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

Type Miyoo Mini Plus game list into any search bar and you are handed a number: 6,041 games. It shows up on retailer pages, in YouTube thumbnails, in Reddit threads, always with the flat confidence of a spec sheet. It is the sort of number that ends arguments. It is also, in the sense that most people mean it, a fiction.

There is no official Miyoo Mini Plus game list. Miyoo — the Chinese OEM that shipped this sub-$54 slab of aluminium and plastic in March 2023 — never published a curated catalogue, never licensed a launch library, never authored a single one of those 6,041 titles. The device is an emulator. It plays whatever you put on the microSD card, which means the game list is not a product at all. It is an emergent artefact: part retailer inventory, part community consensus, part copyright problem. Reviewing it is a genuinely strange assignment. You are not reviewing a game, or even a console's launch slate. You are reviewing a curation with no curator.

So that is the job here. This is a long look at the thing the search results are actually pointing at: the ecosystem, the firmware defaults, the canon that has hardened around this handheld over three years, and the small lies that have hardened alongside it. There is a score at the end. It is 7.5 out of 10, and most of the missing 2.5 points are other people's fault, not Miyoo's.

The List That Was Never Published

The question contains a lie

Start with the premise, because the premise is broken. A game list implies an author — a platform holder who decided these titles ship and those do not. Nintendo has one. Sony has one. The Miyoo Mini Plus has none. What it has is a Roms folder and a file browser, and the contents of that folder are whatever the last human to touch the microSD card decided they should be. There is no gatekeeper, no first-party, not even a storefront.

This matters because the entire framing of the Miyoo Mini Plus game list smuggles in an assumption of officialdom that does not exist. When a retailer's page says the device includes 6,041 games, it is describing the contents of a memory card that some third party filled up, not a decision Miyoo made in a boardroom. The distinction is the whole story, and it is the reason this review spends as much time on where the list comes from as on what is in it.

What 'game list' actually means here

In practice, three different things wear the phrase Miyoo Mini Plus game list, and they are constantly mistaken for one another. The first is the retailer aggregation — the ~6,041-title spreadsheet published by shops to make a pre-loaded card sound generous. The second is the community canon — the informal, endlessly re-litigated consensus of games worth having, which lives in Reddit top-10 threads and in PDFs passed around like samizdat. The third is the firmware's built-in emulator support — the list of systems the software can run, which is a technical fact rather than a library.

Only the third is real in any hard sense. The first is marketing. The second is opinion, which is exactly what a site like this one exists to have. Everything below is an attempt to keep the three separate, because conflating them is how you end up believing your $54 handheld shipped with a curated library of six thousand games. It did not. It shipped with a bootloader and some good intentions.

Why the distinction matters

There is a nice historical irony here. As Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian has documented, Nintendo built its empire in the 1980s precisely by policing its own game list — the Seal of Quality, the lockout chip, the iron grip on what a cartridge was allowed to be. Forty years later, the definitive way to play those games is a Chinese handheld running volunteer firmware, with a catalogue curated by strangers on the internet, on hardware Nintendo never sanctioned and cannot control. The game list went from the most tightly guarded object in the industry to the most open. That is the context this device lives in.

If you buy it expecting a Nintendo-style curated experience, you will be disappointed, then confused, then — if you are the sort of person who reads a 6,000-word review before purchasing — fine. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a blank instrument. Its value is entirely downstream of the effort you put into filling it and the firmware you flash onto it. The game list, properly understood, is a thing you build, not a thing you receive.

The Hardware Under the List

The SoC, the RAM, and the ceiling they set

Every best-games-for-the-Miyoo-Mini-Plus list is really a list of things that fit inside a SigmaStar SSD202D — a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2 GHz, paired with a Mali-400 MP2 GPU and a miserly 128 MB of RAM. This is not a criticism so much as a physical constant. The SSD202D was designed for smart speakers and IP cameras, not gaming, and Miyoo has bent it to a purpose it was never meant for. What it does astonishingly well is 8-bit and 16-bit emulation. What it cannot do — no matter what a thumbnail promises — is anything that needs a modern GPU or more than a few hundred megabytes of working memory.

So the list is defined, at the silicon level, before you download a single ROM. NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, SNES, Sega Genesis, and Sony PlayStation: this is the sweet spot, and it is a deep and glorious one. Everything above it is where the marketing starts lying. Hold that thought; we return to it in detail below.

Here is the full picture, because the hardware is the argument:

The 3.5-inch panel and why 4:3 matters

The screen is the reason this device developed a cult. It is a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480 — plain old VGA, 4:3, no widescreen pretensions, and around 450 nits of brightness that hold up in daylight. That aspect ratio is not a limitation; it is a feature, because almost everything the Miyoo Mini Plus is good at was made for a 4:3 or near-4:3 display. A SNES game fills this panel edge to edge with no black bars and no stretching, and at VGA across 3.5 inches the pixel density is high enough that individual pixels dissolve into image.

The corollary: this panel is wrong for the systems the marketing wants to sell you. PSP is 16:9 at 480×272; N64 games assume analog control and a bigger canvas. Cram them onto a 4:3 VGA screen with a D-pad and you get a compromised, letterboxed apology for the real thing. The screen tells you what the list should be. Listen to it.

Battery, storage, and what the 'Plus' added

The Plus designation, over the original 2023 Mini, comes down to three things: a bigger 3.5-inch screen (up from 2.8), a larger 3000 mAh battery, and — crucially — the addition of Wi-Fi and a real-time clock. The Wi-Fi is not for streaming; it is for RetroAchievements and over-the-air firmware updates, both of which matter more than they sound. Battery life lands around 7.5 hours on Game Boy, 6–7 on SNES, and roughly 5 on the more demanding PS1 titles — genuinely all-day for the commute-and-couch play this thing invites. If you want to see how those numbers stack against the obvious rival, we ran the head-to-head in Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX, where 128 MB somehow beats 256 MB.

Storage is entirely on you. The device takes a single microSD card, user-supplied, and the community standard is to buy a name-brand 128 GB card for around $15 and never think about it again. That card is where your game list physically lives, and its contents are the only list that will ever actually matter to you.

Where '6,041 Games' Comes From

The GameCove spreadsheet

The specific number — 6,041 — traces to a retailer product page, most prominently GameCove's Miyoo Mini Plus listing, which advertises a pre-loaded microSD card and quantifies its contents down to the digit. That precision is doing a lot of rhetorical work. It sounds like a specification. It is an inventory count of somebody's ROM dump — a tally of files on a card, spanning GBA, SNES, PS1, Genesis and the rest, assembled by a seller to make the bundle look like a value proposition rather than a legal liability.

To be clear about the number itself: 6,041 is not wrong, exactly. If you count the files on such a card, you may well arrive there. But it is not a curated 6,041. It is the entire No-Intro-style set for several small systems, padded with hundreds of regional variants, hacks, and games nobody has voluntarily played since 1994. A list of six thousand titles where four thousand are filler is not a library; it is a haystack with a few needles in it. Separating the needles from the hay is the actual work of owning this device, and no retailer's spreadsheet does it for you.

Pre-loaded cards and the law

Here is the part the retailers omit, and the part The Machine cannot let slide. A microSD card pre-loaded with 6,041 commercial ROMs is, in essentially every jurisdiction that matters, a copyright-infringing product. The nuance people miss is that the emulator itself is perfectly legal — that was settled a quarter-century ago in Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix (9th Cir. 2000), which held that reverse-engineering a console to build an emulator is fair use. What that ruling did not bless is the games. Distributing ROMs of copyrighted titles is infringement, and — this is the part people refuse to hear — owning the original cartridge does not grant you a legal right to download a copy of it. The cartridge you own and the ROM you torrented are, in the eyes of the law, unrelated objects.

Miyoo knows this, which is why Miyoo ships no games at all. The pre-loaded cards come from third-party sellers operating in the gap between what is easy and what is lawful. None of this is a moral lecture — it is a review — but a review that pretended the 6,041-game card was a clean, official product would be lying to you, and lying about hardware is the one thing this column will not do.

What Miyoo actually ships, and how the folder works

Out of the box, with stock firmware, the Miyoo Mini Plus is an empty emulator waiting for a card. When you build the card yourself — the honest path — Onion expects a folder structure that looks like this:

/Roms
├── GB      Game Boy
├── GBC     Game Boy Color
├── GBA     Game Boy Advance
├── FC      NES / Famicom
├── SFC     SNES / Super Famicom
├── MD      Sega Genesis / Mega Drive
├── PS      Sony PlayStation
└── ARCADE  MAME / FBNeo sets

Each folder is a system; drop a legally-obtained ROM into the matching folder and it appears in that system's list. This is the real game list: a directory tree you assemble by hand, or, for the clean-conscience crowd, a folder of homebrew and public-domain titles that nobody has to email a lawyer about. The 6,041 number is what happens when someone else fills the tree for you and forgets to mention the risk. The empty tree is what Miyoo actually sold you.

Onion OS and the Curation Problem

It's OnionUI, and it isn't one person

The single most important thing about this device is not in the box: it is Onion, the open-source firmware overhaul that turns a clumsy stock menu into one of the best pocket emulation experiences money can't buy. Onion is developed as OnionUI, a community project hosted openly on GitHub, with a rotating cast of contributors rather than a single named auteur. Various write-ups have tried to pin it on one developer — you will see invented names attached to it — but the honest description is that it is a team effort under the OnionUI banner, and crediting one handle does the rest of them a disservice.

Onion ships more than 100 emulator cores, a clean per-system interface, box art, save states, and — the crowd-pleaser — a Game Switcher that lets you flip between recently played titles and their save states without ever seeing a menu. Reviewing the device in 2026, the writer behind Pixel Swish titled the piece simply Ok, I get the hype now — and that headline is the whole Onion experience in five words. It is also free.

Versions: 4.3.1 stable, 4.4.0 beta, and the myth of 'v4.2.1'

Because this is a review and dates are facts, let us fix the record. As of mid-2026, the latest stable Onion build is the V4.3.1 / V4.3.1-1 line, and the newest work lives in V4.4.0-beta, with a build dated 20 January 2026 on the beta channel. Two version notes are worth having: V4.3.0 added Nintendo DS and PICO-8 as supported systems, and V4.4.0-beta promoted gpSP to the default GBA core and — genuinely surprising for this class of hardware — added netplay, including linking two Mini Plus units for Game Boy Advance. If you have read elsewhere that the device ships with Onion v4.2.1 from March 2025, delete that from your memory: no such release exists, and the device ships with Miyoo's own stock firmware regardless — you install Onion yourself.

The versioning muddle is worth flagging because it is symptomatic. Half the facts floating around this device are retailer copy and AI-summarised nonsense with invented version strings and imaginary release dates. Trust the GitHub releases page. Trust nothing that ends in a suspiciously round point-two-point-one.

Game Switcher, RetroAchievements, and the real value

What Onion actually buys you, beyond aesthetics, is function the stock firmware lacks. In the words of the Miyoo Mini Plus review at PropelRC, OnionOS "adds 3 hours of battery life" and "RetroAchievements support" — turning your Wi-Fi and RTC into a trophy system for 30-year-old games. Russ Crandall of Retro Game Corps, whose Onion install guide is functionally the one everybody follows, frames the stock firmware as the thing you replace on day one, and after a week with the device it is impossible to disagree. If you want to understand the emulator cores doing the heavy lifting underneath all of this, we broke them down in our guide to RetroArch cores in 2026, and we put Onion directly against its rival's firmware in Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX, where OnionOS still wins.

The curation problem, then, is this: Onion gives you a superb vehicle for a game list and zero opinion about what goes in it. It will happily present six thousand ROMs or sixty. The quality of your Miyoo Mini Plus experience is a direct function of your own restraint, and restraint is in short supply among people who just discovered they can carry every SNES game ever made in their pocket.

The Canon: What Belongs on the Card

The 16-bit spine: Zelda, Chrono, Mario

Strip away the 5,900 filler ROMs and a canon emerges — the games that show up on every serious top-10-for-the-Miyoo-Mini-Plus list, including the widely-shared Reddit thread from early 2026 that put The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the free homebrew puzzler Apotris, and Pokémon Gold/Silver at the top. This is the spine of the device, and it is almost entirely 16-bit.

A Link to the Past (1991 in Japan, 1992 in the West) is the reference implementation for this hardware: 4:3, D-pad-native, no analog stick required, and paced for exactly the ten-minute bursts a handheld invites. The Pixel Swish 2026 review, tellingly, ranks the Game Boy Advance's Minish Cap as its number-one pick — proof that the canon here skews handheld-first. Chrono Trigger (1995) is the other pillar — the product of Square's so-called Dream Team of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama. On the Miyoo Mini Plus it is, in PropelRC's blunt phrasing, "Chrono Trigger (SNES): Perfect 60fps." Both run flawlessly, forever, on a charge that outlasts your attention span.

The 32-bit reach: Xenogears and the Disc 2 problem

The PlayStation is where the device stops being merely competent and starts being remarkable for the price. Xenogears (Square, 1998, directed by Tetsuya Takahashi) is the poster child — and its inclusion on any best-of list comes with the most famous asterisk in JRPG history. As Hardcore Gaming 101 puts it, the game's "biggest problem" is its infamous second disc, where conventional RPG play collapses into "brief descriptions of what happened," padded by punishingly slow text.

The reason is lore now: as Kotaku's reporting established, Takahashi's team ran short of time and budget, and when Square's management suggested simply ending the game after the first disc, Takahashi chose instead to turn Disc 2 into a narrated montage so he could finish the story he actually wanted to tell. Playing it in 2026 on a $54 handheld — a machine more powerful than the one it shipped on — that decision reads as either heroic or maddening depending on the hour. Either way it runs, with the caveat below about the controls and the fact that PropelRC clocks only "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2" as the outer edge of the PS1 envelope.

The deep cuts: imports and honest homebrew

Beyond the canon sit the deep cuts — the reason enthusiasts actually love this format. Genuine rarities like Star Ocean: Blue Sphere (tri-Ace / Enix, Game Boy Color, June 2001, a Japan-only direct sequel to The Second Story) become trivially playable on a device that doesn't care what region a game came from. Hardcore Gaming 101 calls it "one of the most technically impressive RPGs ever to grace the Game Boy Color" — and it is exactly the kind of title the game-list format was made to rescue from obscurity. It is the same appeal Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian describes when he recounts discovering the JRPG canon through emulators as a European PC gamer — access to a history that geography and licensing had locked away.

And then there is the clean-hands option: homebrew. The falling-block game Apotris is free, open-source, purpose-built for the Game Boy Advance, and good enough to sit on that Reddit top-10 next to Nintendo's crown jewels. A growing scene of new GB/GBC/GBA homebrew — some of it genuinely excellent, some of it the usual hobbyist churn — means you can build a respectable, fully legal game list without touching a single commercial ROM. It won't be 6,041 games. It might be forty. Forty is plenty.

Here is how the canon's heavy-hitters actually behave on the hardware — the genre spine, with A Link to the Past standing in as the action-adventure anchor everyone loads first:

What Actually Runs, and What's a Lie

Flawless: 8-bit through PlayStation

The good news is enormous and it is most of the news. From the NES up through the Sony PlayStation, the Miyoo Mini Plus runs its library at full speed, with save states, fast-forward, and shaders, more or less without exception. Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo Pocket, and PS1: this is thousands of the best games ever made, and the device handles them the way a calculator handles arithmetic. This is the 95% of the game list that is completely real.

PlayStation deserves a specific note because it is where the SSD202D earns its keep. Most 2D and light-3D PS1 games — the JRPGs, the fighters, the sprite-based everything — run beautifully; the outer edge is a "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2," not a wall. The control scheme is the real limiter, not the CPU. And ignore any claim you read that PS1 games work up to 128 MB; that sentence is technical nonsense (PS1 discs run to roughly 650 MB, and 128 MB is the console's RAM figure being mangled). The honest rule is simpler: if it's 2D or modestly 3D, it's flawless; if it needs two analog sticks, it was never going to work here.

Selective: Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS is the frontier, and the record needs correcting: as of Onion V4.3.0, DS is a supported system — added alongside PICO-8 — so the old claim that DS is unsupported is simply out of date. What remains true is that it is impractical. The dual-screen problem is unsolvable on one 640×480 panel; there is no touch digitizer, so the stylus is approximated with a cursor; and the 1.2 GHz A7 is at its absolute ceiling. A subset of the library — the turn-based RPGs, the slow point-and-tap adventures — is genuinely playable. The rest is a party trick. Treat DS as a bonus that occasionally becomes a feature, never a reason to buy.

Fiction: N64, PSP, and the 'CrossCode' tell

Now the lies. You will find videos and listicles claiming the Miyoo Mini Plus plays Nintendo 64, PSP, even modern indie games like CrossCode or — the tell that a source is pure fabrication — Call of Duty. It does not. CrossCode is a JavaScript/HTML5 game that needs a real CPU and GPU; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was on the PS Plus catalogue in mid-2026 as a PS4/PS5 title. Neither will run on a Cortex-A7 with 128 MB of RAM, and any game list that includes them is describing a different device or describing nothing at all. N64 is not a practical target on this silicon; PSP is not present. These entries are how you spot an AI-generated or copy-pasted list that never touched the hardware.

Here is the per-system reality, with the actual cores Onion uses to do the work:

System        Core (Onion)          Verdict on SSD202D
-----------   -------------------   --------------------------
NES/GB/GBC    FCEUmm / Gambatte     Full speed, always
GBA           gpSP (default 4.4.0)  Full speed
SNES          Snes9x 2005/2010      Full speed; chip games vary
Genesis       Genesis Plus GX       Full speed
PS1           PCSX-ReARMed          Full speed; heavy 3D dips
Nintendo DS   added v4.3.0          Present but impractical
Nintendo 64   —                     Not a practical target
PSP           —                     Not present

If a best-games-for-Miyoo-Mini-Plus article lists anything that requires a row not in that table, close the tab. The hardware is honest even when the marketing is not.

Five Ways the List Plays

The casual and the commuter

The casual player is who this device was secretly built for. Turn it on, hit Game Switcher, resume exactly where you left off, play for eleven minutes on the bus, sleep it, repeat. Save states mean you never lose progress and never see a continue screen. For someone replaying childhood SNES games in ten-minute windows, the Miyoo Mini Plus is close to perfect, and the sprawling 6,041-game card is actively counterproductive — a curated forty is a better casual experience than an unsorted six thousand.

The commuter overlaps but cares about two things the casual player doesn't: battery and pocketability. Both are strengths. At 119×60×20 mm the device is genuinely pocket-sized — smaller than most phones — and the 3000 mAh cell gets through a round trip with room to spare. The 4:3 screen that limits PSP is exactly right for the GBA and SNES libraries a commuter actually reaches for.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist is where RetroAchievements transforms the thing. With Wi-Fi on, every supported ROM gains a trophy set, and suddenly "beat Chrono Trigger" becomes "unlock all of its achievements across every ending." It reframes a finished game as an unfinished checklist, which is either a gift or a curse. The device's save-state support also makes the grindier completion tasks — rare drops, missable items — humane in a way the original cartridges never were.

The speedrunner is a harder sell, and honesty demands the caveat. Emulator input latency on the SSD202D is low but not frame-perfect, and save-state abuse, while great for practice, is not tournament-legal for most leaderboards. As a practice and learning device — routing, memorising, drilling a segment with instant reloads — it is excellent. As the machine you set your official record on, it is not; serious runners still verify on original hardware or reference emulators. Use it to learn the run, not to submit it.

Co-op, and the mobile reality

Co-op is the scenario the device mostly loses — but not as completely as it used to. On a single unit there is no second controller, no port, and no split screen, so a two-player SNES classic like Secret of Mana runs and you play it alone. What changed is that Onion's V4.4.0-beta added netplay, including a Game Boy Advance link between two Mini Plus units. That is a real feature and a genuinely charming one — but it is beta, it is niche, and it requires you and a friend to each own the handheld. For 99% of buyers, treat this as a solo device and be pleasantly surprised if the netplay ever matters to you.

The mobile reality ties it together: this is a device that assumes you are alone, in a chair or a train seat, playing a single-player game from before 2001. Judged against that assumption it is superb. Judged against anything else — living-room co-op, the modern library, the analog-stick shooter — it stumbles, because you asked it to be something its silicon and its buttons were never going to allow.

Who Should Load What

Buy it, and here's your card

The lapsed SNES/PS1 player should buy this immediately and load a tight canon: the 16-bit Square and Nintendo catalogue, a handful of PS1 JRPGs, nothing else. You will use 8 GB of a 128 GB card and be completely happy. This is the device's core audience and its highest score.

The RetroAchievements grinder should buy it, flash Onion, connect Wi-Fi first thing, and treat the whole library as a trophy backlog. The RTC and Wi-Fi the Plus added exist for exactly this person.

The gift-buyer — someone shopping for a nostalgic relative — should buy the base unit, load a legal, curated card of thirty games themselves, and hand over something that turns on and just works. Do not buy them a "6,041 games pre-loaded" card; you are gifting a copyright problem with a bow on it.

Buy something else instead

If you actually want N64, PSP, or Dreamcast, stop looking at this device. You want a more powerful handheld with analog sticks and a widescreen panel — the class we covered in our Retroid Pocket 6 vs G2 comparison. The Miyoo Mini Plus will only frustrate you; buying it for PSP is like buying a bicycle because you need to cross an ocean.

If you want the entire library, sorted and scraped, on a big screen, the answer is a PC or mini-PC running a full distribution rather than a pocket handheld — which is exactly what our Batocera 43.1 install guide is for. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a scalpel, not a library; use the right tool.

The honest 'don't buy' cases

If you need real multiplayer, or you play mostly post-2001 games, or you cannot stomach the ROM-legality gray zone and don't want to build a homebrew-only card, this is not your device. There is no shame in it. The Miyoo Mini Plus is aggressively specialised, and its specialisation is the reason the people it fits adore it and the people it doesn't return it. Know which one you are before the card arrives, not after.

Price and Availability

What it costs in 2026

The Miyoo Mini Plus remains one of the cheapest genuinely-good things in consumer electronics. The base unit — no card, no games — sells for around $53.99, with some retailers listing it a hair under at $52.99, or roughly £60–70 in the UK. Bundles with a microSD card push the number up: roughly $69 for a 64 GB configuration, and $89–99 for 128 GB. None of that markup buys you a better device; it buys you a card and, often, a legal headache.

There is no single official storefront. Miyoo sells through a shifting constellation of AliExpress stores, Amazon third-party listings, eBay, and specialist shops. This is normal for the category and slightly unnerving for newcomers. Buy from a seller with a return policy, expect a two-to-three-week wait if you order from overseas, and budget $15 for a name-brand microSD card you will fill yourself.

The pricing table

The 'pre-loaded' trap

The single biggest way to overpay is to buy a 6,041-games-included card at a premium. You are paying extra for a folder of files you could assemble yourself, sold by someone assuming the legal risk on your behalf until customs or a copyright notice says otherwise. The rational purchase is the base unit plus a blank card. What you put on that card is between you, the law, and the homebrew scene — but you should at least know you are paying a convenience premium for someone else's copyright exposure, not for hardware.

The Ledger: Pros and Cons

What the list gets right

• The screen. A 3.5-inch 640×480 IPS panel at ~450 nits, at this price, is still faintly ridiculous. It flatters every 4:3 game you own.
• Onion. The best pocket emulation firmware going — free, open-source, and constantly maintained, with DS/PICO-8 support added in 4.3.0 and netplay in 4.4.0-beta. Game Switcher alone justifies the flash.
• The sweet spot. Everything from the NES to the PlayStation runs flawlessly. That is thousands of the best games ever made, in your pocket, most of a day on one charge.
• Price. Around $54. There is no serious competitor at this size for less money that does this much.
• RetroAchievements. The Wi-Fi and RTC turn a dead library into a living checklist. A genuine, unexpected pleasure.

Where it falls apart

• The '6,041' fiction. The headline number is a retailer's ROM tally, not a curated library, and buying it pre-loaded is a copyright problem, not a feature.
• No analog stick, no L2/R2. The control scheme quietly disqualifies a chunk of the PS1 library and everything above it.
• Ceiling at PS1. N64, PSP, Dreamcast, and modern indies are fiction on this hardware, no matter what the thumbnails say.
• No on-device multiplayer. No second controller, no split screen; co-op means a second unit and beta netplay. Effectively a solo device.
• You do all the work. The game list is a thing you build. Out of the box, this is an empty emulator with good bones.

The asterisks

Two things sit in the middle. Nintendo DS now technically works — the way a dog walks on its hind legs: impressively, briefly, and not something you'd rely on. And the whole experience depends on flashing third-party firmware and sourcing your own games, which is trivial for the initiated and a genuine barrier for a total newcomer. Neither is a dealbreaker. Both are the difference between the 7.5 this scores and the 9 the hardware would score if the list arrived curated, legal, and finished.

The Verdict: 7.5 / 10

The score, and where the 2.5 went

The Miyoo Mini Plus, as a piece of hardware running Onion, is a 9/10 object. The Miyoo Mini Plus game list, as the internet presents it, is a 6 — a marketing fiction wrapped around a copyright problem wrapped around, admittedly, a superb machine. Average the object against the artefact and you land at 7.5 out of 10, which is exactly where this review has been pointing since the first paragraph. The missing points are not the device's fault. They belong to the retailers who invented a 6,041-game list, the listicles that swear it runs Call of Duty, and the structural reality that the best thing you can put on it is legally fraught.

Score it as a machine and it's one of the great bargains of the decade. Score it as the game list people search for and it's a cautionary tale about believing precise-sounding numbers. Both are true. 7.5 is the honest midpoint.

Who it's for, one more time

Buy it if you are one person who wants to replay the 8-bit-through-PS1 canon in your pocket, will flash Onion without complaint, and will build a tight, mostly-legal card of games you actually intend to play. For that person — and there are millions of them — this is close to a 9, and the price makes it a rounding error. Everyone else should read the two paragraphs above about what it can't do and believe them.

The last word

There is no official Miyoo Mini Plus game list. There never was. What there is instead is a $54 emulator with a beautiful screen, the best community firmware in the category, and a canon of thirty-year-old masterpieces that run better on it than they did on the hardware they were born on. Ignore the 6,041. Build your own list. Keep it short. That is the whole review, and it is worth 7.5 out of 10 with a bullet.