Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: PS1 Ceiling, 8/10

There are two objects that answer to the search term Miyoo Mini Plus game list, and only one of them is real. The first is a number a reseller prints on a product page — 25,000 games, 28,000 games, pick a figure — to sell you a microSD card stuffed with other people's copyrights. The second is the list of systems this little vertical slab can actually run at full speed, which is fixed in silicon and does not care what the listing says. This review is about the second list, because the first one is not a feature. It is a browsing tax with a legal half-life.

Here is the fact the marketing works very hard to bury: the Miyoo Mini Plus ships empty. Miyoo's own firmware comes with zero games. Every eye-watering count you have ever seen attached to this device was added by a third-party seller, and the more games a listing brags about, the more it tends to charge. So the honest question is not how many games does it come with. The honest question is what can the chip do, and the answer has been the same since 2023: everything from the Nintendo Entertainment System up to the original PlayStation, and effectively nothing above it. That is the game list. That is the whole review, and everything below is the argument for why it earns an 8 out of 10 anyway.

The Verdict, Before the Marketing

I put the score at the top because you deserve it before the word count starts, and because the number is the least interesting thing here. The interesting thing is what it measures.

The one-line answer

The Miyoo Mini Plus is the best pure library machine you can buy for the money in 2026, provided your definition of “library” ends at the PlayStation. It runs the NES, SNES, both Game Boy lines, the Game Boy Advance, the Master System, the Mega Drive, the PC Engine, the Neo Geo, arcade sets through FBNeo and MAME2003+, and PS1 — all at full speed, all in your pocket, all on a battery that genuinely lasts a working day. It does not run the Nintendo 64, the Dreamcast, the PSP, or the DS in any way you would call playing. If that ceiling is your ceiling, this is a nine. If you needed one rung higher, it is a two, and no firmware update will move it, because the wall is in the transistors.

What the score actually measures

I am scoring the proposition, not a single cartridge, so the maths deserves daylight. The curated core — the two or three hundred games you would actually keep after a weekend of pruning — is a legitimate 9. The out-of-the-box “25,000 game” bundle a reseller hands you is closer to a 6: padded, duplicated, legally radioactive, and slower to browse than to play. Average the platform you build against the platform you are sold, weight it toward the thing a sane person ends up with, and you land on 8/10. Deduct for the copyright murk, the PS1 hard cap, and the total absence of any multiplayer. Add back for the fact that at roughly the price of a new AAA game, nothing this size does what this does.

Who wrote this, and why distrust round numbers

The Machine does not trust a spec sheet that ends in three zeros, and neither should you. When Pocket Retro Gamer calls this the best ultra-portable retro handheld under $70 in 2026, that is a claim about a device. When a storefront calls it a 25,000-game console, that is a claim about a spreadsheet. One of those publications has to stand behind its words; the other just has to move a card. As the reviewers at Handheld Picker put it, the Mini Plus “knows exactly what it is: a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming.” Keep that sentence in your head. It is the most honest game list anyone has published for this device.

The Game List Is a Lie (Sort Of)

Let us dismantle the headline number first, because until it is gone you cannot see the machine underneath it.

The 25,000-game sleight of hand

Search the exact phrase and you will be quoted a menu of counts, each attached to a different seller and a different price. One European storefront advertises 25,000 games for €109.90. Another lists three storage tiers at 13,056, 25,966, and 27,549. A third promises 28,000 on a 128GB card. A marketplace clone dangles 11,000 for around $25, which is the scam tell: that price does not buy this device, it buys a counterfeit that looks like it in a thumbnail. None of these figures describe Miyoo firmware. They describe pre-loaded ROM sets, assembled by resellers, sold in a legal grey zone that shades to black the moment money changes hands. The counts are uncorrelated with anything you would recognise as playable value, which is exactly what you would expect from a number chosen by a marketing department rather than a QA team. I walked through the full anatomy of that inflation in our companion piece on the 28,000-game myth and the PS1 ceiling, and the short version is: the padding is the product.

Why the counts are padded

Twenty-eight thousand is a real file count. It is not a real game count. Open one of these cards and you find the same title four times — USA, Japan, Europe, and a “Rev A” — plus bad dumps that crash on the title screen, hacks and translation patches shelved next to their originals, and entire folders for systems this hardware cannot emulate at all. That last category is the fastest way to spot a padded list: if the card ships you a Nintendo 64 folder, a Dreamcast folder, and a PSP folder, someone counted a slideshow as a game. A curated NES set is around 700 titles worth keeping. A curated SNES set is maybe 800. Multiply honestly across every system this chip runs and you land near three thousand games worth owning, not thirty. The other twenty-five thousand are the browsing tax — you pay for them in scroll time.

The legal half-life, and building your own

Emulation itself is settled and legal; the software that interprets one machine's instructions on another is protected expression, a point well documented on Wikipedia and established in United States case law decades ago. What is not settled is the crate of ROMs a stranger sold you. The clean path is dull and correct: buy the device bare, wipe whatever card it came with, and build a list from titles you own — which, if you want to be a purist about it, means dumping your own cartridges. We documented that exact workflow in our guide to dumping a SNES cart in twelve steps, and it is more satisfying than it sounds. The reward for doing it right is a machine that boots into a few hundred games you actually chose, loads them in under a second, and never once makes you scroll past Bubble Bobble (J) (Rev 1) [b2] to reach the game you wanted. That is the real Miyoo Mini Plus game list. You write it.

The Full-Speed Library: NES to Neo Geo

Strip the marketing and here is the machine. Everything in this section runs at or near full speed with sound, save states, and fast-forward, on stock firmware or — better — on OnionOS.

The 8- and 16-bit backbone

This is where the Mini Plus is not merely competent but genuinely excellent, because the SSD202D was overbuilt for a Game Boy and merely adequate for a PlayStation. The 8- and 16-bit era is its comfort zone. Playhouse's 2026 emulation guide lists the obvious canon as playable without caveat — Pokémon, Zelda, Tetris, Kirby, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Sonic, Streets of Rage — and in practice the list is far longer than any one guide bothers to print. The 4:3 640×480 panel is the quiet hero here: a Super Nintendo frame maps onto it with integer-clean scaling, and pixel art at native aspect on a 3.5-inch screen looks the way a CRT wanted it to, minus the weight. Chrono Trigger in particular — the 1995 SNES landmark from the so-called Dream Team of Sakaguchi, Horii, and Toriyama, whose production history is a subject unto itself — is arguably the single best reason to keep this device in a coat pocket. Forty hours of it fits in your palm and never drops a frame.

The arcade and Neo Geo layer

Above the console layer sits the arcade layer, and it is stronger than the price suggests. Through FBNeo and MAME2003+, the Mini Plus handles the CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards — Street Fighter II and its many revisions run exactly as you remember — and the Neo Geo MVS library is fully in reach with the correct neogeo.zip BIOS in place. Metal Slug is the poster child, and deservedly: the run-and-gun series that Hardcore Gaming 101 treats as a genre high-water mark plays here with every frame of its absurd sprite animation intact. So does Treasure's Gunstar Heroes, the 1993 Mega Drive tour de force that HG101 rightly calls one of the finest action games of its generation. The only thing missing is a second player, which the arcade era assumed and this device cannot provide. More on that indignity later.

The library, system by system

The table below is the honest game list — not a count of files, but a map of what the silicon does with each platform. The bottom four rows are included precisely because a padded card will pretend they belong.

The PS1 Ceiling: Crown and Cap

The PlayStation is the single most important line in that table, because it is simultaneously the reason to buy this device and the reason it will eventually frustrate you. It is the crown. It is also the cap.

The titles that justify the purchase

When Playhouse's guide says PS1 support covers most games, it is not overselling. The list of what actually runs here reads like a greatest-hits shelf: Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX; Crash Bandicoot 1–3; Spyro 1–3; Metal Gear Solid; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; Tekken 3; Gran Turismo 1 and 2; Resident Evil 1 and 2; Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2; Wipeout; and Ridge Racer. That is a serious library on a device that costs less than one of those games did at launch. The original PlayStation was a 32-bit machine built to throw textured polygons, and the SSD202D can just barely keep up with the ones that were not too ambitious about it. Store your discs as CHD images and a 64GB card holds more of the good ones than you will finish this year.

Where the ceiling shows

The tell is the 3D. This SoC has a 2D graphics unit and no hardware 3D acceleration, so every PlayStation polygon is being rasterised in software on two Cortex-A7 cores. Titles that leaned hard on the hardware show it. Final Fantasy VII, ironically the game everyone reaches for first, is where you will first see the ceiling flicker — battle transitions and the busier field scenes remind you what is doing the work. The sweet spot is the opposite kind of game: Symphony of the Night, Koji Igarashi's 1997 masterpiece, is a 2D game running on 32-bit hardware, which means the Mini Plus renders it with room to spare. It is no accident that the most-praised PS1 game in this whole list is also the one that stresses the chip least. As a rule: 2D-on-PS1 is bliss, 3D-on-PS1 is a gamble you usually win.

The control caveat nobody prints

There is a caveat the game list never mentions, and it matters most on PlayStation. The Mini Plus has a D-pad and face buttons and no analog sticks. For 2D games this is irrelevant. For Metal Gear Solid it is manageable. For Gran Turismo or anything that assumed a DualShock's twin sticks and pressure-sensitive triggers, you are playing a compromised version and should know it going in. There is no rumble and no dual-analog camera control, full stop. The PS1 library is on the menu; a slice of it arrives without the cutlery it was designed to be eaten with.

The Wall: N64, Dreamcast, PSP, DS

Everything above the PlayStation is where honest reviewing separates from listing-copy. A padded card ships these folders anyway. Here is what actually happens when you open them.

N64: three games and a prayer

A second 2026 guide is refreshingly specific: the light Nintendo 64 titles — Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye 007 — are playable with tweaks. “Playable with tweaks” is doing real work in that sentence. It means dropped resolution, occasional frame stutter, per-game settings you will spend an evening tuning, and save behaviour you should not trust. The moment you reach for anything demanding — Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 — the machine folds. The Nintendo 64 was a hardware-accelerated 3D console with a notoriously emulation-hostile architecture, and asking two 1.2GHz A7 cores with a 2D GPU to reproduce it is asking a bicycle to tow a caravan. It will move. You will not enjoy the journey. If N64 is a requirement rather than a curiosity, that is your signal to buy a different device — we ranked the sensible next rung in our Retroid Pocket 2026 buyer's guide.

Dreamcast: a party trick

Dreamcast is the same story with a friendlier accent. The light titles — Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Power Stone — can be coaxed into running, and it is a genuinely impressive thing to show someone who did not think a $60 handheld could touch a 128-bit Sega console. But a party trick is not a platform. The same guide that lists those titles is careful to say Dreamcast is not the handheld's main strength, and Playhouse is blunter still: N64 and Dreamcast are “hit-and-miss.” Load a game to prove a point, then go back to the Neo Geo, where the machine is happy.

PSP and DS: the hard no

Here the wall becomes a ceiling with no give in it at all. The PSP is, per every 2026 source, simply not recommended — a UMD-era portable with its own 3D pipeline is beyond the SSD202D in every respect. The Nintendo DS is worse than not-recommended: there is no working core for this hardware. Not a slow one, not a compromised one — none. A DS folder on a Mini Plus card is a folder of files that will never open. If your must-play list includes Advance Wars: Dual Strike or the DS Castlevania trilogy, this device cannot help you and no amount of tweaking will change that. Playhouse's summary is the one to memorise: “N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss. PSP is not recommended.” DS does not even make the sentence.

The Hardware That Sets the Ceiling

Every limit above is a consequence of one chip. Understand the chip and the entire game list becomes predictable rather than mysterious.

The SSD202D and the 2D-GPU wall

At the centre of the Mini Plus is a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 running at 1.2GHz, with 128MB of DDR3 integrated into the package and a 16MB SPI ROM for the firmware. Crucially, its graphics unit is 2D-only — there is no 3D acceleration of any kind. That single design decision is the PS1 ceiling. Two in-order A7 cores can software-rasterise 32-bit polygons up to a point, and past that point — the N64, the Dreamcast, the PSP — there is simply no hardware to offload to. This is also why the Plus is not faster than the original Mini: they share the identical SoC. The Plus is an ergonomic revision, not a performance one, a point we broke down in detail in our comparison of one SoC across two screens. As DROIX noted in their review, the Miyoo “only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need” — true right up to the PlayStation, and false one system above it.

Screen, battery, and the no-Bluetooth reality

The rest of the hardware is well judged for the mission. The display is a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480 in a 4:3 ratio — the correct shape for retro content and sharp enough that individual pixels look deliberate rather than blurry. The 3000mAh battery is the headline practical feature: Playhouse measured six to eight hours of mixed use at 50% brightness, which is a real working day of 8- and 16-bit gaming. Connectivity is the compromise. There is 2.4GHz Wi-Fi — enough for OnionOS netplay, box-art scraping, and clock sync — but no Bluetooth and no HDMI. You cannot pair wireless headphones and you cannot put this on a television. The whole weight is around 121 grams, a deck of cards you can forget in a jacket. Charging is over USB-C. That is the entire specification, and it is exactly enough.

Device specification, in full

Building the list: the folder structure

Once you have accepted that you write your own game list, the mechanics are simple. OnionOS reads a flat set of tagged folders under /Roms on the card. Drop your legally-obtained images into the right folder, drop the box art alongside, and the launcher does the rest. Here is the layout that matters:

/Roms
  FC/        NES / Famicom
  SFC/       Super Nintendo
  GB/        Game Boy
  GBC/       Game Boy Color
  GBA/       Game Boy Advance
  MD/        Mega Drive / Genesis
  MS/        Master System
  PCE/       PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
  NEOGEO/    Neo Geo (requires neogeo.zip BIOS)
  ARCADE/    FBNeo / MAME2003+ sets
  WS/        WonderSwan
  PS/        PlayStation 1 (.chd preferred)

And here is the shape of a sane card — roughly three hundred games that all deserve to be there, which fits a 32GB card with room to spare and loads instantly because the launcher is not indexing twenty-seven thousand duplicates:

A sane ~300-game card:
  NES ........... 25    Mega Drive .... 30
  SNES .......... 40    Master System . 10
  Game Boy ...... 15    PC Engine ..... 15
  GB Color ...... 15    Neo Geo ....... 12
  GB Advance .... 40    Arcade ........ 20
  PlayStation ... 60    WonderSwan .....  8

How It Actually Plays: Five Scenarios

A game list is only as good as the sessions it enables. Here is how the Mini Plus holds up across the five ways people actually use a handheld like this.

The casual and the completionist

For the casual player — someone who wants twenty minutes of Tetris or Sonic on a couch — this is close to perfect. Instant-on from sleep, a game in your hand in seconds, and OnionOS auto-saves your state when you close the lid, so “twenty minutes” never carries the tax of finding a save point. GamesRadar's reviewer captured the mood exactly: “I used to insist nothing beat the real deal, but now nothing beats curling up with the Miyoo Mini Plus and my favourite retro games.” For the completionist — the person grinding all forty hours of Chrono Trigger or hunting every relic in Symphony of the Night — the six-to-eight-hour battery and reliable save states are exactly the right tools. Save states in particular turn a completionist run from a scheduling problem into a series of pocket-sized sittings. This device was built for these two players. It serves them a nine.

The speedrunner and the co-op partner

The speedrunner gets a more complicated answer. As a practice tool the Mini Plus is excellent: save states let you drill a single skip a hundred times, and fast-forward compresses the boring stretches. As a competition tool it is disqualified before it starts — emulator timing is not the reference platform, input latency on a budget handheld is not frame-perfect, and no leaderboard worth its name accepts a Mini Plus run. Practise here; submit from the real thing or a verified emulator on a desktop. The co-op partner gets the worst news in this review: there is none. No local multiplayer, no link-cable emulation, no second controller port, no second anything. The Neo Geo and arcade libraries are half-experiences on a machine that physically cannot seat player two. If “pass the pad” or “trade Pokémon” is core to your plan, this device says no, politely, in hardware.

The mobile test

The mobile / pocket player is who this machine was designed around, and it is the scenario it wins most decisively. At 121 grams and the footprint of a deck of cards, it disappears into a jacket pocket in a way the larger horizontal handhelds simply cannot. The vertical form factor means one-handed play on a train is genuinely comfortable. The battery outlasts most commutes twice over. The only mobile compromise is the 2.4GHz-only Wi-Fi and the absent Bluetooth — wired earbuds or the built-in speaker, no exceptions — but for a device whose entire pitch is “the console that is always in your pocket,” that is a footnote, not a flaw. As Retro Handheld HQ put it, OnionOS is “the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026,” and it is the software that makes the mobile scenario frictionless.

Miyoo Mini Plus vs the Field

No device exists in a vacuum, and the Mini Plus sits in a crowded budget bracket. Three comparisons matter.

Versus the original Miyoo Mini

The original Mini is the Plus's own ancestor, and the comparison is almost philosophical because they share the identical SSD202D. Same chip, same 128MB, same 2D GPU, same PS1 ceiling — identical game list, to the ROM. What the Plus adds is a larger 3.5-inch screen against the Mini's 2.8-inch, a 3000mAh battery against 1900–2000mAh, and Wi-Fi the original entirely lacked. The original is roughly $20 cheaper on the used market but is largely discontinued new in 2026, which makes this comparison mostly academic: you are choosing the Plus because the Mini is hard to buy, and paying $20 for a bigger screen, a bigger battery, and a wireless radio is an easy call. Nobody should buy the Plus expecting it to run more than the Mini. It runs the same list, more comfortably.

Versus the Anbernic RG35XX Plus

This is the comparison that actually costs the Mini Plus points. The RG35XX Plus is built on the Allwinner H700 — four Cortex-A53 cores at around 1.5GHz with a Mali-G31 MP2 3D GPU and a full 1GB of LPDDR4. That is a categorically more powerful chip, and it shows exactly where the Mini Plus hits its wall: the RG35XX reaches selective Dreamcast, N64, and even PSP and DS titles the Miyoo cannot touch. DROIX put it plainly — “the H700 processor with GPU runs faster than the Miyoo processor.” The Anbernic also adds 5GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, mini-HDMI out, and stereo front speakers. So why does the Miyoo still win recommendations? Size, polish, and OnionOS. The RG35XX Plus is a larger 186-gram device that is only, in Pocket Retro Gaming's phrase, “a smart buy when found in the $45 to $55 range.” If raw ceiling is your priority, the Anbernic wins on paper. If pocketability and a frictionless interface win, the Miyoo keeps its crown. If you want the tier above both, our breakdown of the Retroid Pocket 6 versus the G2 is where that conversation starts.

The comparison, in one table

Pricing and Availability in 2026

The price of a Miyoo Mini Plus is not one number. It is a spectrum, and where you land on it depends almost entirely on whether you can resist a big game count.

The honest target

The device itself, bare or with an empty card, should cost you between roughly $53 and $70. Three separate 2026 reviews triangulate that range and vouch for the value: Pocket Retro Gamer calls it the best ultra-portable retro handheld under $70; a second review cites a $53 street price and rates it one of the best truly pocketable handhelds of the year; a third says it still fits its niche under $70 as a strong budget option for 8-bit through PS1 emulation. The official store and Handheld Picker have listed it at $56.99 on sale (64GB) against a $79.99 regular price, and UK buyers have seen £55.99 for 64GB and £59.99 for 128GB. Any of those is a fair deal. The bare device at the bottom of that range, wiped and rebuilt, is the enthusiast's buy.

The two traps

Avoid the extremes. At the top, a European storefront wants €109.90 for a Mini Plus preloaded with “25,000 games” — you are paying a roughly fifty-euro premium for a card of copyright-infringing ROMs you could assemble yourself, legally, from games you own. At the bottom, a marketplace listing offering the device with “11,000 games” for around $25 is not selling you a Mini Plus at all; it is selling a clone that borrows the photos. The rule is elegant in its cynicism: the more games a listing advertises, the less you should trust it. Pay for the hardware. The list is free to build.

Pricing and availability, at a glance

Who Should Buy It (and Who Shouldn't)

The game list makes the buying decision unusually clear-cut. Here is who this device is for, and who should keep walking.

Buy it if

1. You want a true pocket console. If the machine has to vanish into a jacket and reappear for a train ride, nothing this capable is this small.
2. Your library tops out at the PlayStation. If your all-time list is NES-through-PS1 — RPGs, platformers, 2D fighters, arcade ports — this runs essentially all of it, flawlessly.
3. You value interface polish over raw power. OnionOS is, in Retro Handheld HQ's words, what keeps this device relevant; it is smoother than anything else at the price.
4. You are a battery-life pragmatist. Six to eight hours of real play means you charge it on weekends, not nightly.
5. You want to build a curated list, not inherit a bloated one. The empty firmware is a feature if you treat it as a blank canvas.

Skip it if

1. You need N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS. The wall is in silicon. Buy up, not sideways.
2. Multiplayer is central. No local co-op, no link cable, no second player, ever.
3. You want to play on a TV. No HDMI. This is a personal screen and nothing else.
4. Analog control is non-negotiable. Twin-stick and pressure-sensitive PS1 games arrive compromised.
5. You want Bluetooth audio. Wired or speaker only.

The upgrade path

If two or more of those “skip it” lines apply to you, the Mini Plus is the wrong tool and no discount changes that. The honest next step is a device with a real 3D GPU. The Anbernic RG35XX Plus is the cheapest way to gain selective Dreamcast and N64. Above that, a Retroid Pocket opens GameCube and PS2 — a genuine generational leap in what the game list can contain, at a genuine leap in price, which we mapped out in the 2026 Retroid rankings. The Mini Plus is not a compromise you settle for. It is a specialist you choose on purpose, or not at all.

Pros, Cons, and the Final Score

The ledger, then the number.

Pros

• Runs the entire 8-bit through PlayStation library at full speed — the deepest catalogue that matters, in a pocket.
• Best-in-class interface via OnionOS: fast, polished, auto-save on sleep, box-art scraping.
• Genuinely portable at ~121g with a sharp 3.5-inch 4:3 IPS panel.
• Six-to-eight-hour real battery life.
• Excellent value at $53–70 for the hardware alone.
• Full arcade and Neo Geo support — Metal Slug, Street Fighter II, Gunstar Heroes all sing.

Cons

• Hard PS1 ceiling — no N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS worth the name; DS has no working core at all.
• No local multiplayer, link cable, or second-player support of any kind.
• No analog sticks, no rumble — a slice of the PS1 library plays compromised.
• No Bluetooth and no HDMI.
• The “game list” you are sold is padded, duplicated, and legally dubious — you should wipe it and build your own.

The final word

The Miyoo Mini Plus does one job and does it better than anything else its size or price. It is a pocket-sized library machine for the first four decades of console gaming, and inside that remit it is close to flawless. The game list that matters — NES, SNES, both Game Boys, GBA, Master System, Mega Drive, PC Engine, Neo Geo, arcade, and PlayStation — runs the way you remember, in your hand, for a working day on a charge. The game list that is advertised — the 25,000-ROM headline — is a marketing fiction you should delete on day one. Score the first list and this is a 9. Score the second and it is a 6. Score the machine as it will actually live in your pocket, built by you, capped at the PlayStation and honest about it, and you get the number I have carried from the top: 8 out of 10. Buy the hardware. Skip the games it comes with. Write your own list.