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

Type miyoo mini plus game list into a search bar and you have asked a question that has no author. There is no official roster. Miyoo — the Shenzhen outfit that stamps out the hardware — sells a plastic shell, a screen, and a SigmaStar system-on-chip. It does not publish a catalogue, because the games are not Miyoo's to publish, and because the entire commercial appeal of the device rests on the polite fiction that whatever arrives on the bundled microSD card is somebody else's problem. The game list you are hunting is not a document. It is a folder tree that a reseller copied onto a card, and it changes with every batch.

This review is not a listing. A listing would be dishonest — it would imply a canon where none exists. Instead this is a review of the situation: the hardware, the firmware that makes it worth owning, the four or five emulation tiers that separate what actually runs from what a product photo promises, and the handful of games that genuinely justify keeping the thing in a coat pocket. Along the way we will name the numbers, name the sources, and name the lies. The verdict, for the impatient, is a 7.5 out of 10 — a superb little machine attached to a marketplace that will cheerfully sell you a spreadsheet's worth of ROMs it can't run.

The Search Term With No Answer

The gap between what people search for and what exists is the whole story here, so it is worth sitting inside that gap for a moment before we talk about silicon.

What the search actually returns

Search results for the phrase resolve into three buckets, none of them official. The first is reseller marketing: AliExpress and boutique-store listings that headline a game count as a selling point, the way a hard drive is sold on capacity. The second is community curation — Reddit threads, itch.io collections assembled by named hobbyists such as vdlroberts and AsiagoCheeseBagel, and versioned PDFs like the one 8bitstick circulates under the blunt title "MIYOO MINI / PLUS," tied to the Onion firmware ecosystem. The third is emulation guides — Playhouse.io, GBAtemp, GeekBuying's old 2023 catalogue dumps — that describe what the device can run rather than what any given card does contain. Bubbleretro's page on the device puts it plainly: a complete list is impractical because stock cards ship with anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000-plus games. There is no master document because there is no master.

The number nobody can agree on

Watch the figures refuse to converge. GameCove's aggregation lands on 6,041 titles. A widely circulated 64GB card is quoted at 25,966. Retrogameintensity has marketed a 128GB "gamelist" at a round 28,000 games. Other sellers advertise 8,740. These are not measurements of the same thing — they are inventory counts of different SD images, and every one of them is inflated by the same structural padding: regional duplicates (USA, EUR, JPN of a single title), revisions (Rev A, Rev 1.1), fan translations, ROM hacks, and outright bootlegs. The Neo Geo folder is the tell. A curated card will show roughly 412 Neo Geo entries against SNK's ~150 official MVS releases; the surplus 260-odd are dupes, hacks, and homebrew wearing the SNK logo. When a store says 28,000, read "28,000 files," not "28,000 games," and mentally divide by something between three and five.

Stock set versus best-of list

The single most useful editorial move — and the one every buyer should internalise — is to separate the stock set from the best-of list. The stock set is the padded pile: it exists to make a number big. The best-of list is the two or three hundred games you will actually load, launch, and finish. Retrogameintensity's own "highlights" reel accidentally proves the point by mixing systems the machine handles beautifully — WWF SmackDown! 2: Know Your Role, Xenogears, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories are all PlayStation 1, and all playable — with two it flatly cannot run: Brave Story: New Traveler and Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles are PSP titles, and the PSP is not viable on this hardware. A list that recommends games the device won't boot is not a list. It's a decoration.

What You're Actually Buying

Strip away the SD card and you are left with a genuinely lovely piece of industrial design running on almost comically modest silicon. The interesting engineering is in what Miyoo chose not to spend money on.

The SoC nobody benchmarks

The heart is a SigmaStar SSD202D — a dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with a Mali-400 MP2 GPU and 128MB of RAM. Read that again: 128 megabytes. This is a chip designed for smart speakers and IP cameras, repurposed to run 8-bit and 16-bit emulators, and it is exactly enough. XDA's Adam Conway, who scored the device 9/10, described the SoC as "dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB of RAM" and noted it is "not going to be setting benchmark records ... but that's more than good enough for most retro titles." That is the correct frame. The dual A7 is not competing with a Snapdragon; it is competing with a Super Nintendo, which it wins. It is a category error — one the reseller lists commit constantly — to expect it to touch PSP, Saturn, or anything with "HD" in the marketing. The ceiling is fixed by physics, not firmware.

The screen is the actual product

If the SoC is unremarkable, the panel is the reason the device developed a cult. It is a 3.5-inch IPS display at 640×480 in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio — a resolution that happens to be an exact integer multiple of the 320×240 output of most of the consoles it emulates, which means pixel-perfect scaling with no shimmer. PropelRC's review measured it at "450 nits brightness, making it playable outdoors," and worked out the pixel density: "the 640×480 resolution on a 3.5-inch panel gives you 229 PPI – sharper than the original Nintendo 3DS." Retro Game Corps, reviewing the earlier v2 that shares the panel, called the image simply "crisp." A Game Boy game on this screen looks better than it ever did on Nintendo's own greenish LCD. That is the whole value proposition in one sentence.

The full spec sheet

Here is the device laid out end to end, including the details the reseller listings bury — the missing Bluetooth, the missing video-out, the 5W charging that turns a top-up into a coffee break.

Field	Detail
SoC	SigmaStar SSD202D, dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 @ 1.2GHz
GPU	Mali-400 MP2
RAM	128MB DDR
Display	3.5in IPS, 640×480 (4:3), ~450 nits, ~229 PPI
Battery	3000mAh (some listings 3200) — ~7.5h Game Boy, 6-7h SNES, ~5h PS1
Weight / size	165g; 108 × 78 × 22mm
Ports	USB-C (data + 5W charge), microSD ×1, 3.5mm headphone
Wireless	Wi-Fi b/g/n; no Bluetooth
Video out	None (no HDMI)
Controls	D-pad, ABXY, dual shoulder (L1/L2, R1/R2), Start/Select, dual function/menu keys
Firmware	Stock Miyoo OS or community OnionOS (OnionUI v4.3.1-1 stable)
Save support	In-emulator save states + native battery/RTC saves; Game Switcher resume overlay
Emulation ceiling	PS1 (near-full); light N64 / Dreamcast with tweaks; PSP not viable
Launch price	~$53.99 bare / ~$59.99 with 64GB card / ~$69.99 with 128GB card
Release	2023 hardware; still the current SKU in 2026
Emulator legality	Emulators legal (Sony v. Connectix, 9th Cir. 2000); bundled ROMs are a separate legal question

Sixteen rows, and only two of them — the battery and the price — are things a reseller wants you to think about. The rest is where the honesty lives.

The Firmware Is the Product

Here is the counter-intuitive truth of this entire product category: the silicon is a commodity, and the software is the differentiator. Two handhelds with identical chips can feel a generation apart depending on whose custom firmware they run. On the Miyoo, that firmware has a name.

Stock versus OnionOS

The device boots a serviceable but plain stock Miyoo OS. Nobody keeps it. Within a day of purchase, virtually every owner flashes OnionOS — the community firmware built by the OnionUI project — and the transformation is not subtle. OnionOS adds box art, a proper Game Switcher overlay that resumes any title mid-session, RetroAchievements, save-state management, per-game and per-system configuration overrides, and, crucially, a battery-life improvement PropelRC quantified directly: stock "only manages 4 hours," while "with OnionOS installed, expect 6-7 hours playing SNES games at medium brightness." That is not a cosmetic mod. It is a 50-plus-percent uplift in runtime from software alone, which tells you how much the stock firmware was leaving on the table. Choosing the right emulator core for each system is its own small discipline; if you want to understand why fceumm beats one alternative and Snes9x another, our walkthrough on picking the right RetroArch core covers the logic that OnionOS mostly automates for you.

The version numbers resellers get wrong

If a store or a blog quotes you an Onion version, check it, because most of them are stale. The real project is OnionUI (hosted on GitHub), and the stable release has been frozen at v4.3.1-1 since mid-2024. The only newer tag is a beta, v4.4.0-beta-20260120, dated January 2026, which makes gpSP the default Game Boy Advance core, adds netplay (including a Game Boy link cable between two units), and improves the Game Switcher. Anything advertising "Onion 1.6" or "Onion 2.0" is quoting a build that is years out of date — a reliable signal that the seller copied their card image a long time ago and never revisited it. The 4.3 line, incidentally, is where Nintendo DS and PICO-8 cores were added; the DS core technically exists but is impractical on a single non-touch 3.5-inch screen, so treat it as out of practical scope rather than a feature.

The alternatives worth knowing

OnionOS is the default recommendation, but it is not the only firmware. Allium, MinUI, DotUI, Koriki, and the MiyooCFW fork all target the device, each trading features for minimalism at a different ratio — MinUI in particular strips the experience to a clean list with instant resume, for people who find OnionOS busy. There is no wrong answer, but there is a popular one, and OnionOS is it by a wide margin. If your ambitions run past what a 128MB handheld can do — bigger systems, a television, a proper file manager — that is a different class of project entirely, and a Batocera build on a mini PC is the honest upgrade rather than fighting the SSD202D.

The Emulation Tiers: What Runs and What Lies

Every serious discussion of the "game list" is really a discussion of tiers, because the card's value collapses to the question of what fraction of its 28,000 files actually run at full speed. Playhouse.io's 2026 emulation guide draws the lines about as cleanly as anyone, and our own testing agrees with the shape of it.

The "perfect" tier: 8-bit, 16-bit, Neo Geo

This is the tier that makes the device worth owning, and it is enormous. Playhouse.io lists Game Boy / Game Boy Color, GBA, NES / Famicom, SNES / Super Famicom, Mega Drive / Genesis, Master System, and Neo Geo as running "perfectly," and that is not marketing hedge — it is accurate. Pokémon, Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Chrono Trigger, Sonic, and Metal Slug all run at full frame rate with room to spare. XDA's verdict was that "Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly," and PropelRC's playthrough note is the quotable benchmark for the whole tier: "Chrono Trigger (SNES): Perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough." If your entire library lives at or below the 16-bit line — and for most buyers it should — this device is effectively flawless, and everything above this tier is a bonus you should treat with suspicion.

PS1: a treat, with an asterisk

PlayStation 1 is where the marketing and the reality begin to drift, and where a careful reviewer earns their keep. Playhouse.io files PS1 under "mostly playable," and that qualifier matters. XDA called PS1 games "a treat to play anywhere," and the greatest hits genuinely deliver: Playhouse.io's full-speed list runs through Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, Crash Bandicoot 1-3, Spyro 1-3, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 1 and 2, Resident Evil 1 and 2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2, Wipeout, and Ridge Racer. But the asterisk is real. PropelRC caught it precisely: "PlayStation 1: Excellent for most games, minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2." The dual A7 is running an interpreter, not a dynamic recompiler with headroom, so the most demanding 3D titles will dip. PS1 on this machine is a joy that occasionally reminds you it is being emulated by a smart-speaker chip. That is the true ceiling, and it is a high one.

N64, Dreamcast, and the PSP lie

Above PS1, the honesty tax comes due. Playhouse.io limits N64 to lighter titles — Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye "with tweaks" — and Dreamcast to a short list of forgiving games: Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone. GBAtemp's assessment matches: light N64 runs near full speed, demanding N64 lands at 70-85%, and anything past that is a slideshow. Treat these as party tricks, not a library. If N64 is the thing you actually came for, the machine you want is not this one — it is a purpose-built device like the Analogue 3D with its firmware-based N64 upscaling, which exists precisely because software emulation of the N64 on cheap ARM is a compromise. And then there is the PSP, which several reseller "highlight" lists include and which simply does not work: the presence of Brave Story: New Traveler or Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles on a card is not a feature, it is padding for the file counter. Here is the whole ladder in one view.

System	Typical Onion core	Real-world result	Verdict
Game Boy / GBC	Gambatte / SameBoy	Full speed, ~7.5h battery	Perfect
GBA	gpSP (default in 4.4) / mGBA	"Run flawlessly" — XDA	Perfect
NES / SNES	FCEUmm / Snes9x	Full speed; "Perfect 60fps" — PropelRC	Perfect
Genesis / Master System	Genesis Plus GX	Full speed	Perfect
Neo Geo / CPS-1/2	FBNeo	Full speed (Metal Slug, etc.)	Perfect
PlayStation 1	PCSX ReARMed	Mostly full; "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2"	A treat, with an asterisk
Nintendo 64	Mupen64Plus	SM64 / MK64 / GoldenEye "with tweaks"; demanding 70-85%	Marginal
Dreamcast	Flycast	Sonic Adventure / Crazy Taxi / Power Stone only	Light titles only
PSP	—	Not viable	Skip

The Games That Justify the Card

Enough about counts and tiers. A game list is worthless without games, so here is the smaller, defensible list — the two or three dozen titles that are the actual reason to own the thing, weighted toward the tiers where the device is flawless. PlayRetro's French feature page names a serviceable canon of staples for exactly this purpose: Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Pokémon Red/Blue, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter II, Mega Man X, Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy VI, Mortal Kombat, Chrono Trigger, and Mario Kart. Every one of those runs perfectly. Let us go deeper.

The 16-bit canon

This is the device's home turf, and the games here are not merely playable — they are definitive on this screen. Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995) was built by Square's so-called Dream Team — Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, and artist Akira Toriyama, scored by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu — and it remains the single most-recommended game to load first, for good reason. Final Fantasy VI (SNES, 1994, released in North America as "Final Fantasy III") gives you Kefka, the World of Ruin, and a fourteen-character cast that a 128MB handheld renders without breaking a sweat. The Digital Antiquarian's essay "Generation Nintendo" is the essential long-read on why this 8- and 16-bit canon imprinted so hard on a generation — context that explains why this specific library, on this specific screen, sells a device with a smart-speaker CPU.

The PS1 heavy-hitters

The PS1 folder is where the device flexes past its price. The crown jewel is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1, 1997), directed by Toru Hagihara with Koji Igarashi — the "IGA" whose name is now shorthand for the whole genre — as assistant director, and scored by Michiru Yamane. It is a 2D game running on 3D hardware, which means it runs perfectly here and looks glorious doing it. Hardcore Gaming 101's 158-page Castlevania book, edited by Kurt Kalata, is the authority if you want the lineage that produced it. Elsewhere in the folder sit the Final Fantasy trilogy — VII through IX — and Xenogears (Square, 1998, directed by Tetsuya Takahashi). A note for the pedants, because the reseller blurbs get this wrong: Xenogears was a Square title, made before Takahashi founded Monolith Soft in 1999, so any listing crediting it to Monolith has its history backwards.

The handheld natives, and a comparison

Do not overlook the games that were born on handhelds, because they were designed for exactly this form factor. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA, 2004, Capcom and Flagship, with its Kinstone-fusing hook) was named GBA Game of the Year by GameSpot in 2005, and the 2026 Pixel-Swish review ranked it the number-one game on the entire device — a defensible call. The Pokémon line, from Red/Blue through the Crystal that shows up in GeekBuying's old catalogue, is arguably the platform's killer app. To make the trade-offs concrete, here are five marquee titles across the RPG / action-adventure spine, and how each behaves on the Mini Plus.

Game	Platform	Year	Genre	Runs on MMP?	The one-line case
Chrono Trigger	SNES	1995	JRPG	Full speed	The Dream Team's masterpiece; "Perfect 60fps" confirmed
Final Fantasy VI	SNES	1994	JRPG	Full speed	Kefka, the World of Ruin, 14 characters, zero strain
Symphony of the Night	PS1	1997	Action-RPG	A treat	2D game on 3D hardware — flawless here
Xenogears	PS1	1998	JRPG	Playable	Square, not Monolith; disc-two-heavy but runs
The Minish Cap	GBA	2004	Action-adventure	Flawless	Handheld-native; ranked #1 on the device by Pixel-Swish

How It Actually Plays

A spec sheet tells you nothing about the felt experience of the thing in a hand, in a pocket, on a train. Here are five honest scenarios — the same hardware behaving very differently depending on who is holding it.

The casual and the completionist

For the casual, this is close to a perfect object. You buy it, flash OnionOS, and spend evenings picking one 16-bit game at a time off a clean list. The Game Switcher overlay means you can put down Super Mario World mid-level, sleep the device, and resume in under two seconds three days later. Nothing about the padded card matters, because you only ever touch the top of the pile. For the completionist, the story is more complicated. The 8- and 16-bit systems will happily see a game through to 100% — battery saves and save states are rock-solid, and the ~7.5-hour Game Boy runtime outlasts most sittings. But a completionist chasing PS1 100% runs — every card in a Final Fantasy IX playthrough, say — will eventually hit the reality that the card is riddled with duplicate and low-quality dumps. PropelRC's advice stands: some of the bundled ROMs are "low-quality" and you should "replace immediately" with clean dumps you trust. The completionist's real enemy is not the CPU; it is the reseller's quality control.

The speedrunner and the co-op pair

The speedrunner should approach with clear eyes. For 8- and 16-bit categories the device is frame-accurate enough for casual practice, and the input latency on the stock buttons is low. But no serious run is being submitted from a handheld — the emulator cores prioritise compatibility over cycle-perfect timing, and any PS1 category is disqualified the moment Gran Turismo 2-class slowdown enters the picture. Use it to learn a route on the couch; verify on original hardware or a reference emulator. The co-op pair got a genuine upgrade in 2026: the OnionOS 4.4 beta added netplay, including a Game Boy link-cable emulation between two Mini Pluses over Wi-Fi. That makes Pokémon trading and two-player Game Boy games viable between two owners for the first time on this device. It is fiddly to set up and it is beta, but it works, and it is the single most interesting new capability the platform has gained since launch.

The commuter

This is the scenario the device was born for, and where it beats every larger rival. At 165 grams and 108 × 78 × 22mm it is a true trouser-pocket machine — smaller in footprint than an original RG35XX, if slightly thicker. The 450-nit screen is, per PropelRC, "playable outdoors," which matters on a sunlit platform. A Game Boy or SNES commute drains the battery at a rate that survives a full day of travel on a single charge. The one caveat is the 5W charging — XDA flagged the "slow 5W charging" as a genuine con, and it is: a flat device needs the better part of an evening to refill. The commuter's move is to charge overnight and never think about it. As a pocket emulator for the sub-PS1 canon, nothing at this price is meaningfully better.

Pricing and What to Actually Buy

The buying decision is not "which card has the most games." It is "what am I actually paying for, and what is the honest way to fill it." Both questions have cleaner answers than the marketplace wants you to believe.

The price ladder

The device is cheap, and the card is where sellers add margin. The bare unit runs about $53.99 — the figure PropelRC built its "$53 price point" verdict around. Add a 64GB card of ~25,966 claimed ROMs and the price rises to roughly $59.99; a 128GB card at a claimed 28,000 pushes to about $69.99. Note what that math implies: doubling the storage and adding ~2,000 to the headline count costs ten dollars, because the marginal "games" are duplicates and junk that cost the seller nothing to copy. You are paying for flash capacity, not curation.

Configuration	Typical 2026 price	What's on it	Our take
Bare Mini Plus (no card)	~$53.99	Stock firmware, empty	Buy this, add your own card
+ 64GB reseller card	~$59.99	~25,966 ROMs claimed	Padded; expect dupes and junk dumps
+ 128GB reseller card	~$69.99	~28,000 ROMs claimed (Retrogameintensity)	Same content, more duplicates
DIY curated set (e.g. Tiny Best Set: GO!)	$0 + your own dumps	A few hundred hand-picked games	The honest answer

The legal reality

Since we are The Machine and we know the law: the emulators are legal. This was settled in Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (9th Circuit, 2000), which held that reverse-engineering a console's BIOS to build an emulator is fair use. What that ruling did not bless is the distribution of copyrighted game ROMs — which is precisely what a 28,000-game card is. The device is clean; the pre-loaded card occupies a legal grey-to-black zone that the sellers survive only through obscurity and volume. The buyer who cares can sidestep the whole question by dumping their own cartridges — a cart you own, dumped to a file you made, is the clean path — or by sticking to homebrew.

The honest card, and its shape

The defensible answer to "what should I put on it" is a curated, mostly-legitimate set rather than a reseller dump. The community-assembled Tiny Best Set: GO! is the canonical example — a hand-picked best-of sized for exactly this class of device, with none of the padding. Whatever you load, the OnionOS card follows a predictable structure, and knowing it makes the difference between a device that boots and one that sulks:

/                       (microSD root)
├── miyoo283_fw.img     firmware image — must sit at root
├── BIOS/               PS1/Neo Geo BIOS files go here
├── Emu/                per-system emulator folders
│   ├── SFC/            Super Famicom / SNES
│   ├── PS/             PlayStation 1
│   └── GBA/            Game Boy Advance
├── Roms/               your games, sorted by system folder
├── RetroArch/          cores + shared config
└── miyoo/              OnionOS app + Game Switcher data

Get the firmware image at the root and the ROMs in the matching system folders, and the machine simply works. Most "my card won't boot" complaints are a firmware image dropped one folder too deep.

Who It's For (and Who Should Skip It)

Recommendations, then, in the plainest terms. Five use cases where this is the right buy, and the cases where your money belongs elsewhere.

Buy it if

1. Your library ends at the 16-bit line. If SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and GBA are your retro gaming, this device is effectively flawless and nothing cheaper matches its screen. 2. You want the smallest possible pocketable form. At 165g it out-pockets every rival; commuters and travellers should stop reading and buy. 3. You want a PS1 machine for the greatest hits, not the deep cuts. Symphony of the Night, FF VII-IX, Crash, Spyro, and Tekken 3 all sing; you will only meet the ceiling on the most demanding 3D racers. 4. You enjoy the firmware hobby. OnionOS, cores, box-art scraping, and the new netplay are genuinely fun to tinker with. 5. You want a second, disposable device. At ~$54 bare it is the one you leave in a bag, hand to a child, or take somewhere you would not risk a $400 handheld.

Skip it if

Skip it if your wishlist includes N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or Saturn as a primary use — the ceiling is real and no firmware moves it. Skip it if you need Bluetooth audio (there is none) or TV-out (also none). Skip it if you are the kind of buyer who will be annoyed that 27,000 of the advertised 28,000 games are duplicates, hacks, and titles the device can't run — that friction is baked into the product, and no amount of expectation-management fully removes it. And skip it if you want to play on a television; this is a handheld, full stop.

The upgrade path

If you read the emulation-tier table and your eye kept drifting to the marginal rows, you have already outgrown this machine, and that is fine — it is a $54 device, not a life sentence. The natural next step up is a modern ARM handheld with a real GPU and gigabytes of RAM: our Retroid Pocket 5-versus-6 breakdown covers the current sweet spot for Dreamcast, PSP, and even light Switch-era work, and the broader Retroid Pocket 6 buyer's guide lays out where the extra money actually goes. The Miyoo's job is to be excellent at the bottom two-thirds of the emulation stack for the price of a AAA game. It does that job better than anything, and it does the top third not at all.

The Verdict

The Miyoo Mini Plus is two things wearing one name. It is a superb, tiny, honestly-priced handheld with the best screen in its class and a firmware community that has extracted every drop of performance from a smart-speaker chip. And it is the retail face of a game-list culture that will sell you a number — 6,041, 25,966, 28,000 — that means almost nothing. Judge the hardware and you have a 9/10 machine, which is roughly where XDA (9/10) and PropelRC (8.5/10) landed. Judge the total package — the padded cards, the PSP titles that don't boot, the legal fog, the expectation gap between "28,000 games" and the two hundred you'll play — and it comes down.

The case for

• Best-in-class screen: 640×480, 450 nits, 229 PPI — "sharper than the original Nintendo 3DS," and pixel-perfect for 4:3 consoles.
• Flawless up to PS1: every 8- and 16-bit system runs full speed; PS1 greatest hits are "a treat."
• OnionOS: transforms the device, adds 50%-plus battery over stock, and gained netplay in 2026.
• Genuinely pocketable: 165g, true trouser-pocket size, ~7.5h Game Boy battery.
• The price: ~$54 bare makes it the default recommendation for anyone entering the hobby.

The case against

• The "game list" is a fiction: no official roster, and reseller counts are inflated 3-5× by dupes, hacks, and bootlegs.
• Hard ceiling at PS1: N64 and Dreamcast are party tricks; PSP and Saturn don't run at all.
• Padded cards include unrunnable games: PSP titles like Brave Story and Dracula X Chronicles ship on cards that can't boot them.
• No Bluetooth, no video-out, slow 5W charging.
• Legal grey area: the device is clean, the pre-loaded ROMs are not.

The 7.5 out of 10

Seven and a half. Not a compromise number — a precise one. Half a point above it lives the hardware alone, which is a 9. A point and a half below lives the marketplace, which would drag an uncritical buyer to a 6. The 7.5 is what you get when you weight a brilliant $54 machine against the fact that its headline feature — the game list — is the least trustworthy thing about it. Buy the device. Flash OnionOS. Ignore the number on the box, delete the junk, load two hundred games you actually love, and it becomes the 9/10 handheld it was always meant to be. The lie is in the listing, not the plastic. Know the difference and you will not find a better companion for the 8-bit, 16-bit, and PS1 canon at any price near this one.