Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: 6,041 ROMs, 7.5/10

You typed Miyoo Mini Plus game list into a search bar expecting a catalogue. A grid of box art. A number at the bottom of the page and a tidy “view all” button. There isn’t one. There has never been one. Shenzhen Miyoo, the company that builds the thing, has never published an official list of games, for the excellent reason that it does not sell you any games. It sells you a palm-sized brick of plastic, a SigmaStar system-on-chip, a 3.5-inch panel, and a microSD slot. What goes onto that card is your problem, your community’s project, and — depending on where you bought it — possibly somebody’s copyright headache.

This is a review of a game list that does not exist. Which is more interesting than it sounds, because the absence is the entire product. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a device whose value is defined almost entirely by software it does not legally include, curated by people who are not paid, running on an operating system its own manufacturer did not write. Reviewing it means reviewing the ecosystem: the OS, the curation, and the hard silicon ceiling that decides which decades of gaming history you actually get to hold in your hand. So let us do that properly, because the marketing copy certainly won’t.

The Blank-Slate Problem

Every retro handheld in this price bracket lies to you the same way. The AliExpress listing shows a hero shot of the console with a screen full of Super Mario World, and beneath it a claim like “10,000+ games included.” What that sentence means, legally and technically, is worth unpacking slowly, because it is the difference between a hobby and a shipment of unlicensed ROMs sitting in a customs queue.

The question that has no answer

There is no manufacturer-provided catalogue because the Miyoo Mini Plus is a general-purpose ARM computer, not a console. A Nintendo Switch has a game list because Nintendo signs, distributes, and gatekeeps every title. Miyoo signs nothing. The device ships either bare — an empty card, or no card at all — or preloaded by a third-party reseller who has taken it upon themselves to fill the storage with other people’s intellectual property. The “game list,” therefore, is whatever that reseller decided to dump, or whatever you install yourself. Ask “what games does the Miyoo Mini Plus have” and the only honest answer is a question in return: which card did you buy, and who built it?

Why the absence is the point

This is not a defect. It is the reason the device is worth owning. A closed console gives you a fixed library and a storefront that decides what you may buy; an open handheld gives you the entire back-catalogue of eight console generations, limited only by the hardware and your own conscience. The trade is obvious: you inherit the responsibility for sourcing. The upside is that the “game list” is not a menu somebody else designed — it is a library you assemble, which is a fundamentally different and, for the right person, far superior proposition. If you have ever wanted a shelf you actually curated instead of a storefront that curated you, this is that shelf.

What we are actually reviewing

So this review does not grade a fixed catalogue, because there isn’t one to grade. It grades three things that together constitute the real “game list” experience: the community operating system that presents and runs the library (Onion OS), the community curation that defines the popular reference builds (the gamelist PDFs, the preloaded resellers, the Reddit top-tens), and the hardware ceiling that decides where the list stops. Get those three right and the Miyoo becomes one of the best-value libraries in portable gaming. Get them wrong and you own a very pretty paperweight loaded with games that stutter. The Machine intends to tell you exactly where the ceiling is.

What a 'Game List' Means Here

Because there is no official list, the community built several. Understanding them is the difference between buying a $65 handheld and buying a $110 “preloaded” version of the same handheld whose only added value is a microSD card of pirated ROMs a stranger arranged for you.

Onion OS: the operating system is the catalogue

The single most important word in any Miyoo Mini Plus discussion is Onion. Onion OS — properly OnionUI — is a community-built custom firmware that replaces Miyoo’s clumsy stock interface with a clean, fast, RetroArch-backed front end, complete with box-art scraping, per-game save states, favourites, and sensible emulator defaults. It is, functionally, the catalogue: the way the list is sorted, presented, resumed, and scraped is entirely Onion’s doing. As of 2026 the current line is the OnionUI 4.2 release-candidate series, which is where all the meaningful work — improved PlayStation handling, a refined game menu, cleaner cover-art support across the whole library — actually lives. Note the version carefully, because grey-market resellers habitually advertise ancient 1.x or 2.x builds as though a two-year-old firmware were a feature. It is not. The first thing any competent owner does is wipe the card and flash current Onion. If you have never flashed a retro handheld before, the mechanical process is close cousin to flashing a Batocera image to a boot drive — download, verify, image the card, boot, scrape.

The PDFs: curation as a spreadsheet

Because Onion presents a library but does not define one, the community produced reference lists. The most-cited is the Gamelist-MiyooMini-128GB-Onion.pdf, a curated 128GB Onion build documenting on the order of 1,200 titles — running alphabetically from The Addams Family on Game Boy to Final Fantasy Legend III, also on Game Boy. There is an older, still-circulated reference from 8bitstick, last meaningfully updated in January 2024, which remains the de-facto standard for verifying which Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles are known-good — it is the document that will tell you Yoshi’s Cookie, Wario Land, and TMNT III: Radical Rescue are all confirmed-compatible, which they are. These PDFs are not software. They are curation expressed as a table of contents — a human being’s opinion about what a good 128GB card should contain, published so you can copy their taste.

6,041 vs. 1,200 vs. 10,000: which number is real?

Here is where the marketing gets slippery. The retailer GameCove lists the Miyoo Mini Plus in its 2026 catalogue as an “Upgraded Miyoo Mini” and, in the aggregate across its preloaded cards, advertises a headline figure of roughly 6,041 games spanning Nintendo, Sega, arcade, and PlayStation. That is a real number in the sense that somebody counted the files; it is a fictional number in the sense that no human will play 6,041 games, and a full No-Intro romset of any single system already runs to thousands of near-identical regional variants and hacks. So you now have three competing figures: the curated ~1,200 of a thoughtful Onion PDF, the marketed ~6,041 of a preloaded reseller card, and the theoretical 10,000+ of a full multi-system dump. All three describe the “same” device. Only one of them — the curated 1,200 — describes a library a person would actually enjoy. Hold that thought; it is the crux of the verdict.

The Hardware Ceiling

You cannot review the game list without reviewing the silicon, because the silicon decides which games are on the list at all. A device that cannot run Nintendo 64 does not “have” a Nintendo 64 game list, no matter what the seller pastes into the description. So let us be precise about what is inside, and precisely where it gives up.

The SoC nobody markets: SigmaStar SSD202D

The Miyoo Mini Plus, which launched in 2023, runs on a SigmaStar SSD202D — a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked around 1.2 GHz, paired with a frankly tiny 128 MB of DDR3 RAM. This is an industrial-automation chip, not a gaming part; it was designed to drive smart-home panels and security displays, and it costs pennies at volume. That heritage is the whole story. A dual-A7 with 128 MB is a monster for 8- and 16-bit emulation, entirely adequate for PlayStation, and a brick wall for anything past 1996. It has no dedicated 3D GPU worth the name for sixth-generation workloads, and 128 MB of RAM is less memory than a single Nintendo 64 texture pack. The chip is why the list stops where it stops, and no firmware update will move that wall — a point our companion piece on how firmware beats silicon right up until it doesn’t makes at length.

640×480, no sticks, and the 4:3 truth

The display is a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480 — a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is not an accident. Nearly every system worth emulating on this class of hardware, from the NES to the PlayStation, output in 4:3, so the panel is a near-perfect canvas for them: a Game Boy game at integer scale looks immaculate, and a SNES title fills the screen without the letterboxing that plagues 16:9 handhelds. The catch is the second half of the sentence: there are no analog sticks. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a D-pad-and-face-buttons device with L1/R1/L2/R2 shoulders and nothing that twirls. For the 2D library this is irrelevant and arguably ideal. For the 3D PlayStation library it is a quiet catastrophe we will return to, and for anything requiring dual analog it is simply disqualifying.

The full spec sheet

Here is the ecosystem at a glance — device, operating system, and library sources in one table, because the “game list” is the product of all three.

Read that table as a boundary map. Everything from the NES row down to the PlayStation row is genuinely on the list. Everything past it — N64, Dreamcast, PSP, Saturn 3D — is not, whatever the box says.

The 8- and 16-Bit Core

If you strip away the marketing and ask what this device is genuinely, unimpeachably excellent at, the answer is the handheld and 16-bit home libraries. This is where the Miyoo Mini Plus is not a compromise but arguably the best value on the market, and it is where the community game lists are at their most trustworthy.

Game Boy and the reason this screen exists

The 3.5-inch 640×480 panel divides cleanly for Game Boy and Game Boy Color output, producing crisp integer-scaled pixels with none of the shimmer you get from a badly-matched resolution. The reference PDFs are exhaustive and correct here — the 8bitstick list confirms deep cuts alongside the obvious ones. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 plays flawlessly; Yoshi’s Cookie is a perfect toilet-break puzzler; and TMNT III: Radical Rescue — a genuinely underrated Metroidvania that Konami buried on the Game Boy in 1993 — runs exactly as it should. These are not the titles a reseller puts on the box, which is precisely why the community lists matter: they surface the good obscure games instead of the same forty ROMs every AliExpress card ships.

16-bit: SNES and Genesis at native resolution

The dual-A7 handles the SNES’s more demanding special-chip titles better than the raw clock suggests, because the libretro cores are mature and the resolution is friendly. Mode 7 spins, transparency layers composite, and the vast majority of the SNES canon runs at full speed. The Genesis and Game Gear libraries are similarly solid, and the PC Engine / TurboGrafx catalogue — chronically under-served on cheaper devices — is well-represented in the good Onion builds. The one honest asterisk: the handful of SNES titles that lean on the SuperFX or SA-1 coprocessors (Star Fox, Super Mario RPG) can dip, because emulating a coprocessor in software is expensive and 128 MB is not generous. But for the 95% case, 16-bit on the Miyoo is a native-feeling experience.

Deep cuts the list gets right

The reason to trust the curated lists over the reseller dumps is that they include the games that justify owning eight consoles’ worth of libraries. Consider Star Ocean: Blue Sphere — a 2001 Game Boy Color RPG that never left Japan officially, tri-Ace at the absolute limit of the hardware, now trivially playable in your palm with a fan translation. Or the SaGa series, released in the West under the baffling Final Fantasy Legend branding to trade on a name they had nothing to do with. Akitoshi Kawazu’s SaGa games are famously, deliberately unfair — the design philosophy is that the player should feel the world does not care about them — and Hardcore Gaming 101’s long-running history of the SaGa series is the essential companion text if you want to understand why the difficulty is a feature and not a bug. This is the real argument for the device: not that it plays Mario, but that it puts the entire strange back-catalogue — the games too weird or too Japanese or too commercially unlucky to get a re-release — into your pocket. The 8- and 16-bit core is the reason the Miyoo Mini Plus earns its keep.

The 32-Bit Question: PS1

Every conversation about the Miyoo game list eventually reaches the PlayStation, because PS1 is both the device’s ceiling and its most oversold feature. The truth is nuanced: PS1 works, genuinely and often beautifully, right up until it doesn’t — and where it stops has less to do with the CPU than with the missing thumbsticks.

PCSX ReARMed and what actually runs

PlayStation emulation on the Miyoo Mini Plus runs through PCSX ReARMed, a libretro core specifically hand-optimised with ARM assembly for exactly this class of chip — one of the roughly two hundred cores catalogued in our rundown of the RetroArch core landscape. On a dual-A7 it is remarkably capable. The 2D and pre-rendered-background library is where it shines: Xenogears, Square’s sprawling, half-finished, philosophically deranged 1998 masterpiece, plays at full speed and looks superb on the 4:3 panel. Sprite-and-menu RPGs like Final Fantasy IX run cleanly, and Onion’s 2025-era fixes for a nagging PlayStation screen-flicker bug mean even Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater holds a stable frame rate where it once tore. For turn-based, top-down, and 2.5D PlayStation software, the game list’s claim to “32-bit” is entirely honest.

The Chrono Trigger footnote (it is not a PS1 game)

Here The Machine must correct the record, because half the internet gets it wrong. User reviews and reseller listings routinely bundle Chrono Trigger in with the “PS1 classics” you can play on the Miyoo. It is not a PlayStation game. Chrono Trigger is a 1995 Super Nintendo title; it received a PlayStation port in 1999 (bundled in the West as Final Fantasy Chronicles) that is notorious for its long load times and added-but-skippable anime cutscenes. On a Miyoo you should be emulating the SNES original, which runs perfectly and instantly, not the inferior PS1 conversion. It is a small thing, but it is exactly the kind of small thing a device sold on a fictional “game list” gets systematically wrong, and exactly the kind of thing a technically literate owner should get right.

Where 32-bit falls apart: no sticks

Now the wall. The PlayStation’s 3D library — the reason the console mattered — was built around the DualShock’s twin analog sticks, and the Miyoo Mini Plus has none. This is not a performance problem; it is an input problem, and no firmware fixes it. Ape Escape literally cannot be played, because it requires both sticks by design. Spyro, Crash Team Racing, Gran Turismo, and every first-person or free-camera 3D title become an exercise in D-pad frustration. Worse, the SSD202D’s lack of a real GPU means the heavier 3D titles — Tekken 3’s smooth exception aside — can strain the chip regardless. So the honest summary is this: the PlayStation on the Miyoo is a 2D and RPG machine wearing a 3D console’s name. If your dream game list is Metal Gear Solid with a free camera, you have bought the wrong device, and you should be looking at something a class up, such as the jump described in our Retroid Pocket 5-versus-6 breakdown, where the analog sticks and the horsepower actually exist.

The PC Ports Nobody Prints

The single most interesting category in the real Miyoo game list is the one no reseller advertises and no PDF fully documents: native PC-game ports. These are not emulated. They are the actual game engines, recompiled to run on ARM Linux, and they are the closest thing the device has to a hidden superpower.

DevilutionX: Diablo in your pocket

The headline is Diablo. Through DevilutionX — a from-scratch, open-source reimplementation of Blizzard’s 1996 engine, built by reverse-engineering the original binary — the full game runs natively on the Miyoo Mini Plus, with the original music and cutscenes if you supply the game’s data files (which you must own; DevilutionX ships no assets). It is a genuinely astonishing thing to hold: a landmark action-RPG that defined a genre, running at full speed on a chip built for door-cameras, its click-to-move interface mapping surprisingly well to a D-pad cursor. A January-2026 “Miyoo Mini Plus Starter Guide” from the YouTube channel Stephen’s Retro Corner walks through getting these ports running, and DevilutionX is the crown jewel of the lot.

Doom, Quake, Duke: the id and Apogee canon

The 1990s FPS canon is present and native. DOOM runs through a PrBoom-derived port; Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and the rest of the shareware-era shooters have their own source ports, all descendants of id and Apogee open-sourcing their engines — the decision that made this entire category possible. John Carmack, id’s co-founder, once summarised the design ethos that let DOOM port to everything with a toaster in it: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” Strip the game to a fast engine and a WAD of levels and it becomes eternal and infinitely portable, which is exactly why it is on your Miyoo three decades later. For the historical context — how these DOS-era engines were built, sold as shareware, and ultimately liberated — The Digital Antiquarian’s long-form history of PC gaming is the definitive read, and it will make you appreciate what your $65 handheld is actually running.

DOSBox exists, but temper expectations

Onion does include a DOSBox build, and yes, in principle you can run MS-DOS software on the Miyoo. In practice, temper your expectations hard: DOSBox is a full-machine emulator, not a native port, and the dual-A7 is not a fast enough host to run demanding DOS titles at their intended speed. It is fine for text adventures, early strategy, and lightweight games; it is not your route to smooth Command & Conquer. The native ports — DevilutionX, the id-engine descendants — are the real story, because they sidestep emulation entirely. When someone tells you the Miyoo “plays PC games,” that is the correct and narrow way to understand the claim: the specific games that have been lovingly ported, not the general category of PC software.

Homebrew & the Living List

The one part of the Miyoo game list that is unambiguously, cleanly legal is also one of its best, and it is the part that proves the whole premise: this is not a frozen catalogue but a living one that grows with the scene.

Apotris and the homebrew that is actually legal

The standout is Apotris — a free, open-source, staggeringly good Tetris-family game built for the Game Boy Advance, with modern features (a proper lock delay, spins, marathon and blitz modes, custom palettes) that put many commercial falling-block games to shame. It is not a ROM you have to feel guilty about; the developer gives it away, and it is arguably the single best pick-up-and-play title on the entire device. It is also a clean answer to the copyright question that hangs over everything else here: homebrew and public-domain software are yours to download, run, and share, no backup-of-a-cartridge legal fiction required. A game list built purely from homebrew and public-domain titles would still be worth the device.

The list is alive: it grows with the scene

Because the platform is open, the “game list” is not something Miyoo froze in 2023 — it accretes. New GBA homebrew, new fan translations that unlock previously import-only RPGs, new engine ports, new Onion features that make older systems run better: all of it flows into the library without a firmware licence or a store approval. This is the structural advantage of an open device over a closed console, and it compounds over time. The Miyoo you buy in 2026 will have a materially better game list in 2027, for free, because a few hundred unpaid people will have made it so.

Reddit’s rotating top-ten

The community also self-curates in real time. A representative example: in late 2025, Reddit user 1qi2zef posted a widely-shared “top 10 game list” for the device on r/MiyooMini, leading with Apotris on GBA and Pokémon Gold/Silver on Game Boy Color as essentials. These threads are the closest thing to a living official list the device will ever have — constantly revised, argued over, and worth more than any reseller’s file count, because they reflect what people actually play rather than what somebody could technically fit on a card.

Curation vs. Hoarding

We now arrive at the central thesis, the thing that separates a good Miyoo experience from a bad one, and it has nothing to do with the hardware. It is a philosophy problem: the number on the box is a lie, and believing it will ruin your device.

The 6,041 delusion

Return to GameCove’s headline of roughly 6,041 games. Nobody will play them. A full romset is mostly noise: seventeen regional variants of the same game, hacks, prototypes, unlicensed shovelware, and hundreds of titles that were bad in 1991 and have not improved. A device stuffed with 6,041 files presents you with an unnavigable wall, kills your desire to choose, and buries the forty games you would actually love under six thousand you will scroll past forever. This is the paradox of the preloaded card: the more “value” it advertises, the worse the experience becomes. Hoarding is not curation. A shelf with every book ever printed is not a library; it is a landfill.

Why curation beats a full romset

The curated ~1,200-title Onion PDF is a better product than the 6,041-title dump for exactly the same reason a good bookshop beats a warehouse. Someone made choices. They cut the duplicates, kept the one good version of each game, and included the deep cuts that reward a browse. This is why The Machine’s standing advice is to build your own list: start from a curated reference, prune ruthlessly to the systems and genres you actually enjoy, and end up with two or three hundred games you will genuinely return to. That library will beat any reseller’s six thousand every single day. The scraping is the reward: Onion pulls box art and metadata over Wi-Fi for whatever you keep, and a tight, fully-illustrated shelf of games you chose is a joy to scroll. Here is the folder skeleton Onion expects on the card, so you know what you are curating into:

/mnt/SDCARD
├── Roms
│   ├── GB       → Game Boy
│   ├── GBC      → Game Boy Color
│   ├── GBA      → Game Boy Advance
│   ├── FC       → NES / Famicom
│   ├── SFC      → SNES / Super Famicom
│   ├── MD       → Genesis / Mega Drive
│   ├── PCE      → PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
│   ├── PS       → Sony PlayStation (PCSX ReARMed)
│   ├── ARCADE   → FinalBurn Neo
│   └── PORTS    → DevilutionX, PrBoom, etc.
├── Imgs         → box art scraped over Wi-Fi
├── Saves        → save states + battery saves
└── BIOS         → PS1 SCPH BIOS, etc.

How the Miyoo’s list compares to peers

The Miyoo is not the only sub-$100 curated handheld, and its game-list experience should be judged against its actual rivals. The comparison that matters is not raw specs but what library you get and how good the curation front-end is. Approximate figures below; the point is the shape, not the decimal.

The takeaway: the Miyoo does not win on horsepower — the H700-based Anbernics out-muscle it and add the sticks it lacks. It wins on the list experience. Onion is the most polished, best-scraped, most pleasant way to browse a curated library at this price, which is precisely why so many owners forgive the missing sticks. Firmware, again, doing the heavy lifting.

Five Real-World Scenarios

A game list is not an abstraction; it is a thing you actually use, differently depending on who you are. Here is how the Miyoo library holds up across five real player profiles.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player — someone who wants ten minutes of Tetris, a level of Super Mario World, a quick round of something familiar — the Miyoo is close to perfect. The instant wake-and-resume (Onion snapshots your exact state on sleep), the pocketable form factor, and the flawless 8/16-bit library make it the best casual retro machine going. For the commuter (the mobile use case), the same virtues compound: it is genuinely pocketable in a way the bigger Anbernics are not, the 4:3 panel is bright enough for a train, and 6–8 hours of battery covers a week of commutes on the 8- and 16-bit systems that sip power. Apotris alone justifies the commute build.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist is well-served by the curated deep-cut lists — this is the person who wants Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, the full SaGa run, and every obscure GBC RPG, and the community PDFs exist precisely for them. Save states let them tackle brutal old games without losing hours to a bad checkpoint. The speedrunner is a more complicated case. On one hand, save states and instant reset make practice trivial. On the other, the Miyoo is a poor choice for competitive speedrunning: emulator input latency, while low, is not zero, and any run submitted to a leaderboard needs to be on a documented, latency-tested platform. For personal-best chasing and practice, excellent. For a verified world-record attempt, use the reference emulator on a PC. The Miyoo is a practice room, not a stadium.

Co-op, link cable, and the multiplayer gap

Here the device shows its limits honestly. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a single-player machine. There is no second controller port, no reliable local link-cable emulation, and no meaningful multiplayer story. For co-op — two players on a couch — it is simply the wrong tool; a single 3.5-inch screen and one D-pad do not a co-op session make. Pokémon trading, Four Swords, GBA link-cable games: not happening in any dependable way. This is not a firmware failing; it is a form-factor reality. If multiplayer is anywhere in your plans, the game list on this device is, for those purposes, empty. Buy two devices, or buy something else. For the solitary player — which is most retro handheld buyers, most of the time — it is a non-issue. But it must be stated plainly, because no reseller ever will.

Pricing & Availability

The final piece of the “game list” puzzle is money, and it is where the grey market earns its margin by charging you for files that cost nothing to copy.

Bare vs. preloaded

The Miyoo Mini Plus launched at an MSRP around $53.99. By 2026, amid a broadly inflated components-and-retail climate, typical street pricing has crept to roughly $65–75 for the bare device. The critical decision is bare-versus-preloaded. A “preloaded” unit — from GameCove, LITNXT, or countless AliExpress sellers — ships with Onion and a card full of ROMs for a premium, often $90–110. What you are paying that $30–50 premium for is a stranger’s ROM dump and thirty minutes of your time saved. The Machine’s position: buy bare, flash Onion yourself, and build the curated list you actually want. You will save money, learn the device, and end up with a better library than any preload.

The microSD math

Individual games have no price — there is no store, no per-title cost; you supply ROMs from your own cartridge backups or public-domain archives. Your only real ongoing cost is storage. A quality 128 GB microSD runs $12–20 and is wildly more space than a curated library needs; a tight, well-chosen list fits comfortably on 64 GB. Do not overspend on a 512 GB card to hold 6,041 games you will never open. The whole point of curation is that you need less storage, not more.

Where to buy, and the legal footnote

The bare device is available from Miyoo’s own channels, AliExpress, and Amazon third-party sellers. On legality, The Machine will be precise, because this is the part everyone waves away. Emulators are legal. That is settled law: the U.S. Ninth Circuit established in cases such as Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix that reverse-engineering a console to build an emulator is fair use. The ROMs are the other question. A ROM of a game you personally own, dumped from your own cartridge, sits in a defensible (if untested-at-scale) corner; a ROM of a game you do not own is copyright infringement, and “abandonware” is not a legal category, however much the internet wishes it were. The homebrew and public-domain titles — Apotris and its kind — are unambiguously yours. A reseller shipping a card of unlicensed commercial ROMs is the one taking the legal risk, and charging you for the privilege. Own the device with a clear conscience; source the list with an informed one.

Who Should Buy It

Strip away the game-list mythology and the buying decision becomes clear. This is a specialist tool that is superb at one thing and useless at several others. Match yourself to it honestly.

Five people who should own this

• The 8/16-bit purist. If your dream library is Game Boy, SNES, Genesis, and 2D PlayStation RPGs, nothing at this price does it better or more pleasantly.
• The commuter and pocket-carrier. If it has to fit in a jacket pocket and survive a week of short sessions, the size and battery make it ideal.
• The curator. If the idea of building your own tight, fully-scraped list of 200 hand-chosen games sounds like fun rather than a chore, this device rewards you more than any preloaded rival.
• The RPG completionist. If you want the deep, weird, import-only back-catalogue — SaGa, Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, obscure GBC role-players — the community lists were made for you.
• The homebrew and DevilutionX enthusiast. If Apotris and native Diablo/DOOM ports excite you, that legal, living slice of the library is a genuine joy.

Pros

• Onion OS is the best curation front-end in its price class: fast, clean, superb Wi-Fi cover-art scraping, flawless resume.
• Immaculate 8- and 16-bit emulation on a 4:3 panel that suits those systems perfectly.
• Genuinely capable 2D and RPG PlayStation library via PCSX ReARMed, with 2025 flicker fixes.
• Hidden native-port superpower: DevilutionX, DOOM, Quake, Duke — real engines, not emulation.
• Truly pocketable, good battery on the systems that matter, and cheap.
• An open, living library that improves for free over time.

Cons

• No analog sticks — disqualifies most 3D PlayStation titles and anything needing dual analog.
• The SSD202D wall is hard: no N64, no Dreamcast, no PSP, no Saturn 3D, whatever the box claims.
• 128 MB RAM strains coprocessor SNES games and demanding DOSBox software.
• No meaningful multiplayer, co-op, or link-cable story — a strictly single-player device.
• The “game list” is your responsibility, legally and practically; preloaded cards are overpriced and legally dubious.
• Retailers routinely ship stale Onion versions and inflated file counts as “features.”

The Verdict: 7.5/10

The Miyoo Mini Plus does not have a game list. It has a game-list capability, and how good your experience is depends almost entirely on whether you understand that sentence.

What you are really buying

You are buying a beautifully-executed 8- and 16-bit handheld with a first-rate community OS, a competent 2D PlayStation machine, a surprising native-port library, and a hard ceiling at 1996. You are not buying a console with games, and every disappointment anyone has ever had with this device traces back to expecting the latter. The people who love it are the ones who wanted a curated shelf they could build themselves; the people who return it are the ones who believed the “6,041 games, plays everything” sticker. The hardware is honest. Only the marketing lies.

The rating

Judged as what it is — a sub-$75, pocketable, 8/16-bit-and-2D-PS1 library machine with the best curation front-end in its class — it earns a confident 7.5 out of 10. It loses points for the missing analog sticks (a real and permanent limitation, not a nitpick), the strictly single-player nature, and an ecosystem that leans on the buyer to know things resellers actively obscure. It gains them back for doing its core job better than anything near its price, and for being an open, living platform that will only get better.

The Machine’s bottom line

Buy it bare. Flash current Onion yourself. Ignore the file-count bragging and build a curated list of the two hundred games you will actually play. Keep your expectations south of the PlayStation’s 3D library and your conscience clear about where the ROMs come from. Do that, and the Miyoo Mini Plus is one of the most satisfying $65 objects in gaming — a device whose greatest feature is the game list it refuses to ship, and trusts you to build. That refusal is not laziness. It is the whole point.