/// FIELD NOTES FROM A SELF-AWARE GAME SITE
Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: PS1 Ceiling, 7.5/10
Type miyoo mini plus game list into a search bar and you are, without realizing it, asking the wrong question. You are picturing a menu: an official, curated library, the way a Switch has an eShop or a Genesis Mini has its forty-odd factory ROMs burned to the board. That list does not exist. Miyoo does not ship one. The stock firmware boots to an empty Roms directory and a shrug. Every "25,000 games included" headline you have read is not a specification. It is a reseller's sales tactic, and the number is closer to a warning label than a feature.
The List That Isn't
Before you can talk about the best games for this device, you have to dismantle the premise that it comes with any. It does not. What it comes with is a Linux computer the size of a deck of cards and an open invitation to fill it yourself.
Nobody ships you a game list
The Mini Plus is, first and last, a Linux handheld. That is the whole architecture of the thing, and it is the first fact any honest game-list article has to lead with. Miyoo builds the hardware and a bare-bones stock OS; the community builds the software that makes it worth owning. A 2026 Handheld Picker review laid the specs out plainly, a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640x480, a SigmaStar SSD202D with a dual-core Cortex-A7 at 1.2GHz, a 3,000mAh battery, and microSD storage, and noted the operating system is Linux, with a custom firmware such as Onion OS the near-universal first upgrade. That detail is not trivia. It is the entire reason a game list for this device is something you assemble, not something you unbox.
So when a storefront advertises a number, understand what you are actually being sold: a microSD card that someone else has pre-loaded with ROMs. The device is a vessel. The list is whatever that particular seller dumped onto that particular card, and it changes from listing to listing, which is exactly why no two "official" counts ever agree with one another.
The numbers are a browsing tax
Consider the spread. One storefront advertises 25,000 games in a bundle priced at 109.90 euros. Another splits its catalogue across three storage tiers at 13,056, 25,966, and 27,549 files. A third brags 28,000 on a 128GB card. A fourth, a cloned unit selling for around $25, claims 11,000, which is your cue to run, not to buy. These figures are uncorrelated with playable value. They are padded with duplicate dumps, broken dumps, region variants of the same cartridge, and entire system folders the hardware cannot run at speed. As a rule, the more games a listing brags about, the more it charges, and the more time you will spend scrolling past garbage to reach the forty games you actually wanted.
Call it a browsing tax. A 25,000-entry list is not a library; it is a landfill with a search function you were not given. Geekbuying's own game-list page even organizes some files by release-year label, so you will find entries like 2025 - Frogger's Adventures - Temple of the Frog(EU).zip and 2026 - Shikakui Atama wo Marukusuru Advance - Kokugo Sansu Rika Shakai(JP).zip sitting in the dump. That is machine-generated inventory, not human curation. Nobody sat down and decided a Japanese-only elementary-school study cartridge belonged on your commute.
What this review actually grades
So this is not a review of a fixed product. It is a review of a proposition: buy the Mini Plus, ignore the seller's card, and build the list yourself around what the silicon can actually do. Graded that way, the device is easy to love and easy to over-sell. A September 2025 review on Medium called it a "remarkable retro gaming handheld" built around affordability and customization, which is accurate and also exactly the kind of line the reseller listings quote out of context. The curated core, the four or five hundred games this chip runs flawlessly, is close to a nine. The padding, the copyright murk, the hard performance ceiling, and the total absence of multiplayer drag it back down. We will land on the number at the end. First, the ceiling, because on this device the hardware decides the list, not the other way around.
The Hardware That Sets the Ceiling
Every argument about which games belong on a Mini Plus ends at one component: the system-on-chip. You cannot curate your way around silicon. Understand the SSD202D and you already know the shape of the list before anyone hands it to you.
One chip, one ceiling
The Mini Plus runs a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with 128MB of DDR3 and, crucially, a 2D-only GPU. A 2026 Pixel Swish review confirmed both the SSD202D and the 128MB RAM figure, and that memory ceiling is the wall behind every performance argument on this platform. There is no meaningful 3D accelerator here. The chip was designed for smart displays and IP cameras, not polygon pushing, and it emulates 3D consoles the way a bicycle tows a caravan: technically, briefly, and never uphill.
This is also why the original Miyoo Mini and the Mini Plus are, under the shell, the same machine. Both use the SSD202D, both have the dual Cortex-A7, both carry 128MB, and both top out at PlayStation 1. The Plus is not a performance upgrade over the Mini; it is an ergonomic one. You get a larger 3.5-inch screen instead of 2.8, a 3,000mAh battery instead of roughly 2,000, and the addition of 2.4GHz Wi-Fi for box-art scraping and clock sync. If you came here expecting the Plus to run games the Mini could not, recalibrate now. The list is identical. The screen is just bigger.
The screen, the battery, the missing ports
The panel is a genuine highlight: a 3.5-inch IPS at 640x480, a 4:3 ratio that is exactly right for the 8- and 16-bit era and the arcade boards that defined it. Integer scaling on a sharp small panel flatters pixel art in a way a stretched widescreen handheld never will. Battery life is honest for the class. Playhouse.io's 2026 review measured 6 to 8 hours of mixed use at 50% brightness, dropping to about 5 hours under heavier PlayStation 1 emulation, with a full USB-C recharge in roughly 2 hours. Those are real numbers for a device this size, and they hold up in practice.
What is not here matters just as much for your list. There are no analog sticks, just a d-pad and face buttons, full stop. There is no Bluetooth, no HDMI out, and no local link of any kind. As DROIX noted in its comparison coverage, "one thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port." No sticks means no comfortable Nintendo 64 or PlayStation analog control even where the chip could limp through a title. No link cable and no Bluetooth means the entire multiplayer canon, from link-trading Pokemon to four-player brawlers to couch co-op run-and-guns, is off the table unless a game supports single-console co-op on shared buttons, which almost none do. Keep that fact in your pocket; it will decide half the recommendations later in this piece.
Full specifications
Here is the whole machine in one place. Every figure below is drawn from the 2026 reviews cited throughout this article.
| Specification | Miyoo Mini Plus |
|---|---|
| Release window | ~2023 (in active sale through 2026) |
| SoC | SigmaStar SSD202D |
| CPU | Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1.2GHz |
| GPU | 2D-only (no meaningful 3D acceleration) |
| RAM | 128MB DDR3 |
| Display | 3.5-inch IPS, 640x480, 4:3 |
| Battery | 3,000mAh (6-8h mixed, ~5h PS1) |
| Charging | USB-C, ~2 hours to full |
| Storage | microSD (sold with none, 64GB, or 128GB) |
| Operating system | Linux (stock); Onion OS the common upgrade |
| Connectivity | 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (no Bluetooth, no HDMI) |
| Controls | D-pad, face and shoulder buttons (no analog sticks) |
| Multiplayer | None (no link cable, no Bluetooth pads) |
| Emulation ceiling | PlayStation 1 |
| Weight | ~121g |
| Price (honest) | ~$55-65 / £55-60 |
What Actually Runs at Full Speed
With the ceiling established, the full-speed tier writes itself. Playhouse.io's 2026 guide lists the systems the Mini Plus runs at full speed, and it is a clean, defensible line in the sand.
The full-speed tier
Per that guide, the device handles Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Master System, Neo Geo, and arcade via FBNeo and MAME2003, plus PlayStation 1 at full speed. Add PC Engine and WonderSwan, which the community cores handle without complaint, and you have described roughly nine hardware generations of the best 2D software ever written. This is not a compromise library. This is the good stuff, the 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and 32-bit-2D canon, running on a device that vanishes into a jacket pocket.
Handheld Picker framed it well: the Mini Plus "is still one of the easiest retro handhelds to recommend in 2026 because it knows exactly what it is: a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming." Knowing what it is, and refusing to pretend otherwise, is the whole game here. The PC Engine library in particular is an underrated reason to own the thing, its shmups and its CD-era 2D titles are precisely the workload the 4:3 panel was built to flatter, and almost nobody's pre-loaded card bothers to curate it.
The PlayStation 1 crown, and its flicker
PS1 is the crown jewel and the ceiling in the same breath. The 2D-heavy PlayStation games are the sweet spot: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Igarashi's 1997 masterpiece, is arguably the single best argument for owning this device, a sprite-based game running on 32-bit hardware, which is precisely the workload the SSD202D was accidentally born to run. The heavier, more polygonal PS1 titles are where you see the seams. Final Fantasy VII plays, but its battle transitions and pre-rendered edges are where the chip shows its flicker, which is a useful in-game barometer for exactly where the ceiling sits. If a PS1 game is 2D or lightly 3D, it sings. If it is trying to be a technical showcase, expect compromises and the occasional dropped frame.
This is also the fastest way to spot a padded seller's list. If the card ships with folders for systems above PS1, that is not generosity, it is filler, and we will name those systems shortly.
Onion OS: the thing that makes a list possible
Stock firmware works. Onion OS is what makes the Mini Plus sing, and in 2026 it is effectively mandatory for anyone serious about a curated list. Retro Handheld HQ called Onion "the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026," and that is not hyperbole. It adds a clean interface, save states, box-art scraping over Wi-Fi, per-system folders, and its own tuned build of RetroArch. You want firmware base 202305052130 or newer to install it, and the current line is Onion OS v4.2.3, updated over the air through the OTA Update app.
Onion organizes ROMs by short folder tags under a top-level Roms directory. Getting the layout right is ninety percent of building a working list. Here is the skeleton:
/Roms
/FC NES / Famicom
/SFC Super Nintendo
/MD Mega Drive / Genesis
/MS Master System
/GB Game Boy
/GBC Game Boy Color
/GBA Game Boy Advance
/PCE PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
/NEOGEO Neo Geo (MVS/AES)
/ARCADE FBNeo / MAME2003+ sets
/PS PlayStation 1
/WS WonderSwanDrop a ROM in the wrong folder and it will not launch; drop it in the right one and Onion picks the correct core automatically. If you want to understand which emulator core each folder is calling and how to swap them, that is a rabbit hole worth the descent, and our walkthrough on installing and tuning RetroArch cores covers the same core set this device leans on.
The Canon: Games Worth the Card
Here is the actual list, not 25,000 files but the few hundred that justify the purchase. Wipe the seller's card and start here.
The flagship five
Handheld Picker's review anchored its recommendations around five games, and it is a hard set to argue with. First, Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995), the "Dream Team" collaboration of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, and a game that has topped best-RPG-of-all-time lists for three decades running. It runs flawlessly here and it is, frame for frame, the best reason to own the machine. Second, Pokemon across Game Boy and GBA, with the enormous asterisk that there is no link cable and no Bluetooth, so trading and battling are gone. You can catch them; you cannot, in the literal original sense, catch them all.
Third and fourth, the two 1997 PlayStation pillars: Symphony of the Night (the sweet spot) and Final Fantasy VII (the ceiling-tester). Fifth, Metal Slug on Neo Geo. Hardcore Gaming 101 describes the original as combining "gorgeous animated sprite artwork with dark comedy violence," calling it "a side-scrolling action game not unlike Konami's Contra," and every frame of that hand-drawn animation lands at full speed on this hardware. These five, plus the genre picks below, are a better starter list than any 25,000-file dump you will ever be sold.
The beat-'em-up bench
If one genre defines what this device is for, it is the 16-bit and arcade beat-'em-up: 2D sprite work, tight timing, short sessions, no analog stick required. The catch, as always, is multiplayer. Every one of these was built to be played two-up, and the Mini Plus can only give you one player. You are playing the single-player arcade of a co-op genre, which is either a tragedy or a focused pleasure depending on your temperament. Here is how the essentials stack up on this specific hardware:
| Game | System | Year | Native players | On the Mini Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Streets of Rage 2 | Mega Drive | 1992 | 2 | Flawless; the genre's high-water mark, solo only here |
| Final Fight | Arcade (CPS-1) | 1989 | 2 | Full speed via FBNeo; skip the cut-down SNES port, run the arcade |
| Golden Axe | Arcade / Mega Drive | 1989 | 2 | Flawless; pick the arcade set for the extra content |
| Streets of Rage 3 | Mega Drive | 1994 | 2 | Flawless; faster, harder, divisive soundtrack |
| TMNT: Turtles in Time | Arcade / SNES | 1991 | 4 (arcade) | Runs great solo; the four-player arcade magic is gone |
The verdict on the genre: the Mini Plus is a superb single-player beat-'em-up machine and a heartbreaking co-op one. Streets of Rage 2 alone is worth the folder, but do not pretend the couch-co-op soul of these games survives the port to a solo handheld with no second controller.
The rest of a real list
Beyond the flagships, a genuinely good ~300-game list writes itself out of the full-speed tier. The platformers are non-negotiable: Super Mario World is the reference-grade SNES launch platformer and runs perfectly, Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 2 give you the Mega Drive's answer, and Kirby Super Star plus the Donkey Kong Country trilogy round out the 16-bit run. The action-adventure spine is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which many still consider the finest top-down Zelda ever made, plus the two Game Boy Zeldas for the road.
For arcade purity, Street Fighter II and its endless revisions run flawlessly through the CPS cores, though six-button fighting on a d-pad is a real ergonomic tax you should factor in. For the run-and-gun and shoot-'em-up crowd, Contra, Gunstar Heroes, and the PC Engine and Neo Geo shmup libraries are exactly what the sharp 4:3 panel was made for. And for the quiet commute, Tetris on Game Boy remains the most perfect single object in this entire library, 1989's killer app, still undefeated. That is your list. Everything past it on a 25,000-file card is noise you paid extra to scroll through.
Where the List Stops
A good game-list article is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. On the Mini Plus, the exclusions are not opinions. They are physics.
N64 and Dreamcast: the slideshow tell
Playhouse.io's 2026 guide is diplomatic about it, listing Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast as suitable "only for light games or with tweaks." In its comparison coverage the site was blunter: "N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss." Translated out of reviewer-speak, that means a handful of the lightest titles will run at a wobbly, inconsistent frame rate if you fiddle with settings, and everything else is a slideshow. The 2D-only GPU and the 128MB of RAM are simply not equipped for the fifth-generation 3D leap. If a seller's card ships with fat N64 and Dreamcast folders, that is not value. It is the single fastest tell that the list was padded to inflate a number on a listing.
PSP, DS, and the honesty of "no"
PSP is worse. Playhouse.io states flatly that "PSP is not recommended," and Nintendo DS, a system whose entire interface assumes a second screen and a stylus, is a non-starter on a single-screen, touchless handheld regardless of raw speed. These are not "with tweaks" systems. They are "buy a different device" systems. The most useful thing any 2026 game list can do for you is tell you where to stop, and the Mini Plus stops, cleanly and permanently, at PlayStation 1.
If you need more, buy more
There is no shame in wanting sixth-generation power; there is only the wrong tool for it. If your dream list includes GameCube, PS2, Dreamcast at full speed, or PSP on the go, the Mini Plus is architecturally incapable and no firmware will change that. That is the moment to look up the class, at a device with a real GPU and analog sticks like the ones we cover in our Retroid Pocket 6 versus 5 breakdown. Expect to pay two to four times as much and to carry something that no longer disappears into a coin pocket. The Mini Plus is not competing in that weight class, and its whole appeal is that it never once pretended to.
How It Plays: Five Scenarios
Specs are theory. Here is how the list actually feels across five kinds of player, because the same device is a triumph for three of them and a genuine frustration for the other two.
The casual and the completionist
The casual player is who this device was built for. You want twenty minutes of Super Mario World on the sofa, a few rounds of Tetris before sleep, an hour of Chrono Trigger on a lazy Sunday. Onion OS boots fast, save states mean you never lose progress to a closed lid, and the 6-to-8-hour battery outlasts your attention span. For this player the Mini Plus is close to perfect and the 7.5 feels stingy. GamesRadar's reviewer captured the mood exactly: "I used to insist nothing beat the real deal, but now nothing beats curling up with Miyoo Mini Plus handheld and my favorite retro games."
The completionist has a harder time, and it is not the hardware's fault, it is the library's. A 100% run of a single 40-hour RPG is bliss here; save states and instant resume make grinding painless. But the completionist who wants the full Pokemon dex hits the wall immediately: no link cable, no trading, no version-exclusive fills. Anything designed around connectivity is permanently incomplete on this device. Curate around single-player-completable games and you will be happy for months. Chase multiplayer-gated 100% and you will be miserable inside an afternoon.
The speedrunner and the co-op player
The speedrunner should be careful. Emulation on a Cortex-A7 introduces input latency that a CRT-era runner will feel, and Onion's save states, while excellent for practice and segment drilling, are not a substitute for a low-latency setup on a real display. It is a fine practice tool for learning routes and rehearsing sections on the train. It is not the device you want for a submitted personal best, because the timing floor is set by the emulator and the panel, not by your thumbs.
The co-op player is simply out of luck, and it is the device's saddest limitation. There is no second controller, no link cable, no Bluetooth, no HDMI to a shared screen. The entire couch-co-op canon, Streets of Rage 2, Turtles in Time, Contra, four-player Bomberman, collapses to single-player. If co-op is why you play retro games at all, the Mini Plus is the wrong purchase, full stop. Look at something with Bluetooth and HDMI out, like the RG35XX Plus discussed in the next section.
The commuter
The mobile player is, alongside the casual, the device's ideal owner. It is genuinely pocketable at around 121 grams, the 4:3 screen is sharp under train lighting, and the battery clears a long round trip with hours to spare. Wi-Fi lets you scrape box art on a home or hotel network, and then you go fully offline for the commute itself. For a bag that already carries a phone and a laptop, this is the most game-per-gram you can buy without stepping up to a heavier, pricier class. The 2D-forward library is also exactly the kind of pick-up-put-down gaming that suits interrupted travel time, where a save state between stations is worth more than raw horsepower.
The Competition
The Mini Plus does not exist in a vacuum, even at this price. Two rivals matter: its own predecessor, and the Anbernic device that out-specs it on paper.
Versus the original Miyoo Mini
This is the easiest comparison in the category, because the two devices share a soul. The same SSD202D, the same 128MB, the same PS1 ceiling. The original Mini has a smaller 2.8-inch screen, a roughly 2,000mAh battery, and no Wi-Fi, and it is now largely discontinued new, surviving on the used and collector market for perhaps $20 less. The Plus is the same list on a bigger, more comfortable canvas, with a battery that lasts and Wi-Fi for box art. If you are choosing between them in 2026, buy the Plus and do not look back; the Mini's only remaining edge is pure pocket size and nostalgia.
Versus the Anbernic RG35XX Plus
This is the real fight. The RG35XX Plus shares the same 3.5-inch 640x480 panel but runs an Allwinner H700, a quad-core Cortex-A53 at roughly 1.5GHz with a Mali-G31 GPU and 1GB of LPDDR4, eight times the Mini's memory. As DROIX put it, "the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor." That extra muscle buys selective Dreamcast, N64, PSP, and even some DS, the exact systems the Mini Plus cannot touch, plus Bluetooth, mini-HDMI out, dual microSD, and stereo front speakers. It is the more capable machine by a wide margin on a spec sheet.
And yet. The Mini Plus counters with a more polished stock-to-Onion experience, a smaller and arguably nicer-in-hand body, and the reputation Retro Handheld HQ summarized as "still the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026." DROIX's own concession is telling: the Miyoo "only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need." Handheld Picker's blunt framing settles it, the Mini Plus is "no longer the strongest budget handheld" but "still one of the nicest small ones." If your list stops at PS1, and for most people it should, the Mini Plus's software polish is worth more day to day than the RG35XX's headroom you will rarely use. If your list wants that headroom, the choice makes itself.
| Device | SoC | RAM | Screen | Ceiling | Extras | Street price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miyoo Mini Plus | SSD202D (A7 x2 @1.2GHz) | 128MB | 3.5" 640x480 | PS1 | 2.4GHz Wi-Fi; no BT/HDMI/sticks | ~$55-65 |
| Miyoo Mini (original) | SSD202D (A7 x2 @1.2GHz) | 128MB | 2.8" 640x480 | PS1 | No Wi-Fi; discontinued new | ~$40-50 used |
| Anbernic RG35XX Plus | Allwinner H700 (A53 x4 @~1.5GHz) | 1GB | 3.5" 640x480 | Selective DC/N64/PSP | BT, mini-HDMI, dual SD, speakers | ~$45-65 |
| Retroid Pocket (2026 class) | Real 3D GPU + analog sticks | 4GB+ | Larger, higher-res | GC/PS2 class | Sticks, BT, HDMI, Android | ~$200+ |
Read the table and the thesis is obvious: the Mini Plus wins on polish and pocketability, loses on headroom and connectivity, and is priced exactly where it should be for what it does and no higher.
Price and Availability
Pricing on this device is a genuine mess, and understanding it is the difference between a $56 bargain and a 110-euro rip-off for identical silicon.
The honest price
Strip away the bundles and the honest number is roughly $55 to $65, or about £55 to £60. Miyoo's official store listed a holiday sale window of May 1-5, 2026 with 64GB colour variants at $56.99 against a regular price of $79.99. Playhouse.io's 2026 review pegged it at "roughly £60," which places it squarely in budget-handheld territory. Reviewed's spec summary is the most useful sanity check: the device ships in multiple configurations, and its base price runs as low as $49 with no SD card, with the tested configuration listed at $63. That $49-to-$63 band is the real device. Everything above it is a card full of ROMs that someone is charging you to have copied. RetroResolve's summary of the value proposition still holds: "For the price, I'll happily admit the Miyoo Mini is easily the best budget handheld available."
The price-chaos table
Here is the spread, and the pattern hiding inside it: the more games a listing brags about, the more it charges for the exact same hardware.
| Listing / source | Configuration | Advertised games | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miyoo official store (May 1-5 2026 sale) | 64GB colour variant | Bring your own | $56.99 (reg $79.99) |
| Playhouse.io 2026 review | Standard | Bring your own | ~£60 |
| Reviewed (base, no card) | No SD card | None | $49 |
| Reviewed (tested config) | With SD card | Seller-loaded | $63 |
| EU "25000 jeux inclus" storefront | 128GB bundle | 25,000 | 109.90 euros |
| Amazon clone trap | 128GB bundle | 11,000 | ~$25 |
The clone trap
That last row is not a bargain; it is a warning. A "Mini Plus" advertising 11,000 games on a 128GB card for around $25 is a cloned unit, meaning an inferior panel, worse build, dubious firmware, and a battery you should not trust. The genuine article does not sell for $25, and no legitimate seller pads the marketing with a five-figure game count and a rock-bottom price at the same time. The correct move, always, is to buy the cheapest legitimate configuration, ideally the bare device or the 64GB variant on sale, and then wipe whatever card comes with it and build your own list. You are paying for hardware. The included games are a liability dressed up as a feature, which brings us to the part every other game-list article skips.
Who Should Actually Buy It
Strip the marketing away and the Mini Plus is a sharply defined tool. Here is who it is for, and who should keep walking.
Five people who should buy it
- The pocket purist. If your list ends at PlayStation 1 and you want the smallest, most polished device that runs it, this is the buy. Nothing this size does the 2D and arcade canon better.
- The lapsed player returning cheap. If you want to test whether retro gaming still does anything for you before spending $200-plus, a ~$56 Mini Plus is the lowest-risk on-ramp in the entire hobby.
- The commuter. Around 121 grams, a 6-to-8-hour battery, a sharp 4:3 screen, and it disappears into a bag. The single best game-per-gram ratio short of a bigger, pricier class.
- The single-player RPG and platformer fan. Chrono Trigger, A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Symphony of the Night, the device's flawless core is exactly this catalogue, and none of it needs multiplayer.
- The tinkerer who wants a clean canvas. If wiping a card and building a 300-game list in Onion OS sounds like a Saturday well spent rather than a chore, the Mini Plus rewards curation more than almost any device at the price.
Three people who should not
- The couch co-op player. No link cable, no Bluetooth, no HDMI. The entire two-player canon is off the table. Buy an RG35XX Plus or step up a class.
- The sixth-generation collector. If your list needs Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, or PSP at full speed, the hardware physically cannot, and no firmware will fix it.
- The competitive speedrunner. Emulation latency on a Cortex-A7 and a small panel make this a practice tool, not a personal-best machine.
The one-line filter
If your dream list is 8-bit through PlayStation 1, single-player, and you want it in your pocket, buy the Mini Plus today and thank yourself later. If it is anything else, whether co-op, sixth-gen 3D, or a competitive timer, the money is better spent elsewhere. The device is honest about which player it serves. The marketing around it is not.
Pros, Cons, and the Legal Fine Print
The balance sheet is short and clear, and then there is the part the listings never print.
The pros
- Flawless full-speed emulation of the entire 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PS1-2D canon.
- Excellent 3.5-inch 640x480 IPS panel at the correct 4:3 ratio for the era.
- Honest 6-to-8-hour battery, ~2-hour USB-C recharge, and genuinely pocketable at ~121g.
- Onion OS turns the stock experience into one of the most polished interfaces at any price.
- Budget pricing, around $56 on sale, makes it the lowest-risk entry point in the hobby.
The cons
- Hard PlayStation 1 ceiling; N64, Dreamcast, PSP, and DS are effectively out.
- No analog sticks, no Bluetooth, no HDMI, no link cable, so zero multiplayer of any kind.
- Only 128MB of RAM; the hardware has no headroom and never will.
- The included-games marketing ranges from misleading to outright clone-scam territory.
The legal fine print
Here is the part the "25,000 games" listings never print. Those bundled ROM sets are, with vanishingly few exceptions, unlicensed copies of copyrighted software. A seller who pre-loads 25,000 games onto a card and sells it is distributing infringing material, and the legality of the card in your hand does not improve because a storefront treated it as a feature. The device itself is entirely legal. The dump is not. This is precisely why the honest recommendation is always to buy the bare hardware and supply your own software.
The clean path is to dump your own cartridges, a process that is legal in far more jurisdictions when the backup is of media you actually own, and genuinely satisfying to boot. Our guide to dumping a cartridge in about twenty minutes walks the whole chain. For the broader argument about preservation, ownership, and why emulation matters as history rather than theft, the Digital Antiquarian's long-running chronicle of the medium is the most thoughtful reading in the space. The Mini Plus is a superb way to play games you have a right to play. What you put on the card is on you.
The Verdict
After all of it, the ceiling, the canon, the clones, and the fine print, the score is not close to a mystery.
The score: 7.5 out of 10
Graded as a proposition, the device plus the list you should actually build on it, the Miyoo Mini Plus earns a 7.5 out of 10. The curated core is close to a nine: the 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PS1-2D canon runs flawlessly on a lovely little screen, with a battery that lasts and an interface, via Onion OS, that punches far above the price. What pulls the number down is not the good part. It is the padding-by-default marketing, the copyright murk of the bundled cards, the hard PS1 ceiling, and the total absence of multiplayer. Those are real deductions, and they are the difference between a great device and a great device sold dishonestly.
Who it is for, one more time
Buy it if your list is single-player and stops at PlayStation 1, and if the phrase "wipe the card and build your own 300 games" sounds like fun rather than homework. Skip it if you need co-op, sixth-generation 3D, or a competition-grade timer. The Mini Plus knows exactly what it is, which is Handheld Picker's line and the truest sentence written about this device, and it is worth owning precisely because it does not overreach. For deeper library math on the same machine, our companion pieces on the 25,966-game PS1 wall count and the PS1-ceiling game list go further into what those numbers really contain.
The bottom line
There is no official Miyoo Mini Plus game list, and that is the most honest thing about the device. What there is, once you throw away the seller's landfill card, is one of the best small windows into thirty years of 2D gaming that money can buy for under $65. Ignore the five-figure numbers. Build the few hundred that matter. Grade the machine on that, and it is a very easy recommendation, eyes open, card wiped, and ceiling understood.
Questions the search bar asks me
- Is there an official Miyoo Mini Plus game list?
- No. Miyoo ships stock Linux firmware with an empty Roms folder, so the device holds no licensed games out of the box. Every '25,000 games' or '28,000 games' claim comes from resellers pre-loading a microSD card with ROM sets, not from Miyoo itself.
- What is the most demanding system the Mini Plus can run at full speed?
- PlayStation 1, per Playhouse.io's 2026 guide. The SigmaStar SSD202D (dual-core Cortex-A7 at 1.2GHz, 128MB RAM, 2D-only GPU) is a hard ceiling; N64 and Dreamcast run only light titles or with tweaks, and PSP is not recommended at all.
- How long does the Miyoo Mini Plus battery last?
- About 6 to 8 hours of mixed use at 50% brightness, dropping to roughly 5 hours under heavy PlayStation 1 emulation, per Playhouse.io's 2026 review. The 3,000mAh cell recharges over USB-C in about 2 hours.
- How much should I pay for a Miyoo Mini Plus in 2026?
- Around $55 to $65, or £55 to £60. Miyoo's store ran a May 1-5 2026 sale at $56.99 for 64GB colour variants against a $79.99 regular price; Reviewed lists $49 with no SD card up to $63 for a loaded config. A '128GB, 11,000 games' unit at about $25 is a clone, so avoid it.
- Do I need Onion OS to build a game list?
- Practically, yes. Stock firmware works, but Onion OS (v4.2.3, installed on firmware base 202305052130 or newer) adds save states, box-art scraping, per-system folders, and a tuned RetroArch build. Retro Handheld HQ called it 'the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026.'