a treat, as XDA and Retro Game Corps both attest.
• Best library-to-price ratio in its class — roughly $54 for the bare machine.
• A well-made card spares you BIOS hunting, romset-matching and box-art scraping — real, if variable, value.

Where it falls apart

• The 27,549 headline is marketing; roughly three-quarters of it is duplication, region variants and bootleg chaff.
• PlayStation 1 is a hard, permanent ceiling — no N64, Dreamcast, Saturn or PSP, ever.
• Legally murky: the manufacturer licenses nothing, and the whole bundle rests on third-party ROM distribution.
• Sellers frequently ship stale OnionOS builds; you may need to update before the device is at its best.
• D-pad-only (no analog stick), one small screen, no HDMI — analog-required PS1 games and any couch co-op are compromised or impossible.
• Curation quality is a coin-flip by vendor; some cards are thoughtful, many are lazy full-set dumps.

The Verdict

You came looking for a game list and found a magic trick. The trick is that 27,549 and 6,041 describe the same microSD card, and the industry has agreed to only ever print the first number. Once you see through it, the device underneath is genuinely lovely.

What you are really rating

You are not rating a game and you are not really rating a list. You are rating a curation-plus-hardware pairing, and on that basis the Mini Plus is strong but padded. As hardware it is the right cheap chip for a narrowly-defined job, doing 8-bit through PS1 well and refusing to pretend otherwise. As software — OnionOS — it is close to best-in-class. As a "library," it is four-and-a-half times smaller than advertised and none the worse for it, because the 6,041 that are real include essentially every game from the era worth owning.

Rating breakdown

The bottom line

Ignore the 27,549. Buy the Mini Plus for the roughly 6,041 games that matter, put the current OnionOS on it, and treat it as the best sub-$90 way to carry the entire 8-bit-through-PlayStation-1 canon in a pocket. Better still, buy it bare and curate the card yourself. Emulators, as the Ninth Circuit settled a quarter-century ago in Sony v. Connectix, are perfectly legal; how you fill the card is on you. Judged as hardware and software, this is a 9/10 machine. Judged as the "27,549-game list" it is sold as, it is closer to a 4. Split the difference where the honesty lives and you land where we do: 7.5 out of 10, and a genuine recommendation to anyone who reads the number on the box as fiction.