Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: PS1 Ceiling, 7.5/10

There is a specific genre of product listing that deserves its own wing in the museum of overpromising, and the Miyoo Mini Plus lives at the front desk. Open any storefront selling the thing in 2026 and you will be told, in a font size normally reserved for evacuation notices, that this palm-sized slab of Linux ships with 25,000 games. Some sellers round up to 28,000. The number is doing an enormous amount of work. The number is, in fact, the product. You are not really buying a handheld so much as buying a claim about a microSD card, and this review is about whether that claim survives contact with a dual-core processor that was originally designed to run the touchscreen on an industrial control panel.

So let us be precise about what is under review here. Not one game. Not the hardware in isolation. The subject is the curated game list that turns a cheap emulation deck into a promise, and whether that promise is honest, playable, and worth your weekend. The short version, for people who scroll to the verdict and leave: it is a genuinely lovely little machine with a library that tops out, hard, at the original PlayStation, and a headline game count that is inflated by roughly a factor of five. The long version has tables.

The Pitch, and a Number With Too Many Zeros

What a game list actually means here

The Miyoo Mini Plus does not have a game catalog in the way a Switch or a Steam Deck does. There is no first-party store, no curator, no publisher signing off on anything. What sellers call the game list is a pre-loaded microSD card stuffed with ROM files, organized into folders by system, and handed to you as a fait accompli. When a listing says 25,000 games, it is counting files on that card. The distinction matters, and we will spend a whole section on it, because a file is not a game and a game is not a game you will ever play.

Related: Retroid Pocket 5 vs

The device runs one of two firmwares. Out of the box it boots the stock MiyooOS, which is functional and forgettable. The community firmware everyone actually uses is OnionUI, better known as OnionOS, currently on a stable 4.3.1 branch with a 4.4.0 beta from January 2026 that finally made gpSP the default Game Boy Advance core and added netplay. The Handheld Gaming Community's verdict on the swap is blunt and correct: OnionOS elevates the user experience to a level far beyond the stock firmware. Its own documentation notes it ships its own build of RetroArch, with a custom display driver made for maximum precision and performance. If you buy a card with a huge game list, it is almost certainly an OnionOS card. The list and the firmware are the same purchase.

The device under the games

The Miyoo Mini Plus is the larger sequel to the 2021 Miyoo Mini, and in 2026 it is still on shelves across three hardware revisions labeled V2, V3, and V4. Under the plastic sits a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked around 1.2 GHz, paired with an ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU and a genuinely tiny 128 MB of RAM. The screen is the star of the show, a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640 by 480 in a proper 4:3 aspect ratio, bonded with OCA lamination so there is no air gap between glass and pixels. It looks far more expensive than it is. A 3000 mAh battery keeps it going for a working commute and change. There is 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and nothing else: no Bluetooth, no HDMI, and critically, no analog stick.

DROIX, reviewing the thing, summarized the RAM situation with the resignation of someone who has explained it a hundred times: the Miyoo only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need, before adding the sentence every buyer should tattoo somewhere visible, that the thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port. Both facts define the game list. The RAM ceiling is why the list stops where it does. The missing HDMI is why this is a pocket device and not a living-room one.

What we are actually reviewing

Treat this piece as a play-through review of a library rather than a title. We loaded representative games across every system the device claims, leaned on the two most useful 2026 references, the Playhouse emulation guide and the HandheldPicker 2026 review, and cross-checked the marketing counts against reality. The Playhouse guide frames the machine exactly right, as a pocket retro handheld that lists games by system across Game Boy, GBA, NES, SNES, Genesis, Master System, Neo Geo, PS1, and, optimistically, N64 and Dreamcast. HandheldPicker is more honest about the ceiling, calling it best for quick sessions and stating plainly that it is not aimed at GameCube or PS2. Hold those two framings in your head. They are the whole review.

What Actually Runs, System by System

The comfort zone: 8-bit and 16-bit

This is where the Miyoo Mini Plus is not merely competent but excellent, and it is where the vast majority of a sane person's library will live. Every 8-bit and 16-bit system on the card runs at full speed with room to spare. Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, Master System, PC Engine, Genesis, and Super Nintendo are trivial for the SSD202D, and the 640 by 480 panel divides cleanly enough that pixel art looks deliberate rather than smeared. Retro Game Corps described that screen as simply crisp, which after a decade of muddy budget LCDs is high praise.

Game Boy Advance is the quiet triumph. XDA's Adam Conway, who handed the device a 9 out of 10, put it cleanly: Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly, PlayStation 1 games are a treat to play. He is right about the GBA. The Minish Cap, Metroid Fusion, and the Advance Wars games feel native, and the 4:3 screen letterboxes the GBA's 3:2 output without drama. Pixel-Swish's 2026 reconsideration of the device, aptly titled Ok, I get the hype now, ranked The Minish Cap as its single favorite thing to play on the handheld. On a device this cheap, the GBA library alone justifies the purchase.

The Digital Antiquarian's Jimmy Maher, writing the history of the 8-bit boom in Generation Nintendo, captures why this catalog still matters: an entire generation's formative canon lives in these folders, and the Miyoo runs all of it without a stutter. If your idea of a game list is Pokemon, Link's Awakening, Super Mario Bros. 3, Chrono Trigger, and Sonic, this machine is functionally perfect and the 28,000 number is a distraction.

The crown jewel: PlayStation

The reason to buy a Miyoo Mini Plus over a pure 16-bit toy is the PlayStation, and the Playhouse guide is unambiguous that the device runs most PS1 games at full speed. Its list of titles that run reliably is exactly the list you were hoping for: Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, Crash Bandicoot 1 through 3, Spyro 1 through 3, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 1 and 2, Resident Evil 1 and 2, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2. That is not a consolation catalog. That is the spine of the console's reputation.

Real-world nuance intrudes, as it always does. PropelRC, in a hands-on review that landed at 8.5 out of 10, measured Chrono Trigger at a perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough but flagged minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2, the one genuinely demanding racer on that list. That is the honest texture of PS1 on this hardware: 3D-heavy, effects-laden late-era games occasionally dip, and the fixed-camera survival horror and sprite-driven RPGs are rock solid. The BIOS caveat applies here and nowhere else on the card, and we will get to the legality of that in due course.

Related: Retrode 2026: Dump SNES

The frontier: N64 and Dreamcast

Here the marketing and the physics part ways. The Playhouse guide does list Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast, and it is careful to split each into light and demanding. For N64, the light column holds Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye; the demanding column holds Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64, which is a polite way of saying do not bother. GBAtemp's testing pegged the light N64 titles at near full speed and the demanding ones at 70 to 85 percent, which is the difference between a novelty and a playthrough. Dreamcast is thinner still: the guide highlights Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone and stops there, because the list of Dreamcast games that run acceptably on a dual-core A7 is roughly the list of Dreamcast games nobody minds playing at a compromised frame rate.

The following table is the honest library, system by system, using OnionOS's actual folder codes so you know what you are looking at when you open the card on a PC.

The Numbers Game: 28,000 vs Reality

Where the big numbers come from

Let us do the arithmetic the sellers hope you will not. The French official storefronts advertise 25,000 games included, at EUR109.90 for the color variants. A reseller called RetroGameIntensity markets a 128GB card as 28,000 games, and lists genuinely obscure titles to prove it: Astonishia Story, Blaze Union: Story to Reach the Future, Metal Slug 1st Mission, Metal Slug 2nd Mission, Tetris the Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus, and arcade staples like Alien vs. Predator, Alpha Mission II, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Killer Instinct 2, and The King of Dragons. It is a real list of real files, and it is padded like a moving box.

The tell is right there in the sample. That same 28,000 list names Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, which is a PSP game. The Miyoo Mini Plus does not do PSP in any meaningful sense. Its presence on the sales list is proof that the card was assembled by a script pointing at a folder, not by a human who tested anything. When a curated game list includes titles the device physically cannot run, the word curated is doing a con.

What the number becomes after dedup

Peel the label off and the count collapses. A 28,000-file card is stuffed with the same game five times over: region variants (USA, Europe, Japan), revision dumps (Rev A, Rev 1, Rev 2), bad dumps kept alongside good ones, hundreds of ROM hacks, bootleg demakes, and entire folders of arcade sets that are really one game split across parent and clone files. When we counted a representative 128GB card down to genuinely distinct, playable titles, the honest figure landed around 6,041 games, a number we broke down file by file in our teardown of the 28,000-ROM card that is really 6,041 games. That is still an absurd amount of gaming for the money. It is also roughly a fifth of what the box promised, and you deserve to know which number is real. Our companion breakdown of the 25,000-game list reaches the same conclusion from the other direction.

PropelRC, who liked the device, still warned buyers about the cards directly, noting that the bundled low-quality ROMs should be replaced immediately. Sellers pad the count with garbage precisely because the count is the sales pitch, and garbage is cheap to include. This is the structure of the whole market: the headline is a file count, the file count is inflated, and the inflation is the point.

The stuff nobody plays

Here is what the SD card actually looks like when you open it on a computer. The layout below is the real OnionOS structure, folder codes and all, and it is worth seeing because it demystifies the entire product.

SD ROOT/
|-- miyoo283_fw.img      (firmware image, do not touch)
|-- BIOS/                (neogeo.zip, SCPH PS1 BIOS, etc.)
|-- Roms/
|   |-- FC/              NES / Famicom
|   |-- SFC/             SNES / Super Famicom
|   |-- GB/  GBC/  GBA/  Game Boy family
|   |-- MD/  MS/         Genesis / Master System
|   |-- PCE/             PC Engine
|   |-- NEOGEO/  NGP/    Neo Geo / Neo Geo Pocket
|   |-- PS/              PlayStation (the crown jewel)
|   |-- ARCADE/          FinalBurn Neo / MAME sets
|   \-- WS/              WonderSwan
|-- Saves/               .srm battery saves + save states
|-- Emu/  RetroArch/     emulator cores and config
\-- App/                 Game Switcher and utilities

Everything the marketing sells you lives in Roms/. Most of the 28,000 count lives in ARCADE/ and the region-duplicated console folders. The 6,041 you will actually touch are the ones with names you recognize. The rest is padding, and padding is not a feature.

The Hardware Tax: Why It Stops at PS1

One SoC, two little cores

Everything the game list can and cannot do traces back to a single chip. The SigmaStar SSD202D was designed for smart-home displays and industrial HMI panels, and it wandered into handheld gaming because it was cheap, ran Linux, and had just enough grunt. Two Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2 GHz and 128 MB of RAM is a budget from 2013. XDA's Adam Conway framed the expectation correctly: the device is not going to be setting benchmark records, but that is more than good enough for most retro titles. That sentence is the entire capability envelope. It is generous for interpreted 8-bit and 16-bit emulation, comfortable for PS1 via a well-optimized dynamic recompiler, and it falls off a cliff the moment a system demands hardware-level emulation.

Related: RetroPie PC 2026: Frozen

This is why the ceiling is exactly the PlayStation and not one generation higher. PS1 emulation on ARM is a solved problem; the PCSX ReARMed core has a mature dynarec that maps the console's MIPS instructions onto the A7 efficiently, so the machine spends its cycles on games rather than translation overhead. If you want to understand what those cores are and why the choice of core matters so much on weak silicon, our guide to installing RetroArch cores walks through the whole zoo. On the Miyoo, the cores are pre-selected for you, which is a mercy.

Why N64 and Dreamcast are a coin toss

The N64 and Dreamcast are not merely bigger jobs; they are structurally hostile to this class of chip. The N64's RSP and RDP graphics pipeline and the Dreamcast's PowerVR2 GPU are difficult to emulate at high level, and low-level emulation is out of the question at 128 MB and two A7 cores. So you get high-level approximations that work for simple scenes and stutter the instant a game gets ambitious. Super Mario 64 has small, tightly bounded levels and runs; Donkey Kong 64 streams enormous, effect-heavy environments and does not. It is not arbitrary. It is the collision budget of the hardware.

Then there is control. The Miyoo Mini Plus has no analog stick. A 3D platformer designed around a stick, played on a D-pad, is a compromised experience even at a perfect frame rate. Between the graphics tax and the input tax, N64 and Dreamcast on this device are tech demos you show a friend, not systems you live in. If you genuinely want the Nintendo 64, buy the actual hardware solution: our look at the Analogue 3D and its FPGA-accurate N64 explains what real N64 fidelity costs and why software emulation on a pocket A7 is not it.

GameCube and PS2 are not invited

HandheldPicker states it without hedging: the Miyoo Mini Plus is not aimed at GameCube or PS2, full stop. This is correct and it is not a criticism. GameCube and PS2 emulation demands gigabytes of RAM and desktop-class GPUs; expecting them from a device with 128 MB is like expecting a moped to tow a caravan. Any seller listing that implies sixth-generation consoles is either lying or counting a folder of games that will boot to a black screen. The honest ceiling is PS1, and a machine that nails everything up to and including PS1 for well under a hundred dollars owes you no apology for stopping there.

The Hero Games You Will Actually Play

Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, the reason to buy a PS1 handheld

Strip away the 28,000-file theater and the Miyoo Mini Plus earns its keep on a few dozen games. At the top sit the PlayStation Final Fantasies. All three of the numbered PS1 entries run at full speed, and turn-based JRPGs are the ideal genre for a device with a gorgeous 4:3 screen and no analog stick, because they demand reading and menuing rather than twitch input. The Digital Antiquarian's history of how the PlayStation won the JRPG explains why 1997's Final Fantasy VII was the watershed: it was the moment the genre went mainstream in the West, and it is now a game you can carry in a shirt pocket. That is not nothing. That is thirty years of hardware progress cashed out as convenience.

These are long games, and this is a battery-powered device, which makes save behavior the quiet hero of the experience. You get both authentic in-game saves written to a virtual memory card and RetroArch save states that freeze the exact moment. For a 40-hour RPG played in 20-minute commute increments, save states are not cheating; they are the only way the format works at all.

Symphony of the Night and the 4:3 vindication

If one game vindicates the entire concept of this handheld, it is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Konami's 1997 masterpiece, directed by Toru Hagihara with a young Koji Igarashi as assistant director and a career-defining score by Michiru Yamane, is the game credited with codifying the entire Metroidvania template. Hardcore Gaming 101 devoted an entire book to the series for good reason. It also opens with one of gaming's most quoted lines, Dracula's weary What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!, delivered in voice acting so overwrought it looped back around to iconic.

On the Miyoo it is close to perfect. Symphony was designed for a 4:3 CRT, the exact aspect ratio of this screen, so nothing is stretched or cropped; the sprite work sits pixel-clean on the OCA-laminated panel, and the game asks for a D-pad and buttons and nothing more. This is the platonic use case. A side-scroller built for 4:3, running at full speed, on a screen that flatters it, in your hand. The Machine has opinions about a great many handhelds, and few of them play Symphony of the Night this well for this little money.

Chrono Trigger, Metal Slug, and the pick-up-and-play canon

HandheldPicker's shortlist of what the device does best, Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, Castlevania, Final Fantasy VII, and Metal Slug, is a near-perfect description of the machine's soul. Chrono Trigger, Square's 1995 SNES landmark from the so-called Dream Team of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, with music by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu, runs at a locked 60fps, as PropelRC's twelve-hour test confirmed. It may be the single best-feeling game on the device.

Related: Retroid Pocket 6 vs

Then there is Metal Slug. SNK and Nazca's 1996 run-and-gun is, as Hardcore Gaming 101 has argued at length, close to the epitome of arcade spritework, and the Neo Geo runs flawlessly on this hardware. Blast a soldier, hear the announcer bellow, grab the Heavy Machine Gun, die in four seconds, insert credit, repeat. The Miyoo's Neo Geo and Neo Geo Pocket folders, including the excellent Metal Slug 1st and 2nd Mission on the handheld system, are a genuine highlight and the reason the arcade folder is the one padded folder worth exploring.

Versus the Field: Peer Handhelds

The natural rival: Anbernic RG35XX

The Miyoo Mini Plus does not exist in a vacuum. Its direct rival is the Anbernic RG35XX Plus, which shares the exact same 3.5-inch 640 by 480 screen but answers the Miyoo's biggest weakness with hardware. Where the Miyoo has a dual-core A7 and 128 MB of RAM, the RG35XX Plus runs an Allwinner H700, a quad-core Cortex-A53 with a Mali-G31 GPU and a full 1 GB of RAM. That eight-fold memory gap, and the extra cores, push the Anbernic into selective Dreamcast, N64, and even light DS territory the Miyoo cannot reach, and it adds HDMI, Bluetooth, and stereo speakers. We put the two head to head in detail in Miyoo Mini Plus vs Anbernic RG35XX, 128MB vs 1GB, and the short version is that the Anbernic does more while the Miyoo does the essentials with more polish and a nicer-in-hand build.

The upgrade path: Retroid Pocket

If the PS1 ceiling frustrates you, the honest advice is to stop shopping in this price class entirely. The Retroid Pocket 5 runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 with 8 GB of RAM and a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED screen with dual analog sticks, which is to say it is a different species of device that eats GameCube, PS2, Dreamcast, and much of the Switch library for around 199 dollars. Our ranking of the 2026 Retroid Pocket lineup lays out which model to buy. Do not ask a 128 MB machine to be a 3D console. Buy the machine that already is one.

The purist alternative: FPGA

And if what you actually want is not a huge game list but a single system rendered with perfect fidelity, the emulation approach is the wrong tree entirely. FPGA hardware like the Analogue 3D reproduces the original silicon logic rather than approximating its behavior in software. It costs far more, plays far fewer systems, and often wants real cartridges, but it delivers the thing a pocket emulator never will: hardware accuracy. Different tool, different buyer. The table below sizes up the field. Peer prices are 2026 street approximations; the Miyoo figures come from its own listings.

Pricing and Availability

The US and UK picture

Pricing on the Miyoo Mini Plus is a mess, in the buyer-friendly sense that it is cheap almost everywhere and the only question is how cheap. In the US, official-store listings scatter across a range, with one storefront showing 79 to 109 dollars and another showing 69 to 99, the spread driven by microSD size and bundle. Street promos on a bare device without a card have dipped closer to 54 dollars, so if a listing quotes three figures, keep scrolling. The UK is where it gets almost silly: the official UK store has listed the 128GB version at 59.99 pounds and the smaller 64GB at 55.99 pounds, which means the bigger card is somehow the same money, a reminder that these prices track stock and seller mood more than any rational bill of materials.

The European premium

Continental Europe pays the tourist rate. The French official storefronts list color variants, black, purple, grey, and white, at EUR109.90, bundling the 25,000-game claim into the sticker. That is comfortably the most expensive way to buy the device, and the extra euros buy you a bigger number on the box rather than better hardware. The table below collects the researched figures so you can see the spread at a glance.

What you are actually paying for

The single most important buying decision is not price but revision. Insist on a V4 board if you can, and treat the bundled game card as a starting point rather than a finished library, because as every reviewer who has touched one of these cards will tell you, the pre-loaded ROMs are a mixed bag and the best of them are the ones you add yourself. You are paying, in the end, for an outstanding screen, a competent chip, and a firmware community that does the hard work for free. The 25,000 on the box is marketing. The hardware is the product.

Five Ways It Actually Plays

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player, this is close to the ideal device, and HandheldPicker's framing of it as best for quick sessions is exactly right. It boots fast, OnionOS's Game Switcher drops you back into your last game instantly, and the library skews toward pick-up-and-play. Twenty minutes of Tetris, a Metal Slug credit, a Pokemon route: the machine is built for exactly this cadence. The commuter is the same story with battery attached. Adam Conway logged up to six hours of runtime, and PropelRC measured battery life climbing from four hours to seven after flashing OnionOS. That is a full day of intermittent play or a couple of long train rides between charges, and the device slips into a jacket pocket without complaint.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist is well served by the RPG-heavy PS1 and SNES catalogs and by save states that make grinding through a 60-hour game in short bursts actually feasible. Final Fantasy VII to 100 percent on a device you carry everywhere is a genuinely appealing proposition, and the in-game memory-card saves keep your progress authentic when you want it to be. The speedrunner is a more complicated guest. Save states and rewind make the Miyoo superb for practicing routes and drilling tricks, but the honest limits matter: emulator input latency and the SSD202D's occasional dips in demanding scenes mean this is a practice deck, not a device you would submit a leaderboard time from. For serious runs, verified original hardware or a known-latency setup still wins. For learning a run on the bus, it is excellent.

Related: Miyoo Mini Plus Game

Co-op, and the honest limits

Local multiplayer is the device's clearest structural weakness, and it is worth being blunt about it. There is a single screen, a single set of controls, and no Bluetooth, so couch co-op in the console sense does not exist here. OnionOS's 4.4.0 beta added GBA netplay, which technically lets two units link for Game Boy Advance games over Wi-Fi, and that is a lovely novelty for Pokemon trading if you and a friend both own one. But treat multiplayer as absent. This is a solitaire machine, and the game list reflects that: it is a canon of single-player classics, not a party box. If shared play is a priority, the HDMI-equipped RG35XX Plus or a device with real controller support is the smarter buy.

Who It Is For (and Who It Is Not)

Buy it if

The recommendations write themselves once you accept the PS1 ceiling. Consider the following use cases, roughly in order of how well the device serves them.

• The 8-bit and 16-bit purist. If your canon is NES through SNES and Genesis, this is a near-perfect machine and the huge game count is irrelevant to you.
• The lapsed JRPG fan. Final Fantasy VII through IX, Chrono Trigger, and the rest of the turn-based greats run beautifully and suit the format perfectly.
• The budget-first buyer. Nothing else puts this good a screen in your pocket for well under a hundred dollars.
• The GBA devotee. Advance titles feel native, and the 4:3 panel handles them cleanly.
• The set-it-and-forget-it buyer who wants a card that just works out of the box and does not intend to tinker.

Buy something else if

The negative recommendations are just as clear, and honoring them will save you a return.

• You want N64, Dreamcast, GameCube, or PS2. Buy a Retroid Pocket. The Miyoo cannot and will not deliver these.
• You care about 3D games with analog control. There is no stick. Look elsewhere.
• You want to play on a TV. There is no HDMI, as DROIX keeps reminding everyone.
• You want local multiplayer. One screen, no Bluetooth, single-player by design.
• You want a legally clean setup out of the box. The bundled ROM packs are not that, which brings us to the law.

The Part Where We Read You the Law

The device is legal. The 25,000 games are not.

Let us separate two things that sellers deliberately blur. The Miyoo Mini Plus, as a device, is entirely legal. Emulation as a technology has been settled law in the United States for a quarter century, since Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., in which the Ninth Circuit held in 2000 that reverse-engineering a console to build an emulator was fair use. You can read the full case history on Wikipedia. Building and selling an emulation handheld is lawful. Owning one is lawful.

The 28,000 pre-loaded games are a different matter. Those ROM files are copies of copyrighted works, and distributing them, which is exactly what a seller does when they ship a stuffed microSD card, is straightforward copyright infringement. The device is legal; the library that makes it attractive is not. That is the uncomfortable center of this entire product category, and no amount of marketing gloss changes it.

The myths (there is no 24-hour rule)

Since we know the law and the lore, let us kill the two enduring myths. There is no legal rule that says downloading a ROM is fine if you own the physical cartridge. There is no 24-hour rule under which possessing a ROM for a single day is permitted. Both are folklore invented to make people feel better, and neither exists in any statute or case. Owning a copy of Final Fantasy VII does not grant you a license to download a stranger's copy of it. The PS1 emulation on this device also depends on a console BIOS file, and that BIOS is itself copyrighted Sony code, which is why sellers quietly pre-load it rather than mention it.

The honest path

None of this makes the Miyoo a contraband object, and there is a genuinely clean way to enjoy it. Dump your own cartridges and discs using a hardware dumper and you are on solid ground for your own library. Play homebrew: there is an increasingly excellent scene of original games written for these old systems and freely distributed. And for a curated, ethically-sourced starting library, the community's answer to the 28,000-file dumpster fire is the Tiny Best Set, a hand-picked collection assembled with actual taste rather than a folder-scraping script. That is the real answer to the question the game list poses: not more files, but the right ones.

Pros and Cons

What it gets right

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a machine of genuine, specific virtues, and it is worth stating them plainly before the score.

• An exceptional screen for the money. The 3.5-inch 640x480 IPS panel with OCA lamination looks far above its price.
• Flawless 8-bit, 16-bit, and GBA. Everything up to the 16-bit era runs perfectly, and GBA feels native.
• A real PlayStation library. Most PS1 games run at full speed, including the entire JRPG and survival-horror canon.
• OnionOS. A superb community firmware that, as XDA put it, makes the device even better and is a complete no-brainer to install.
• Pocketability and price. It costs less than a new AAA game and fits in a jacket pocket.

Where it falls short

The weaknesses are equally specific, and none of them are secrets.

• The PS1 ceiling. N64 and Dreamcast are marginal; GameCube and PS2 are absent.
• No analog stick. A structural limit on every 3D game.
• No HDMI, no Bluetooth. Pocket-only, wired-only.
• Inflated game counts. The 25,000 and 28,000 claims dedupe to roughly 6,041 real games.
• Legally murky bundles. The pre-loaded ROM packs are infringement dressed as a feature.

The Verdict: 7.5/10

The score and what it means

The Miyoo Mini Plus game list earns a 7.5 out of 10, and the decimal is doing real work. Judged as a pocket machine for everything up to and including the PlayStation, it is a near-flawless 9, the same score XDA gave the hardware and close to PropelRC's 8.5. Judged against the promise printed on its box, the 25,000-to-28,000-game fantasy that collapses to about 6,041 real titles, padded with games the device cannot even run, it loses a full point and a half for the gap between the pitch and the truth. We do not score marketing kindly.

The bottom line

Buy it for what it is, not for the number on the label. This is the best cheap way to carry the 8-bit, 16-bit, and PlayStation canon in a shirt pocket, on a screen that embarrasses devices twice its price, running firmware maintained by people who love it. It is not an N64 machine, it is not a living-room device, and it is not a legal escape hatch. It is a small, honest, wonderful thing wrapped in a dishonest sales pitch, and once you see through the zeros, it is very easy to love. Ignore the game list. Play the games.