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

There is no such thing as an official Miyoo Mini Plus game list. The firmware Miyoo actually ships, including the "Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware" package hosted on LOMIYOO's download page (the clearest named source in this whole ecosystem), arrives empty. A bare, OnionOS-ready card waiting for you to supply the contents. Everything you have read about "25,000 games built-in," "28,000 games built-in," or "11,000 titles preloaded" is describing something Miyoo did not put there: a reseller's ROM dump, sold as a feature, priced as a premium, and sitting legally somewhere between a grey area and a photocopied phone book.

So this is a review of the phone book. Not the handheld itself, we have covered the hardware and its identical-silicon relationship to the original Mini at length elsewhere, but the proposition: the bundled catalog that a $60 Linux toy gets dressed up as a "28,000-game console" to sell. The number is the pitch. The number is also the tell. And once you understand what the number is counting, you understand precisely what the Miyoo Mini Plus game list is worth: quite a lot, for about 300 of those games, and nothing whatsoever for the other 27,700.

Rating up front, because The Machine respects your time: 7.5 out of 10. The curated core is a 9. The padding, the copyright fog, the PlayStation ceiling, and the total absence of local multiplayer drag it down from there. Here is the long version.

What You're Actually Reviewing

The Game List Is the Product

When a reviewer sits down with Chrono Trigger, the game is the product and the cartridge is merely the delivery. When you sit down with a Miyoo Mini Plus "game list," the relationship inverts: the hardware is fixed and cheap and known, and the thing being sold, the thing with the variable price and the breathless marketing, is the curation. Or the lack of it. You are not reviewing a game. You are reviewing an act of librarianship, performed by an anonymous third party, and graded on whether that library is worth the SD card it's copied onto.

That reframing matters because it changes what "good" means. A good game list is not the biggest one. It is the one where the ratio of things-you-will-play to things-you-will-scroll-past is highest, where the emulation is honest about the hardware's limits, and where the person who built it understood that a handheld with a 3.5-inch screen and a two-hour commute in front of it does not need six regional variants of Tetris. By that standard, almost every commercial Miyoo bundle fails, and the device succeeds anyway, because the fix is a card reader and an afternoon.

The 28,000-Game Number Is a Reseller's Number

Here is the count chaos, laid out flat. Retro Game Intensity's product page, dated 2026-02-01, advertises a 128GB Miyoo Mini Plus with 28,000 games built-in. A separate storefront lists 13,056 / 25,966 / 27,549 across three storage tiers. The long-running "25,000 games" pitch anchors a EUR 109.90 European bundle. And an Amazon listing brags 11,000 games on a 128GB card for around $25, which, as we'll get to, is the single most reliable scam signal in the entire category.

Six different numbers, one identical piece of silicon. That alone should end the conversation. The count is not a property of the Miyoo Mini Plus; it is a property of whichever card a given seller shoved into the box. It correlates with storage capacity and marketing nerve, and with nothing (nothing) about how many of those files will boot, run at full speed, or be worth the thumb-cramp of scrolling to. If you want the deeper autopsy of that specific 28,000 claim, we have taken it apart line by line.

The Firmware Ships Empty

The honest baseline: Miyoo distributes firmware, not games. The device you buy from a reputable channel boots to an empty OnionOS install expecting you to add a /Roms folder tree and fill it. The moment a listing quotes a five-figure game count, you are no longer dealing with Miyoo. You are dealing with a middleman who copied a ROM set onto the card, and the copyright status of that set is exactly what you think it is. The Machine is not here to clutch pearls about emulation; preservation is a real and defensible practice. But a commercial seller charging a premium to distribute copyrighted commercial games is not preservation. It's distribution. Keep the distinction clear, because it's the difference between a hobby and a liability.

The Silicon That Sets the Ceiling

One Chip, One Limit

Every argument about the game list eventually collides with one component: the SigmaStar SSD202D. Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 at 1.2GHz, 128MB of DDR3, 16MB of SPI ROM, and, the decisive spec, a 2D-only GPU with no 3D acceleration whatsoever. That is the whole story of what the catalog can and cannot do. The Plus does not fix this. The original Mini used the same chip; the Plus is a bigger screen, a bigger battery, and Wi-Fi bolted to identical compute, which is why we keep insisting the two are the same machine in different clothes.

A 2D GPU means the ceiling is PlayStation 1, and even that is a software trick. PS1 emulation here is CPU-driven, leaning on the two A7 cores, which is why the crown jewel of the catalog is also its stress test. There is no headroom above it. None. This is not a device that will "get there with a future update." The chip cannot do the math.

The Three-Tier Reality

Playhouse's 2026 emulation guide does the single most useful thing any Miyoo write-up has done: it refuses to treat the device as a universal emulator and instead sorts systems into most games, light games, and not recommended. "Most games" covers Game Boy, GBC, GBA, NES, SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, Master System, Neo Geo, and the bulk of the PS1 library. "Light games" is a hedged, caveated tier for N64 and Dreamcast, a handful of titles that might run. "Not recommended" is PSP, DS, Saturn, and, this is the giveaway, Dreamcast again.

Yes: Playhouse lists Dreamcast in both the "light games" tier and the "not recommended" tier. That contradiction is not sloppiness; it's honesty. It tells you that Dreamcast on this chip is a coin-flip that mostly lands on "no," and that the six titles anyone cites as proof (Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Power Stone) are the exceptions that survive precisely because they get quoted so often. The tier system is the correct mental model for the entire game list. Adopt it.

What the Padding Hides

The consequence for the bundle is direct. A card advertising 28,000 games ships folders for systems the SSD202D physically cannot drive. N64 titles that stutter into a slideshow. PSP folders that are pure decoration. Those files pad the count and produce the fastest possible tell that a list is junk: if the seller is bragging about PSP or DS support on a 128MB, 2D-GPU handheld, they either don't know what they're selling or are counting on you not to. Every one of those unplayable folders is a game in the marketing count and a zero in the playable count.

The Spec Sheet Nobody Prints

The Catalog by the Numbers

Here is the game list treated as the product it is: a bundled catalog with attributes, limits, and a license status that the box art conveniently omits.

Reading the ROM Filenames

The most illuminating artifact in this whole category is the GeekBuying game list, an article from 2023, last updated 2024-10-31, that publishes the actual bundled filenames. It confirms the device is routinely sold with curated Game Boy and GBA libraries, and it hands you concrete examples: Donkey Kong.gb, Double Dragon.gb, Mega Man 1.gb, Final Fantasy Adventure.gb, Prince of Persia.gba. So far, so reasonable, those are real, playable, worth-having files.

Then it keeps going, and the mask slips:

2023 - Frogger Advance - The Great Quest.gba
2024 - Frogger's Adventures - The Rescue.gba
2025 - Frogger's Adventures - Temple of the Frog.gba
2026 - Shikakui Atama wo Marukusuru Advance.gba
...
2029 - Megaman Zero 4.gba

Those leading numbers look like release years. They are not. Frogger's Adventures: Temple of the Frog came out in the early 2000s; Mega Man Zero 4 in 2005. "2025," "2026," "2029" are row indices: line numbers in an unsorted database dump that happens to run past the 2,000 mark. That single detail tells you everything about how these lists are assembled: not curated, not deduplicated, not checked. Concatenated. A machine appended one ROM set to another until the folder was full, and a marketing team rounded the total up to 28,000.

What Actually Runs, Tier by Tier

The 8-bit and 16-bit Core (Full Speed)

This is where the list earns its 9. The SSD202D annihilates 8- and 16-bit software. NES, SNES, Game Boy, GBC, GBA, Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, PC Engine, all of it runs at full speed with save states, fast-forward, and pixel-clean scaling on the 640x480 IPS panel. The Playhouse guide's own example roster is the canonical shortlist: Pokemon, Zelda, Tetris, Kirby, Super Mario Bros., Contra, Mega Man, Chrono Trigger, Sonic, Streets of Rage, and Metal Slug. Every one of those is a bullseye. This is the library the device was built to run, and it runs it flawlessly.

Arcade sits comfortably in this tier too, within reason: CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards via FBNeo or MAME2003+ (Street Fighter II, Final Fight, the Capcom canon) and Neo Geo MVS once you supply the neogeo.zip BIOS. The 4:3 panel is the correct shape for almost all of it, which matters more than people admit, because you are not letterboxing a 16:9 abomination onto a vertical handheld.

The PlayStation Crown Jewel and Its Ceiling

PS1 is simultaneously the catalog's headline and its high-water mark. The right way to understand it: 2D and light-3D PlayStation software is the sweet spot, and heavy-3D software is the ceiling made visible. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Koji Igarashi's 1997 template for the entire Metroidvania form, is the single best thing you can run on this device, because it's a 2D game on 32-bit hardware and the A7 cores never break a sweat. Xenogears, Symphony, the sprite-based RPGs: gorgeous.

Then you load Final Fantasy VII, and the ceiling introduces itself. It runs, it's playable, and Handheld Picker are right that this device "knows exactly what it is: a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming," but the battle-swirl transition flickers, load times lengthen, and you feel the CPU doing PS1's job by brute force. That's not a bug to be patched. That's the SSD202D at the edge of its envelope. The PlayStation library is the reason to buy in, and its heaviest titles are the reason you won't buy up.

The Light-Games Mirage and the Not-Recommended Pile

Above PS1, the catalog turns to set dressing. Playhouse's "light games" tier names Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye, Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone as N64/Dreamcast titles that may run with caveats. Read "may" and "caveats" as load-bearing. Some boot; most that boot don't hold framerate; and the N64's analog-heavy control scheme runs headlong into a device with no analog stick. Playhouse's own verdict, "N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss. PSP is not recommended," is the polite version.

The "not recommended" pile is unambiguous: PSP, DS, Saturn, and the bulk of Dreamcast. These do not belong on the SSD202D and their presence in a bundle is pure count-padding. If you want to actually play that software portably, you are shopping for a different class of machine, the Retroid Pocket line and its real GPU, and you are spending three to four times as much to get it. That's not a knock on the Miyoo. It's the definition of its lane.

The Flagship Titles as a Set

The RPGs

Judge the list by its RPGs and it looks like a masterpiece, because the RPGs are the genre the hardware serves best and the genre these dumps always include. Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995) is the benchmark: the product of Square's so-called "Dream Team," Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama on character art, and it runs here without a single compromise. Final Fantasy VII (PS1, 1997) is the headline that shows the ceiling. Xenogears (PS1, 1998), the marquee PS1 name on Retro Game Intensity's own listing, is playable with the long load times its sprawl always demanded. The through-line: this device is a portable JRPG shrine, and the JRPG is exactly what a small screen and a long battery are for.

The Arcade Row

The arcade selection is the list's second-strongest suit. Retro Game Intensity's page names Alien vs. Predator, 1943: The Battle of Midway, and The King of Fighters '98 alongside its PS1 and Neo Geo haul. KOF '98, subtitled The Slugfest in Japan and forever known to the fighting-game crowd as the "Dream Match" that folded the entire roster into one game with no story to justify it, is a genuine showcase for a 4:3 handheld, provided you can live without a second player. Metal Slug, from the short-lived Nazca team later absorbed into SNK, is the run-and-gun the histories at Hardcore Gaming 101 rightly treat as a high-water mark for pixel animation. All of it runs.

The Curios

Then there are the entries that reveal the dump's provenance. Prince of Persia.gba is a real inclusion, and it's a fine excuse to remember that Jordan Mechner built the 1989 original on the Apple II by rotoscoping footage of his own brother running around a parking lot, a story The Digital Antiquarian tells in full. Final Fantasy Adventure.gb is the 1991 Game Boy title known in Japan as Seiken Densetsu, the seed of the entire Mana series, filed in the bundle under a name most buyers won't recognize. These are the good kind of deep cut. They're also, tellingly, adjacent in the same file list to four Frogger games and a numbering scheme that thinks Mega Man Zero 4 came out in the year 2029.

Here are five flagships graded as a set, peers in genre and vintage, judged on how the list actually delivers them:

Note the asterisk on Pokemon. It runs perfectly, but the device has no link cable and no local wireless pairing, so trading and battling, half the point of the games named in every bundle's marketing, is off the table. The list gives you the cartridge and quietly removes the schoolyard.

How It Stacks Up vs Rivals

vs the Original Mini's List

The original Miyoo Mini runs an identical catalog because it runs an identical chip. Same SSD202D, same PS1 ceiling, same OnionOS folder tree, just a 2.8-inch screen instead of 3.5, a smaller battery, and no Wi-Fi. Any "game list" advantage one has over the other is illusory; they are the same library on the same silicon. The only real difference is that the original Mini is largely discontinued new in 2026, pushed aside, as EZRetro's 2025 coverage noted, when production shifted in favor of the Plus for its larger screen, bigger body, and Wi-Fi. If you find a Mini cheap, the list plays the same. You're just giving up screen and stamina.

vs the RG35XX's Bundle

The Anbernic RG35XX Plus is the more interesting rival, because its bigger number is actually backed by more silicon: an Allwinner H700 quad-core Cortex-A53 with a Mali-G31 GPU and 1GB of RAM. That reaches into selective Dreamcast, N64, and PSP, genuinely above the Miyoo's ceiling. But DROIX's own review, while conceding "the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor," also grants that the Miyoo's "128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need." The RG35XX's list is wider and messier; the Miyoo's is narrower and cleaner. If you want the full argument, we've mapped where each list wins. The short version: the RG35XX gives you a bigger slideshow to go with a bigger core, and its firmware is weaker out of the box.

vs Building Your Own

The rival that beats every commercial bundle is the one you assemble yourself. Buy the bare device, wipe the card, and drop ~300 chosen ROMs into the OnionOS tree, and you get a list with a zero-percent browsing tax: every entry is something you decided to keep. Purists chasing genuine cycle accuracy rather than a good-enough A7 approximation should look past all of these to the FPGA world, which is a different hobby at a different price. But for a pocket machine, hand-curation wins outright. The OnionOS /Roms tree makes it trivial:

/Roms
  FC/       NES / Famicom
  SFC/      Super Nintendo
  GB/       Game Boy
  GBC/      Game Boy Color
  GBA/      Game Boy Advance
  MD/       Mega Drive / Genesis
  PCE/      PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
  NEOGEO/   Neo Geo (MVS) - needs neogeo.zip BIOS
  ARCADE/   CPS-1 / CPS-2 via FBNeo / MAME2003+
  PS/       PlayStation (.chd / .pbp) - the ceiling
  WS/       WonderSwan

Pricing, Availability, Clone Trap

The Price-Chaos Table

The pricing tells the same story as the game count: the more games a listing brags about, the more it charges for the same hardware. That is the browsing tax made literal. A device that sells bare for roughly $55-65 becomes a EUR 109.90 "25,000-game" bundle the moment someone copies a ROM set onto the card. You are paying a premium for files you could add for free, and for the privilege of not knowing whether any of them are good dumps.

The $25 Scam Tell

Fix that bottom row in your memory. A 128GB Miyoo Mini Plus advertising "11,000 games" for around $25 is not a bargain; it is a clone. The genuine device does not sell that low, full stop. At that price you are buying a counterfeit shell with a mismatched screen, a worse battery, firmware that may never take an OnionOS update, and a card full of the same padded dump, minus the one thing that made it tolerable, which was working hardware. A high game count wrapped around a suspiciously low price is the oldest trap in this category. The real floor is the mid-$50s.

What to Actually Pay

The Machine's guidance is simple. Target the bare or lightly-bundled device at $55-65 / GBP 55-60, ignore the game count entirely, and treat any card that ships with it as a formatting exercise rather than a feature. If a listing's headline is a number with four or five digits in it, mentally subtract that number to zero and re-evaluate whether the hardware price is still fair. Usually it is. Occasionally, the EUR 109.90 bundles, the $79.99 "regular" pricing, it is not, and you're paying a curator who didn't curate.

Five Ways It Actually Plays

The Casual and the Completionist

The casual player is the ideal customer for this list, and the person the marketing is genuinely honest with. You want Super Mario Bros., a Pokemon game, Sonic, maybe Tetris for the bus. The bundle hands you all of it running perfectly, and the 27,000 games you'll never touch cost you nothing but scroll time. GamesRadar's reviewer captured this exact conversion: "I used to insist nothing beat the real deal, but now nothing beats curling up with Miyoo Mini Plus handheld and my favorite retro games." For this user, the padded list is harmless clutter around a genuinely great core. A 9/10 experience.

The completionist has the worst time of anyone. A completionist wants a clean, deduplicated, verified set: one canonical version of each game, correctly named, correctly regioned. What the bundle delivers is the opposite: duplicate dumps, bad dumps, regional variants stacked three deep, and a numbering scheme that thinks 2029 is a year. The 28,000 count is actively hostile to completionism. This user should wipe the card on day one and rebuild from a known-good ROM set they curate themselves. A 4/10 out of the box, 9/10 after an afternoon of librarian work.

The Speedrunner and the Co-op Player

The speedrunner gets a mixed bag. OnionOS's custom RetroArch build with save states and rewind is a legitimate practice tool, and the 4:3 screen is honest about aspect ratio. But two problems bite: input latency on an A7-class handheld is not competition-grade, and the emulation is not cycle-accurate, so frame-timing and RNG can diverge from reference hardware. For learning routes and grinding movement, it's fine. For submitting times, you want a properly characterized setup, not a $60 pocket emulator. A 6/10.

The co-op player hits a wall the game list papers over completely. There is no second controller port, no link cable, and no Bluetooth. The catalog is stuffed with two-player classics (Streets of Rage, Contra, Double Dragon, KOF '98) and you can play exactly none of them with a friend in the room. Wi-Fi netplay technically exists in OnionOS, but it's fiddly and best-effort, not couch co-op. If shared play matters to you, this is the list's single biggest lie of omission. A 3/10.

The Commuter

The mobile / commuter player is the second bullseye after the casual. The 3.5-inch, deck-of-cards form factor, the ~121g weight, and the 3000mAh battery (Playhouse measures "6 to 8 hours of mixed use with the screen at 50% brightness") make this a near-perfect thing to carry. Instant sleep/resume via OnionOS means you close it mid-battle and reopen exactly there when the train arrives. A JRPG you'll play for eighty hours in twenty-minute increments is the killer app, and the list is drowning in them. A 9/10.

Who This List Is For

Five Straight Recommendations

The Machine deals in specifics, not vibes. Here is who should and shouldn't put money down.

1. Buy it if you want a pocket JRPG and 16-bit machine. The 8-bit-to-PS1 core is the best-in-class experience at this price and size. Retro Handheld HQ is right that "it's still the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026," and that "OnionOS transforms this device." This is the device's home turf.
2. Buy it if you'll build your own list. The single highest-value move is to treat the bundle as a blank card. Wipe it, drop in ~300 curated ROMs across the OnionOS folder tree, and you own the best small handheld experience going, tax-free.
3. Buy it as a first retro handheld or a gift. Cheap, tiny, idiot-proof once set up, and stuffed with recognizable classics that run perfectly. For a lapsed player who just wants Pokemon on the couch, it's ideal. Tom Fichtner's 2025 review handing it a 5/5 is not unreasonable framing for this exact buyer.
4. Do NOT buy it for anything above PS1. If your want-list is PSP, DS, Saturn, or serious N64 and Dreamcast, this chip cannot serve you and no game list will change that. Spend three to four times more on a Retroid-class device with a real GPU instead.
5. Do NOT buy it for local multiplayer or a clean, complete set. No link cable, no second pad, and a bundle that's a padded dump rather than a curated library. Co-op players and completionists will be frustrated on day one.

The One-Sentence Filter

If your favorite games came out before the PlayStation and you play alone on a train, this is a near-perfect object. If either of those clauses is false, the size of the game list is not going to rescue the fit.

The Ledger: Pros and Cons

What the List Gets Right

• A world-class 8-bit-to-PS1 core. NES, SNES, GB/GBC/GBA, Genesis, PC Engine, Neo Geo, arcade, and 2D PlayStation all run at full speed with save states. The genres that matter here (JRPG, Metroidvania, run-and-gun, fighting) are exactly the ones the hardware serves best.
• OnionOS. The custom RetroArch build, auto-save/resume, box-art scraping over Wi-Fi, and clean folder structure are the real reason the device stays relevant. Handheld Gaming Community: OnionOS "elevates the user experience to a level far beyond the stock firmware."
• Form factor and battery. ~121g, 3.5-inch 4:3 IPS, 6-8 real hours, instant sleep. A genuinely superb thing to carry.
• Price of the hardware. Mid-$50s to mid-$60s for the device is honest value. RetroResolve: "For the price, I'll happily admit the Miyoo Mini is easily the best budget handheld available."

Where It Falls Down

• The count is a lie. 28,000 / 27,549 / 25,000 / 11,000 all describe padded, duplicate-laden dumps of copyrighted games that Miyoo never shipped. The real playable set is ~300.
• The PS1 ceiling is hard. The 2D-only SSD202D means FF7 flickers and everything above PS1 is decoration. No update fixes silicon.
• No multiplayer. No link cable, no second controller, no couch co-op, on a catalog full of two-player classics.
• Copyright fog. The premium bundles are commercial distribution of infringing ROM sets. That's a liability the box art hides.
• Price-vs-count inversion. The bigger the advertised list, the more you pay for identical hardware and files you could add yourself.

The Verdict

The Rating: 7.5 / 10

The Miyoo Mini Plus game list is two products wearing one price tag. There is the genuine article: a tight, brilliant, full-speed library of the best software ever made for the Game Boy, the SNES, the Genesis, the Neo Geo, and the 2D PlayStation, delivered on a pocket machine with a superb frontend and a real battery. That product is a 9. And there is the marketing fiction wrapped around it: the five-figure count, the padded dumps, the unplayable N64 and PSP folders, the EUR 109.90 browsing tax, the $25 clones, which is a 4, and which exists purely to make the first product sound bigger than it is.

Average those honestly, weight for the fact that the fiction is easily deleted and the excellence is not, subtract for the hard PS1 ceiling and the total absence of multiplayer, and you land at 7.5 out of 10. Playhouse's 4.5/5 and Tom Fichtner's 5/5 are reviewing the good half and rounding up; The Machine is reviewing the whole listing, count and all, and the count costs it points it didn't have to lose.

The Move

Buy the bare device in the mid-$50s. Ignore every number over four digits. Wipe the card, build your own ~300-game list in the OnionOS /Roms tree, and you will own one of the best small things in the hobby. The Miyoo Mini Plus is not the strongest budget handheld of 2026: Handheld Picker's line that "it is no longer the strongest budget handheld; it is still one of the nicest small ones" is exactly correct. The game list, once you strip the lie off it, is the reason why. Nine out of ten games in the marketing are noise. The tenth is the reason you'll still be playing this thing on the train in 2028.