Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX 2026: 128MB Beats 256MB

Two plastic bricks. Both roughly 3.5 inches of 640×480 IPS glass, both engineered to fold a Super Nintendo, a Game Boy Advance and a PlayStation into a coat pocket for less than the price of one new AAA release. On the spec sheet, the Anbernic RG35XX humiliates the Miyoo Mini Plus — double the RAM, four CPU cores to the Miyoo's two, a dedicated graphics chip the Miyoo simply does not have, and a video-out port the Miyoo will never grow. And yet spend ten minutes in the retro-handheld corners of Reddit and Discord and it is the Miyoo people will not stop recommending.

This is the whole story of the sub-$70 handheld class compressed into two devices: firmware beats silicon, polish beats horsepower, and roughly half the facts floating around this matchup are wrong. The RG35XX does not charge over micro-USB. OnionOS was not written by a lone auteur named in every listicle. The RG35XX Plus did not launch in 2025. We are going to correct all of it, benchmark by benchmark, and then tell you which one to actually buy.

The Short Version

You came for a verdict, not a hardware seminar. Here it is up front, and then we will spend six thousand words earning it.

Related: Analogue Pocket Firmware v2.5

If you read nothing else

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus if your library stops at the PlayStation 1 and you want the best-feeling software in the category, full stop. Buy an Anbernic — and in 2026 that means the RG35XX Plus, not the original — if you want HDMI out to a television, physical shoulder-button comfort in a larger shell, or genuine headroom to poke at Nintendo DS, Dreamcast and lighter PSP titles. The original 2022 RG35XX is effectively a museum piece now, kept alive only by its clearance price. We will explain why below, because the reason is instructive.

The catch nobody prints

The Miyoo Mini Plus ships with half the RAM of the RG35XX — 128MB against 256MB — a slower two-core CPU, and no discrete GPU whatsoever. It still wins the day-to-day experience for most buyers, because OnionOS is that far ahead of what the original RG35XX booted into out of the box. Hardware you can measure in an afternoon; software you have to live with for a year. In this price class the software is the product, and that single sentence explains the entire cult.

What we are actually comparing

Three devices keep getting mashed into one search term, so let us separate them cleanly. The Miyoo Mini Plus arrived in October 2022. The original Anbernic RG35XX arrived in July 2022. And the RG35XX Plus arrived in January 2024 — an Allwinner H700 machine that quietly replaced the original and is what you will actually find in stock today. We will treat the Mini Plus versus the original RG35XX as the core fight, and fold the Plus in wherever it moves the verdict, which turns out to be constantly.

The Spec Sheet, Decoded

Below is the honest three-way spec sheet, corrected against primary sources — the OnionUI GitHub, Anbernic's own listings, and reviews from people who actually stopwatched the battery — rather than the copy-pasted listicle numbers that have been laundering errors for two years. Read the three columns as a timeline as much as a comparison.

Reading the silicon

The Miyoo runs a SigmaStar SSD202D: two ARM Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2GHz with an integrated Mali-400 MP2 and 128MB of DDR3 soldered on. It is, bluntly, a low-power industrial part that found a second career emulating the Game Boy. The original RG35XX runs an Actions ATM7039S — four Cortex-A9 cores that clock as high as 1.6GHz, paired with a genuine PowerVR SGX544 GPU and 256MB of RAM. On brute-force arithmetic the Anbernic wins every column: more cores, higher clocks, a real graphics pipeline, double the memory. The RG35XX Plus then laps them both with an Allwinner H700 — four modern Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz, a Mali-G31 MP2, and a full gigabyte of LPDDR4, which is why it, and not the original, is the Anbernic that matters in 2026.

The specs that are wrong everywhere

Four errors have metastasized across comparison posts, and you should inoculate yourself against all of them. First, the Miyoo Mini Plus is dual-core, not quad-core; the SSD202D has exactly two A7s. Second, the original RG35XX charges over USB-C, not micro-USB — Anbernic's own spec listings and hands-on reviews confirm it shipped USB-C from day one, and there was never a micro-USB revision. Third, that USB-C port does not carry video; the RG35XX's HDMI is a separate dedicated mini-HDMI jack pushing 720p, not some cursed micro-USB dongle. Fourth, the RG35XX Plus launched in January 2024, evidenced by the wave of reviews dated that month — anyone telling you 2025 is two years behind. If a spec sheet gets the charging port wrong, distrust the rest of it.

Where the two are genuinely identical

Strip away the marketing and the panels are the same class: 3.5-inch, 640×480, 4:3 IPS displays, the correct aspect ratio for everything up to and including the PlayStation. Both take a single microSD card. Both, again, use USB-C. Both run libretro's RetroArch under whatever pretty launcher sits on top — which is why arguing about the RetroArch cores both devices lean on matters more than arguing about SoCs. The hardware delta is real but narrow. The experience delta is enormous, and it lives entirely in the firmware.

OnionOS vs GarlicOS: The Real War

You are not buying a chipset. You are buying an operating system that happens to arrive fused to a chipset. This is the section that decides the comparison, so we are going to be precise about it — including correcting the internet's favorite lie about who wrote OnionOS.

Related: Miyoo Mini Plus Game

OnionOS is a community project, not one man's app

You will see OnionOS attributed, confidently, to a single named developer in listicle after listicle. There is no primary source for that attribution — no commit history, no maintainer page, no release note that supports it. OnionOS is the OnionUI project, an open-source, community-maintained OS overhaul for the Miyoo Mini and Mini Plus, with a contributor list you can read on GitHub and a public release cadence you can audit. As of mid-2026 the stable build is v4.3.1-1 with v4.4.0-beta-20260120 (dated 21 January 2026) as the leading pre-release. The 4.3 line folded in DraStic for Nintendo DS and a battery-monitor app; the 4.4 beta made gpSP the default Game Boy Advance core, added CPU overclock hotkeys with an on-screen overlay, and — crucially — shipped netplay. When a project moves like that, in the open, you do not need a mascot. Attributing it to one man is not a compliment; it is sloppy sourcing.

What OnionOS actually gives you

The pitch is 100-plus tuned emulators, automatic save-and-resume on every game, a game-switcher that thumbnails your last sessions, cover-art scraping over Wi-Fi, RetroAchievements, box-art overlays, per-system button remaps, and cosmetic controls down to gamma and saturation. PropelRC's Miyoo review put a number on the quality-of-life delta, noting OnionOS adds 3 hours of battery life and RetroAchievements support over stock — the OS is not just prettier, it is materially more efficient. It is the reason DROIX, reviewing an Anbernic, still went out of its way to call OnionOS simply phenomenal. When the competition's reviewers praise your rival's software, the argument is basically over.

GarlicOS, and why the original RG35XX aged badly

The RG35XX's answer is GarlicOS, maintained by the developer known as Black Seraph — again, a real person with a real repository, not the fictional Garlic some posts invent. GarlicOS 1.x was genuinely good and single-handedly rescued the original RG35XX from its dismal stock firmware. The trouble is the follow-up. Russ Crandall at Retro Game Corps, the closest thing this hobby has to a paper of record, flagged in his RG35XX family starter guide that GarlicOS 2.0 was still in an early alpha state and advised readers to wait until it is in a beta release state. That is a long time to wait on a device you already bought. Meanwhile the RG35XX Plus, being a mainstream Allwinner H700 board, gets the full buffet — GarlicOS Plus, muOS, Knulli, Batocera-adjacent builds — so if you want a firmware ecosystem on Anbernic hardware, the Plus is where it lives, not the original.

Performance: Where the Ceilings Are

Everything below the PlayStation is a solved problem on all three devices; nobody is dropping frames in Super Mario World. The interesting questions start at PS1 and climb toward the systems these little chips were never really meant to touch. Here are the numbers, sourced, not vibed.

8-bit and 16-bit: a tie you can stop worrying about

NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, PC Engine, Neo Geo — full speed, everywhere, on every device in this comparison. PropelRC's Miyoo testing recorded Chrono Trigger at a Perfect 60fps, which is representative of the entire 16-bit catalog. XDA's Adam Conway, reviewing the Miyoo, wrote that Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly, and he is right; the Mali-400 does not break a sweat until you ask it for 3D. If your dream library is a shoebox of cartridges from 1985 to 2001, this entire section is academic and you should choose on ergonomics and battery. For a sense of just how deep that catalog runs on the Miyoo specifically, see our breakdown of what actually runs on the Miyoo's 128MB.

PlayStation 1 and the Dreamcast question

PS1 is where the Miyoo earns its keep and the original RG35XX quietly proves it has power to spare. On the Miyoo, PropelRC found only minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2 — a demanding outlier — with the broader library a treat to play, per XDA. On the original RG35XX, DROIX's tester ran Tekken 3, Gran Turismo and Ridge Racer 4 and reported they did not spot any slowdown, which is what that extra GPU and RAM buy you. Dreamcast, though, is the fault line. Neither the Miyoo nor the original RG35XX is a Dreamcast machine — the SSD202D and the ATM7039S both run out of room. Only the RG35XX Plus, with its H700 and gigabyte of LPDDR4, makes Dreamcast a realistic if selective proposition, and even then GamesRadar's reviewers — who nonetheless called the Plus the gold standard of budget handhelds — would tell you to keep expectations game-specific.

DS, N64 and PSP: the honest ceiling

This is where the marketing evaporates. Nintendo DS is the original RG35XX's party trick: XDA's 9/10 review reported Nintendo DS at full speed, and Pokemon Black 2 runs at full speed, a genuine feather in the ATM7039S's cap. The catch, in the same review, is battery — two to three hours of playtime with Nintendo DS emulation, because pushing DraStic that hard drains the modest 2100mAh cell fast. On the Miyoo, DS exists in the OnionOS menus but is impractical: one 3.5-inch screen, no touch input, a 1.2GHz A7 pair. GBAtemp's community testing sums up the Miyoo's real limits — lighter N64 runs near full speed, demanding N64 lands at 70–85 percent, and PSP is not viable. XDA said it plainly and it remains the right frame: the Miyoo is not going to be setting benchmark records ... but that's more than good enough for most retro titles. If you need PSP and Dreamcast to be a daily driver rather than a party trick, neither of these belongs on your list — you want more silicon, and you can read about what that costs in our look at spending three times the money on a Retroid Pocket.

Saves, Netplay, Shaders, Achievements

Emulation ceilings get the headlines, but the features you touch a hundred times a day are saves, states, shaders and the online plumbing. This is another quiet OnionOS win, though the gap narrows once you put the RG35XX Plus on the table.

Related: Retroid Pocket 5 vs

Save states and auto-resume

All three support RetroArch save states and in-game battery saves. What separates them is the wrapper. OnionOS's Game Switcher auto-suspends whatever you were playing and drops you back exactly where you left off across reboots — close the lid mid-boss, charge overnight, resume mid-boss. GarlicOS has resume too, but on the original RG35XX it is less seamless and, per Retro Game Corps, was still stabilizing on the 2.0 branch. One durable warning that applies to every device here: save states are welded to the exact emulator core and CPU that made them. They do not survive a move to different hardware. Battery saves — the .srm files the original games actually wrote — are the portable ones. Internalize that now; it matters in the migration section.

Netplay is real, and it is on both

The tired claim that the Miyoo cannot do online play is dead. OnionOS ships Easy Netplay, which automates the whole ritual: the host spins up a hotspot, launches RetroArch and enables netplay; the client joins, verifies core and ROM checksums, and connects. It is even documented as compatible with Game Boy and Game Boy Color Pokemon trading over the link, which is the exact use case people assume requires a physical cable. The original RG35XX, having no Wi-Fi radio at all, cannot do wireless netplay — a hard hardware limit, not a firmware one. The RG35XX Plus, with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2, can. So on netplay the ranking is Miyoo Mini Plus and RG35XX Plus tied, original RG35XX disqualified by physics.

Shaders, scaling and the RetroAchievements angle

Both platforms expose RetroArch's shader stack — scanline and LCD-grid shaders, integer scaling, the works — but temper your ambitions: a 640×480 panel and a low-power GPU mean heavy multi-pass shaders will cost you frames, so most people run a light scanline or none. Integer scaling is the setting that actually matters on a 4:3 screen, and both nail it. RetroAchievements works on all three; OnionOS surfaces it cleanly, and PropelRC specifically credited the Miyoo's OnionOS build with baked-in achievement support. One legal aside the achievement crowd forgets: hardcore mode disables save states by design, which quietly makes the are states portable question moot for that audience.

Connectivity: HDMI, Wi-Fi, and a USB Myth

Ports and radios are where the two original devices diverge hardest, and where the comparison sheets lie most. Let us take the three connections that actually change how you use the thing.

HDMI: the RG35XX's one unanswerable advantage

The Miyoo Mini Plus has no video output. None. It is a handheld and only a handheld, by design. The RG35XX — original and Plus — carries a dedicated mini-HDMI port that pushes 720p to a television or monitor. If your fantasy is a $55 device wired to the living-room TV with a Bluetooth pad for two-player Streets of Rage, only the Anbernic delivers it, and the Plus does it better because it actually has the Bluetooth radio to pair that pad. This is the single feature that should override every other consideration if you care about it. If TV output is the whole point for you, though, be honest that a mini PC running Batocera wired to the TV will embarrass both of these at the same price bracket.

Wi-Fi: the Miyoo has it; the original RG35XX does not

Here is the inversion people get backwards. The Miyoo Mini Plus has Wi-Fi (2.4GHz b/g/n); the original RG35XX has no wireless at all. That Miyoo radio is not decoration — it drives OnionOS over-the-air updates, Easy Netplay, cover-art scraping, and SSH/FTP access for tinkerers. The original RG35XX makes you sneakernet everything over the SD card, every single time. The RG35XX Plus fixes this with Wi-Fi 5 (dual-band) plus Bluetooth 4.2, which is one more reason the Plus, not the original, is the Anbernic worth comparing. Neither Miyoo nor original RG35XX has Bluetooth; only the Plus does.

The USB-C-versus-micro-USB myth, buried

Both original devices charge and transfer data over USB-C. The endlessly repeated claim that the RG35XX uses micro-USB is simply false — it was USB-C at launch and there was never a micro-USB SKU. This matters beyond pedantry: USB-C means you charge both devices from the same cable that powers your phone, your Steam Deck, and everything else made after 2019. The only actual port difference between the two originals is the RG35XX's extra mini-HDMI jack. If a comparison gets this wrong — and most do — treat it as a signal that the author never held either device.

Battery Life in the Real World

Battery is where the paper specs and the lived experience finally agree, and where the Miyoo's low-power philosophy pays off against its own weak silicon. The numbers below are from reviewers who timed them, not from box copy.

Related: Miyoo Mini Plus 2026

The Miyoo's efficiency dividend

The Miyoo Mini Plus carries a 3000mAh cell, and because the SSD202D sips power, that translates to real endurance: reviewers consistently land at 6–7 hours of SNES, roughly 7.5 hours of Game Boy, and around 5 hours of PS1, with XDA citing up to six hours as a fair typical figure. OnionOS's efficiency tuning is part of this — recall PropelRC's finding that the OS itself adds 3 hours of battery life over stock. A weak chip that barely draws current, wrapped in an OS built to conserve, is a genuinely good combination for a device you use in twenty-minute commuter bursts.

The original RG35XX's endurance problem

The original RG35XX pairs a hungrier quad-A9 with a smaller 2100mAh battery, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. General use lands around 3–4 hours; DROIX's stopwatch caught roughly 3 hours and 3 minutes of PS1, and XDA measured only two to three hours once you push it into DS emulation. That extra horsepower is not free — it is billed to the battery. For a device whose entire premise is portability, half the runtime of its rival is a real strike, and it is the clearest single reason the original has aged out.

Where the Plus lands

The RG35XX Plus resolves the original's worst flaw with a 3300mAh cell and a more efficient Cortex-A53 SoC, quoted at up to 8 hours and realistically delivering the longest legs of the trio for light content. So the battery ranking, honestly stated: RG35XX Plus first, Miyoo Mini Plus a close and efficient second, original RG35XX a distant and disqualifying third. If you are choosing between the two originals purely on how long you can play on a train, the Miyoo is not close — it wins outright.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

Both devices live in the same $50-to-$65 band, which means price is rarely the deciding factor — but availability and the variant maze absolutely are. Here is the money table.

What you actually pay

The Miyoo Mini Plus settled well below its $69.99 launch and now trades around $54–65 depending on color and stock, with periodic bumps when a batch sells out. The original RG35XX is the wild card: MakeUseOf and others have clocked it as low as $40–50 on AliExpress against roughly $75 on Amazon, where third-party sellers tax the impatient. Do not pay Amazon's markup for the original — if you want that hardware, buy it cheap on clearance or not at all. The RG35XX Plus holds around $59–65, which, given it out-specs the original in every dimension, makes the original nearly impossible to justify at parity pricing.

The variant maze, and how not to get lost

Anbernic's naming is a deliberate fog: RG35XX, RG35XX Plus, RG35XX H (horizontal), RG35XX SP (clamshell), RG35XX 2024, RG35XX Pro. With the sole exception of the 2022 original, every one of those is an H700 machine — same core silicon, different shells and battery sizes. So the practical decision is not which RG35XX, it is which shape do I want the H700 in. The Miyoo lineup is mercifully simpler: the Mini, the Mini Plus, and the newer V4 hardware revisions that OnionOS's 4.3 line added screen support for. When in doubt: for Anbernic, buy an H700 in the body shape you like; for Miyoo, buy the Plus.

Five Buyers, Five Verdicts

A single verdict is a lie, because these devices are bought by very different people for very different reasons. Here are the buyers, and the honest recommendation for each.

The pocket purist and the couch player

The commuter purist — someone whose library is Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES and PS1, played in short bursts on a train — should buy the Miyoo Mini Plus without hesitation. It is the lightest (~118g), the most pocketable, has the best software, and its battery is built for exactly this pattern. The couch and TV player who wants to throw Streets of Rage on the living-room screen needs HDMI, which eliminates the Miyoo entirely; buy an RG35XX, and buy the Plus so you also get the Bluetooth radio to pair a controller. These two buyers want opposite things, and the split is clean.

Related: RetroPie PC 2026: No

The ceiling-chaser and the tinkerer

The ceiling-chaser who specifically wants Nintendo DS, occasional Dreamcast, or lighter PSP should skip both originals and buy the RG35XX Plus for its H700 headroom — accepting that even then, DS on the original RG35XX drinks battery in 2–3 hours and Dreamcast stays game-by-game. The tinkerer who loves firmware, over-the-air updates, netplay, SSH access and a polished launcher is the Miyoo Mini Plus's ideal owner; OnionOS is a hobby unto itself, and the Wi-Fi radio makes it a connected one. If your idea of fun is flashing builds and reading changelogs, the OnionUI release page is your new bookmark.

The gift-buyer, the road-tripper, and the accuracy snob

The gift-buyer purchasing a first handheld should choose on simplicity and price: the Miyoo Mini Plus if they will use it on the go, the cheapest H700 Anbernic if they want it on a TV — either way, pre-load the SD card so it boots into games, not a setup wizard. The battery-max road-tripper wants the RG35XX Plus (8 hours) or the Miyoo (6–7 hours) and should give the 3-hour original RG35XX a wide berth. And the accuracy snob who cares about frame-perfect timing should understand that none of these emulators are cycle-accurate — if precision is the religion, the real answer is dedicated cycle-accurate FPGA hardware like the MiSTer, at ten times the price. These are convenience machines, and they are honest about it.

Migrating Between Them

Suppose you own one and are switching to the other, or running both. Nothing transfers automatically — different SoCs, different operating systems, different folder conventions. You are moving ROMs and saves by hand, and there is exactly one rule that will save your progress. Here is the field manual.

The one rule: know your save types

Battery saves (.srm) are semi-portable, because they are the save data the original game logic wrote and any matching emulator core can usually read them back. Save states (.state) are not portable — they are a frozen snapshot of a specific emulator core running on a specific CPU, and they will not survive the jump between a Cortex-A7 and a Cortex-A9, or between OnionOS and GarlicOS. Translation: before you migrate, load each in-progress game and hit the game's own save. Do not trust a save state to cross hardware.

The step-by-step

# MIGRATING SD CARDS BETWEEN DEVICES
# Nothing transfers automatically. Different SoCs, different
# OSes, different folder layouts. You are moving files by hand.

## FROM MIYOO (OnionOS)  ->  RG35XX (GarlicOS)
1. Miyoo card: /Roms/<SYSTEM>/game.zip     (copy your ROMs out)
2. Miyoo card: /Saves/CurrentProfile/saves/   (.srm battery saves)
3. Miyoo card: /Saves/CurrentProfile/states/  (.state - will NOT port)
4. Flash GarlicOS to a SECOND card (balenaEtcher / Win32DiskImager)
5. Boot the RG35XX once so GarlicOS builds its folder tree
6. Copy ROMs into  /Roms/<SYSTEM>/  on the Garlic card
7. Drop .srm files into Garlic's save folder; leave states behind

## FROM RG35XX (GarlicOS)  ->  MIYOO (OnionOS)
1. Garlic card: /Roms/<SYSTEM>/   ->  copy ROMs out
2. Garlic card: /Saves/           ->  copy .srm battery saves
3. Flash Onion to the Miyoo card; boot once to build folders
4. Copy ROMs into Onion  /Roms/<SYSTEM>/
5. .srm battery saves usually load if the core matches
6. Save STATES do not survive the core/SoC change - beat the boss first

# GOLDEN RULE
# .srm (battery saves) = semi-portable across hardware.
# .state (save states) = tied to exact core + CPU. Do not rely
# on them crossing devices. RetroAchievements hardcore mode
# disables states anyway, so serious players lose nothing.

Practical notes before you flash

Use a quality microSD from a real brand — most my handheld is broken threads are counterfeit cards, not dead devices. Keep a backup image of your working card before you overwrite anything, because a five-minute copy beats re-scraping a thousand box arts. And remember the asymmetry: migrating to the Miyoo gains you OnionOS and Wi-Fi but loses HDMI; migrating to the RG35XX gains you a TV output and, on the Plus, more grunt, at the cost of OnionOS's polish. Neither move is strictly an upgrade. You are trading one set of strengths for another, which is the whole thesis of this article rendered as a chore list.

Pros and Cons, Tabled

The compressed ledger for each device, so you can scan instead of read. Nothing here that the preceding six thousand words did not earn.

Miyoo Mini Plus

RG35XX (original)

RG35XX Plus

The Machine's Verdict

Two devices, one price band, and a decision that turns entirely on what you value. Here is where the data lands, without the fluff.

The recommendation

For most people, most of the time, buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. It has half the RAM of the RG35XX and it wins anyway, because OnionOS is the best software in the category and the Miyoo's efficient chip delivers 6–7 hours of the systems you will actually play — up to and including PS1. Even reviewers holding competing Anbernic hardware call OnionOS simply phenomenal. The title of this piece is not hyperbole: 128MB genuinely beats 256MB here, because the megabytes were never the bottleneck. The firmware was.

The two exceptions

Buy an Anbernic RG35XX Plus instead if either of two things is true. One: you want HDMI to a television, which the Miyoo cannot do at any price. Two: you specifically need the emulation ceiling — Nintendo DS, occasional Dreamcast, lighter PSP — which the Miyoo's A7 pair cannot reach. In both cases, buy the Plus, not the 2022 original, whose 3-hour battery and stalled firmware have retired it. GamesRadar did not call the Plus the gold standard of budget handhelds by accident.

The larger point, and the law

The deeper lesson is that in the sub-$70 tier, hardware is a commodity and software is the moat. The Miyoo proves you can win with worse silicon and a better OS; the RG35XX proves that raw specs, unaccompanied by polish, age into clearance-bin footnotes. Buy the experience, not the spec sheet. And since we are The Machine and we know the law as well as the lore: emulation itself is legal — the Ninth Circuit settled that in Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix back in 2000 — but the ROMs are a different question. Dump your own carts, stick to homebrew, and the only thing you will have to answer for is buying two handhelds when the Miyoo would have been enough.