Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: 28,000 Games, 7.5/10

You typed miyoo mini plus game list into a search bar expecting a catalogue. A tidy, alphabetised manifest of everything the little orange brick can play, stamped and certified by a manufacturer. That document does not exist. It has never existed. What exists instead is a $53.99 handheld, a microSD card that some reseller filled with ROM files, and a number printed on the product page that bears roughly the same relationship to reality as a used-car odometer bears to the road actually travelled.

This review is about that gap — the space between the number and the machine. We are not reviewing a game. We are reviewing a list: a shifting, bundle-specific, region-dependent pile of files that different sellers count differently and that no two SD cards agree on. Reviewing it honestly means separating three things the marketing deliberately blurs: what the Miyoo Mini Plus can actually run, what gets crammed onto the card regardless of whether it runs, and what the count on the box really measures. Spoiler for the impatient: the hardware is genuinely good, PlayStation 1 is the practical ceiling, and the ‘28,000 games’ is a file tally, not a library. Verdict at the bottom, as always. It is not a 9, and it is not a 3. It is a 7.5, and the reasons are specific.

There Is No Official Game List

The single most important fact about the Miyoo Mini Plus game list is that it is not a fixed, officially standardised library. Third-party and reseller lists vary by microSD image, by region, and by firmware bundle. Any ‘full list’ you find should be treated as bundle-specific rather than universal — a snapshot of one card at one moment, not a canonical catalogue. Miyoo, the company, does not publish a games manifest, because the company does not ship the games. It ships a device.

The search term with no answer

Search demand created this article, and search demand is built on a false premise. People want ‘the list’ the way they want the manual to a boardgame: one authoritative document that settles arguments. But the Miyoo Mini Plus is sold in two fundamentally different configurations. There is the bare device — a piece of open hardware with an empty card slot — and there is the ‘preloaded’ device, where a reseller has imaged a card with community firmware and a heap of ROMs before shipping. The bare device has no list because it has no games. The preloaded device has whatever the seller put on it, and no two sellers put on the same thing. The question ‘what is the Miyoo Mini Plus game list’ is therefore not a hard question. It is a malformed one, like asking for the official playlist of a blank cassette.

Who actually decides what is on your card

The people who decide are, in rough order of influence: the reseller who images the card, the community-firmware developers whose folder structure organises it, and the anonymous scene groups whose ROM sets get poured in. The firmware almost always is OnionUI (github.com/OnionUI/Onion), the dominant custom OS for this device, which as of 2026 sits at a stable V4.3.1-1 with a V4.4.0 beta line adding netplay. OnionUI does not contain games; it provides the menus, the emulator cores, and the folder layout the ROMs drop into. The list, in other words, is an emergent property of three parties who never coordinate. That is why it changes shape every time someone re-images a card.

Why the count is a ROM-file tally, not a library

When a listing says ‘28,000 games,’ it is counting files, not games. A single title can appear as a dozen files — USA, Europe, Japan, and World releases; revision A and revision B; a translation patch; a ROM hack; a bad dump kept ‘just in case’; a bootleg pirate cart nobody asked for. Here is what the microSD card actually looks like once OnionUI is installed, and where those files live:

/                      <- microSD root
├── miyoo283_fw.img    <- OnionUI firmware image
├── BIOS/              <- system BIOS files (PS1 scph, etc.)
├── Emu/               <- emulator core packages
├── RetroArch/         <- RetroArch + per-core configs
├── Roms/
│   ├── FC/            <- Famicom / NES
│   ├── GB/  GBC/  GBA/
│   ├── MD/            <- Mega Drive / Genesis
│   ├── SFC/           <- Super Famicom / SNES
│   ├── MS/            <- Master System
│   ├── PS/            <- PlayStation 1
│   └── NEOGEO/
└── miyoo/             <- config, themes, save states

Every folder in Roms/ is a directory of files, and the ‘game count’ is just a recursive file count across all of them. It measures the seller’s willingness to dump entire No-Intro and Redump sets onto a card. It does not measure how many distinct, playable, worthwhile games you get. Hold that thought; the entire numbers section below is an autopsy of it.

What Actually Runs, Tier by Tier

Strip away the count and a real, useful hierarchy emerges. The Miyoo Mini Plus is not a mystery box; its capabilities are well-mapped by two years of reviews and firmware iteration. There is a tier that runs flawlessly, a tier that runs with caveats, and a tier that does not run at all no matter what the box says.

The flawless tier: 8-bit and 16-bit

A 2026 emulation guide states plainly that the Miyoo Mini Plus runs Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES/Famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, Mega Drive/Genesis, Master System, and Neo Geo ‘perfectly.’ That matches every hands-on review I trust. XDA’s Adam Conway, who scored the device 9/10, wrote that ‘Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly, PlayStation 1 games are a treat to play anywhere,’ and that while the chip is ‘not going to be setting benchmark records… that’s more than good enough for most retro titles.’ PropelRC, which handed it an 8.5/10, was even more specific: Chrono Trigger on SNES gave ‘perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough.’ This is the device’s home. If your idea of retro stops at 1996, the Miyoo Mini Plus is a near-perfect object, and the 640×480 IPS panel — which PropelRC calls sharper than the original Nintendo 3DS at 229 pixels per inch — renders integer-scaled sprites with a clarity the original hardware never had.

The Neo Geo asterisk

Neo Geo ‘runs perfectly’ is true and also a trap. The SNK MVS library of officially released cartridges numbers around 150 titles. When a preloaded card’s Neo Geo folder shows 412 entries — a figure that recurs across bundles — roughly 260 of those are regional duplicates, bootleg conversions, and hacks. The Metal Slug series (Nazca and SNK, from 1996 onward) runs beautifully; so do The King of Fighters entries and Garou: Mark of the Wolves. But the folder is a microcosm of the whole list: a genuinely excellent, fully playable catalogue, padded to nearly triple its real size so a number on a webpage looks bigger. If you want to understand how the emulator cores that make this possible are chosen and configured, our walkthrough on picking the right RetroArch core in 14 steps covers the exact mechanics OnionUI hides behind its menus.

Where the wall is

The same 2026 guide is blunt about the ceiling: Nintendo DS is not supported because there is ‘no working core for this hardware.’ That is the honest version. The subtler truth is that a DS core does technically exist in newer OnionUI builds — version 4.3.0 added one — but it is out of practical scope. The DS was a two-screen, touch-driven machine; the Miyoo Mini Plus has one 3.5-inch screen, no touch, and a 1.2GHz dual-core Cortex-A7 that cannot brute-force the emulation. Loading Pokémon Black 2 onto this device is a category error, not a feature. Anything above the PS1 tier — DS, PSP, Saturn, GameCube — is either impossible or a slideshow, whatever the reseller’s spreadsheet claims.

The Numbers: 6,041 vs 25,966 vs 28,000

Now the autopsy. Three numbers dominate the listings, and no two sellers agree, which is itself the most honest thing about them. The disagreement is the data point.

Every seller quotes a different figure

A community aggregation via the GameCove project lands at 6,041 games. A 2023 Reddit thread records a seller claiming the card came with 25,966 games. A 2026 retail listing from Retro Game Intensity markets a ‘128GB Version (28,000 Games Built-in)’ package. Other sellers advertise 8,740, or 13,056 for a 32GB card, or 27,549 for 128GB. These are not five measurements of one library converging on a true value with some measurement error. They are five different piles of files. When your data ranges from 6,041 to 28,000 for the ‘same’ device, the number is not describing the product. It is describing the seller’s ROM-set hygiene.

How one game becomes forty files

The inflation mechanism is mechanical and boring, which is why it works. Take the most famous game on the NES. In a raw dump set, it looks like this:

Super Mario Bros. (World).nes
Super Mario Bros. (USA).nes
Super Mario Bros. (Europe).nes
Super Mario Bros. (Japan, USA).nes
Super Mario Bros. (USA) (Rev A).nes
Super Mario Bros. (25th Anniversary Edition).nes
Super Mario Bros. (VS) [arcade port].nes
Super Mario Bros. (PC10) [hack].nes
...  8 files, 1 game

Eight files. One game. Now apply that multiplier across a No-Intro NES set, a full Redump PS1 set, every GBA revision, and every bootleg Neo Geo conversion, and the ‘28,000’ assembles itself without a single additional title of actual value. A Geekbuying Famicom list from May 2023 illustrates the padding perfectly: it includes Super Mario Bros. (25 Anniversary Edition) — a hack — sitting alongside legitimate Japanese classics like Gradius II (Konami, 1988), Akumajou Densetsu (that is Castlevania III in its home region), Akumajou Special: Boku Dracula-kun, and Gun-Dec (localised in the West as Vice: Project Doom). Real games and filler, counted identically.

What the honest count looks like

De-duplicate ruthlessly — one preferred region per title, no revisions, no hacks, no bootlegs — and the number collapses into the low thousands. That is not a knock on the device; a curated few thousand games spanning the GB-through-PS1 era is a staggering amount of the medium’s history in your pocket. It is a knock on the list, and on the resellers who would rather you believe you are buying 28,000 things than 3,000 good ones. We went deeper on this exact accounting in our companion piece on how a claimed twenty-five-thousand-plus ROMs shakes out; the arithmetic is identical no matter which inflated figure a seller picks.

The Hardware Under the Catalog

A list is only as good as the machine that runs it. The Miyoo Mini Plus hardware is a known quantity, and knowing it explains every ‘runs’ and ‘does not run’ above. Here is the spec sheet that actually matters, then a representative slice of the library judged against it.

The SoC and the 128MB ceiling

The heart is a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with a Mali-400 MP2 GPU and just 128MB of RAM. That RAM figure is the single most important number on the device and the one no reseller prints. 128MB is why the PS1 is the ceiling: a PlayStation game’s working set fits; a PSP or DS game’s does not. Adam Conway’s XDA review named the silicon precisely — ‘dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB’ — and correctly predicted it would never trouble a benchmark while remaining ‘more than good enough for most retro titles.’ The chip is not the story. The chip is the wall.

The screen and the missing analog stick

The 3.5-inch 640×480 IPS panel is the device’s best feature: bright (PropelRC measured it around 450 nits, ‘playable outdoors’), sharp, and a perfect 4:3 for the systems that matter. The device’s worst feature is the thing it lacks: there is no analog stick. None. It is a d-pad and face buttons, full stop. For everything up to the PS1’s 2D output, that is correct and even preferable. For 3D games that assume a stick — every N64 title, every Dreamcast game, the entire PSP library the resellers love to list — it is a permanent handicap that no firmware can patch. Below is a representative slice of a preloaded card, judged against this hardware:

A representative slice of the ‘list’

Read that table from the bottom up and the whole review is in it. Crisis Core is on plenty of reseller lists. It cannot run — a 2007 PSP action-RPG on a 128MB Cortex-A7 is a non-starter. Sonic Adventure and Super Mario 64 technically boot but demand an analog stick the device does not have. Everything from Gran Turismo 2 upward hits a wall the marketing pretends is not there. And everything from Symphony of the Night downward is exactly as good as promised. The list is a truthful document about two-thirds of the way down and a fantasy above it.

PlayStation 1: The Practical Ceiling

If the 8- and 16-bit tier is the device’s home, the PlayStation 1 folder is its crowning achievement and its natural limit. This is where the Miyoo Mini Plus earns the affection reviewers give it, and where the compromises start to bite.

What runs beautifully

The 2026 guide lists a deep bench of PS1 titles that run reliably: Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX; Crash Bandicoot 1–3; Spyro 1–3; Metal Gear Solid; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; Tekken 3; Resident Evil 1 and 2; Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2; Wipeout; and Ridge Racer. A 2026 retailer guide on Playhouse hedges it as running ‘most’ PS1 games and ‘many’ 2D fighters, which is the correct amount of caution. The 2D and fixed-camera catalogue — Symphony of the Night, the pre-rendered Final Fantasies, the sprite-based fighters — is flawless. Symphony of the Night deserves its own sentence: released by Konami in 1997 under director Toru Hagihara and assistant director Koji Igarashi, with a Michiru Yamane score, it is the game that fused Metroid’s map with an RPG’s stat sheet and gave the ‘Metroidvania’ its second half. On a 640×480 IPS panel it looks better than it did on a 1997 CRT in most living rooms.

Where the d-pad betrays you

The trouble is the same missing stick. PropelRC caught the exact failure mode: ‘minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2.’ Racing games and anything that assumes analog steering or camera control are playable but compromised — you are steering a 1999 driving sim with a digital pad, which the game was explicitly redesigned to accommodate on the DualShock and which the Miyoo throws away. Metal Gear Solid’s tank controls survive; Ape Escape, which literally requires two analog sticks, does not exist on this device in any meaningful sense. The PS1 folder is therefore split down the middle: the 2D and fixed-camera half is a triumph, and the analog-native half is a demo.

The historical weight of the PS1 folder

It is worth pausing on what this folder represents, because the reseller count actively obscures it. This is the library that carried the medium from sprites to polygons: Squaresoft’s three-disc Final Fantasy VII in 1997, Xenogears in 1998 under director Tetsuya Takahashi (who would leave to found Monolith Soft the following year — a detail worth getting right, since the game itself is pure Square), the survival-horror grammar Resident Evil codified. Hardcore Gaming 101’s book-length treatment of the Castlevania series, edited by Kurt Kalata, spends real pages on why Symphony of the Night reoriented an entire franchise. You can cross-reference nearly every marquee title against Wikipedia’s deep entries — the Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy VII pages alone are more curated than any ‘game list’ a reseller will hand you. That is the irony: the genuinely valuable index of this device’s library was written by volunteers, for free, years before the card in your hands existed.

N64 and Dreamcast: The ‘With Tweaks’ Tier

Above the PS1 sits a tier the resellers exploit shamelessly: the systems that sometimes run, under specific conditions, if you accept ugly compromises. The honest label is ‘with tweaks.’ The marketing label is ‘included.’

The three N64 games everyone tries

The 2026 guide is careful here in a way the listings are not. It says light N64 games — specifically Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye — can run ‘with tweaks.’ It then lists the demanding titles separately as tougher cases: Majora’s Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64. That separation is the entire truth of N64 on this device. The three ‘light’ games boot and are broadly playable if you fiddle with core settings and accept frame drops; the heavyweights — anything with the Expansion Pak’s memory appetite or dense geometry — are a chore or a no. And all of them are hamstrung by the absent analog stick, because the N64 controller’s stick was not an option, it was the defining input. If N64 is genuinely what you want in a handheld, the answer is not this device with tweaks; it is dedicated silicon. Our deep-dive on the Analogue 3D’s firmware and internal upscaling across twelve builds is what N64 done properly looks like, and it is a different price class for a reason.

Dreamcast as a party trick

The same source files Dreamcast under ‘light games’ as a partial, limited-use category rather than a full-performance platform — and names the usual suspects: Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone. Treat this as a party trick, not a feature. Yes, a preloaded card can boot Crazy Taxi. No, you should not buy this device to play it. The Dreamcast was a 1998 machine with a controller built around a single analog stick and analog triggers; the Miyoo has neither. What you get is a technically-impressive-that-it-runs-at-all demonstration, wrapped by a reseller into a bullet point that implies a Dreamcast experience the hardware cannot deliver. If your ambitions genuinely reach Dreamcast and PSP, the correct move is to spend more, and we lay out exactly why in our argument for why the $244 Retroid Pocket 6 still wins its class — a device with the RAM, the GPU, and the two analog sticks this one lacks.

The PSP titles that don’t run at all

Here is the smoking gun for the whole ‘game list’ con. A 2026 retail page for a 128GB Miyoo Mini Plus card lists, among its examples, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Brave Story: New Traveler, and Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. All three are PSP games. The PSP is not in the ‘with tweaks’ tier; it is not viable at all on a 128MB Cortex-A7, and every serious source — GBAtemp among them — says so flatly. These titles are on the list because they are files, and files get counted. They will sit in a folder on your card, appear in your ‘28,000,’ and never launch into anything playable. When a reseller pads the count with software the device physically cannot run, the count has stopped being a spec and become a lie of a particular, quantifiable kind.

Bundle Archaeology: What Resellers Ship

To review the list fairly you have to dig through the actual artifacts sellers have published over the years. They are surprisingly well-documented, and the documentation tells a consistent story: this device has always been sold as a curated-collection product, and the collections have always been messy.

The Geekbuying split lists (2023)

Geekbuying, a major reseller, published system-by-system lists for the Miyoo Mini Plus back in May 2023 — evidence the bundled-library ecosystem long predates the current 2026 marketing. Its Game Boy / Game Boy Advance list includes recognisable first-party and licensed handheld titles: Pokémon Blue Version, Pokémon Crystal Version (Rev A), and Donkey Kong Land. Its Mega Drive / Genesis list runs alphabetically through 688 Attack Sub, Aa Harimanada, AAAHH!!! Real Monsters, Addams Family Values, The Addams Family, and The Adventures of Batman & Robin — a spread of genuinely good games (the Batman & Robin platformer is a Sega technical showcase) and utter filler (a Japanese sumo game most Western buyers will never touch), counted with equal weight. The lists are real, the games are real, and the curation is nonexistent. That is the pattern, frozen in 2023.

The Onion gamelist PDFs

There is a 2024 Onion OS PDF titled simply ‘MIYOO MINI / PLUS’ circulating as a downloadable gamelist document. It matters as editorial evidence: community firmware and pack-specific lists are part of the device’s software identity, not an afterthought. People maintain these documents because the official manifest they want does not exist, so the community keeps re-deriving it, pack by pack, PDF by PDF. It is the clearest possible proof that ‘the list’ is a folk artifact — assembled from below, never issued from above. If you enjoy the folk-firmware rabbit hole, the same energy drives the whole alternative-OS scene; our Batocera 43.1 download-and-install walkthrough covers the desktop-class cousin of what OnionUI does on this handheld.

The 128GB card’s PSP tell

Return one more time to that 128GB listing, because it is the Rosetta Stone. Alongside the impossible PSP entries it also lists legitimately playable heavyweights — Xenogears, Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, WWF SmackDown! and SmackDown! 2: Know Your Role on PS1 — mixed indiscriminately with PSP software that will not boot. The card does not distinguish between ‘great and runs’ and ‘listed and doesn’t.’ Neither does the count. A buyer scanning that bullet list has no way to know that Xenogears is a triumph on this hardware and Crisis Core is dead weight, because the seller has deliberately flattened that distinction into a single big number. Bundle archaeology, in the end, always digs up the same fossil: a real, good, playable library, buried under padding designed to be counted rather than played.

How the Library Stacks Up

The Miyoo Mini Plus does not exist in a vacuum. Its whole class — sub-$70 handhelds sold with preloaded cards — makes the same promises, and the comparison clarifies what you are actually choosing between.

Versus the Anbernic RG35XX

The original Anbernic RG35XX is the natural rival: the same 3.5-inch 640×480 form factor, a similar price, the same ‘preloaded thousands’ pitch. On paper it out-specs the Miyoo — an Actions ATM7039S with four Cortex-A9 cores, a PowerVR GPU, and 256MB of RAM, double the Miyoo’s memory — and it pushes slightly past PS1 into light DS via the DraStic core. But XDA’s review notes the DS gains cost you dearly, dropping battery to ‘two to three hours’ under DS emulation. The Miyoo answers with firmware. As gogamegeek put it bluntly, ‘the miyoo has a far better custom OS,’ and that is the crux: in this class, firmware beats silicon. OnionUI’s polish, save-state handling, and battery tuning make the weaker chip feel like the better product for the tier both devices actually live in — PS1 and below.

Versus the H700 generation

Anbernic’s newer H700 units — the RG35XX Plus, H, SP, and 2024 — are the real spec upgrade: an Allwinner H700 with four Cortex-A53 cores, 1GB of LPDDR4, Bluetooth, and a mini-HDMI output the Miyoo lacks. They push into competent Dreamcast and light PSP. If you specifically want that extra tier and a TV-out, they are the smarter buy, and DroiX’s review is honest that the H700 ‘runs faster than the Miyoo processor.’ But note what you are buying: more capability the class-defining games do not need, and firmware ecosystems (Knulli, muOS) that are excellent but not, in my view, as frictionless as OnionUI. For the GB-through-PS1 library that is 90% of why anyone buys one of these, the Miyoo remains the better-tuned instrument.

Versus stepping up to a Retroid

The honest comparison, if the ‘28,000 games’ fantasy has you dreaming of GameCube and PSP, is not another sub-$70 brick — it is a step up in class entirely. A Retroid Pocket 6, at roughly $244, is a real Android machine with real RAM, a real GPU, and two analog sticks, and it makes the systems the Miyoo only pretends to run into genuine daily-drivers. The trade is price, size, and the pick-up-and-play simplicity that is the Miyoo’s entire charm. Choosing between them is really choosing what you want the ‘list’ to mean: a curated pocket museum of gaming’s first two decades, or a do-everything emulation slab. Both are valid. Only one costs $53.99.

Five Ways the List Actually Plays

Specs are abstractions. Here is how the game list behaves for five real kinds of player, because ‘28,000 games’ means something completely different depending on who is holding the device.

Casual and commuter: the home turf

For the casual player and the commuter, the Miyoo Mini Plus is close to perfect, and the sprawling list is a genuine feature rather than a liability. You are not auditing the catalogue; you are thumbing to Pokémon Crystal or Chrono Trigger on a train and playing for twenty minutes. The device weighs 165g, fits a jacket pocket at 108×78×22mm, and returns six to seven hours of SNES play (PropelRC measured OnionUI lifting it from a stock ‘4 hours’ to a real ‘7 hours’). Save states mean you never lose progress to a closing train door. This is the scenario the device was built for, and against it the list’s bloat simply does not matter — you were only ever going to touch a hundred of those games anyway, and they are all there. Pixel-Swish’s 2026 review, titled ‘Ok, I get the hype now,’ ranked The Minish Cap as its number-one experience on the device, which is exactly the kind of GBA gem this tier nails.

Completionist and speedrunner: the friction

For the completionist, the list is a trap. There is no reliable metadata, no verified ‘one canonical version per game,’ no box art curation worth the name — just thousands of dupes, regional variants, and bootlegs. You will spend more time culling and organising the card than playing it, and you will never be sure you have the ‘right’ version of anything. For the speedrunner, a different problem: emulation on a Cortex-A7 introduces input latency and per-core timing quirks that make this a practice device, not a run-verification one. It is fine for learning a GB or SNES route on the couch; it is not something you submit times from. Both of these players are fighting the list instead of enjoying it, and both would be better served curating a small, known-good card by hand.

Co-op and the collector

Co-op is the device’s genuine weak spot. There is no second controller, no Bluetooth to add one, and no HDMI to throw a two-player game onto a TV — three separate omissions that together kill couch multiplayer. The one bright spot is the OnionUI 4.4 beta line, which added netplay and even GBA link-cable emulation between two units, so two Miyoo owners can play a link-cable Pokémon trade or a versus match wirelessly. It is a lovely, narrow feature. For the collector and preservation-minded buyer, the list is a curiosity rather than an archive: a pile of unverified dumps of dubious provenance is the opposite of a preservation set. The clean version of that impulse — dumping your own carts — is covered in our Retrode guide to dumping SNES and Genesis carts in thirteen steps, and it is the only path that turns ‘a card of ROMs’ into ‘an archive you actually own.’

Who the List Is For

Reduced to use-cases, the recommendation is not ‘buy’ or ‘skip.’ It is ‘buy this configuration for this reason, and ignore the number entirely.’

Buy the bare device if…

Buy the bare $53.99 device — no preloaded card — if you are any of the following. The commuter who wants GB, GBC, GBA, and SNES in a pocket: curate a 32GB card yourself and you will have a flawless machine with none of the dupe clutter. The lapsed PS1 player revisiting Final Fantasy VII or Symphony of the Night: it is superb for the 2D and fixed-camera catalogue, provided you make peace with the missing analog stick for the 3D outliers. The purist who wants a clean conscience: image the card yourself with a legal curated homebrew set. There is no reason to pay a reseller to do a worse, murkier version of a job OnionUI makes trivial.

Buy a preloaded card if…

Buy a preloaded card only if you are the gift-giver handing this to someone who will never touch a firmware menu, and for whom ‘it works out of the box’ outweighs everything else. In that single case the count does not hurt you — the recipient will find their childhood games among the thousands and never notice the padding. For everyone else, the preloaded card is a convenience tax paid in clutter and legal ambiguity. And if your reason for wanting the big card is a hunger for N64, Dreamcast, or PSP, do not buy this device at all: that appetite is better fed by stepping up a class, as our Retroid Pocket recommendation lays out in full.

The clean, legal path

The law here is settled and worth stating plainly. Emulators themselves are legal — Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp. (9th Cir., 2000) established that reverse-engineering a console to build an emulator is fair use. Distributing and downloading copyrighted ROMs is not, and buying a card stuffed with 28,000 of them is buying commercial-scale infringement someone else committed. The clean paths are two: dump the carts you already own, or use legal curated homebrew collections such as the community-assembled Tiny Best Set: GO!, which packages public-domain and freely-distributable titles into a tasteful, small, actually-curated library — the honest answer to the question the ‘game list’ pretends to answer. None of this stops anyone from doing what they will with their own device; it just means the reseller’s big number is not a feature you should pay a premium for.

The Verdict: 7.5/10

We are reviewing a list, not a machine, and the two earn very different scores. The machine is a 9. The list is a 7.5, and the gap between them is the whole point.

What earns the score

The hardware is genuinely, unfussily excellent. A bright, sharp 640×480 IPS panel that PropelRC rates sharper than an original 3DS; six-to-seven-hour battery under OnionUI; a 165g pocketable body; flawless emulation of everything up to and including the 2D PlayStation catalogue; and the best custom firmware in its class by consensus. For $53.99 it is one of the great value objects in modern retro hardware, and the reviewers who scored the device itself 8.5 and 9 out of ten were not wrong to. When the list overlaps with the hardware’s real strengths — the entire GB-through-PS1-2D span — it is a magnificent little museum you can hold in one hand. Jimmy Maher, writing as The Digital Antiquarian, once noted that ‘in 1990 a survey found Mario to be more recognizable to American children than that most American of all cartoon icons — Mickey Mouse’; this device puts that entire cultural strata back in your pocket, and mostly it delivers.

What costs it

What drags the score down to 7.5 is the list as a product — the thing you actually searched for. It is an uncurated, dupe-laden, legally-dubious file tally dressed up as a library. It counts PSP games the device cannot run. It ranges from 6,041 to 28,000 depending on which seller you ask, which means the number describes the seller and not the device. It buries the genuinely great catalogue under bootlegs and bad dumps, and it hands you no metadata to dig it back out. The hardware’s real limitations — no analog stick, 128MB of RAM, no Bluetooth, slow 5W charging, no HDMI, a PS1 ceiling — are all fine and honestly priced, right up until a reseller pretends they do not exist to justify a bigger number.

The rating

Miyoo Mini Plus game list: 7.5/10. Buy the device; ignore the count. Curate your own card, or accept a preloaded one purely for convenience while understanding that its headline number is marketing, not a spec. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a superb $53.99 handheld saddled with a fictional catalogue, and the honest review is to praise the first and dismantle the second. There is no official Miyoo Mini Plus game list. There is a very good little machine, and a pile of files someone counted for you. Tell the difference, and you have made a great purchase. Believe the number, and you have been sold a spreadsheet.