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

There is a comparison the internet has been running for four years, and most of the people running it are arguing about the wrong device. Type Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX into any search bar and you will get a thousand results, half of which quietly compare a two-core handheld from 2023 against a four-core handheld from 2022, and the other half of which compare that same Miyoo against a completely different four-core handheld from 2024 that happens to share three letters and two numbers with the first one. The spec tables copy each other. The errors copy each other. Somewhere in the chain a writer decided the Miyoo has a quad-core processor and a micro-USB port, and everyone downstream inherited both mistakes like a genetic defect.

So before anything else, a correction and a thesis. The correction: the Miyoo Mini Plus runs a dual-core chip and charges over USB-C, the same as its rival. The thesis: in the sub-$70 handheld tier, the winner is not decided by the spec sheet. It is decided by firmware, integration, and the number of hours the thing survives in your pocket. Which is the only way to explain how a console with 128MB of RAM consistently out-satisfies a console with 256MB. This is not a paradox. It is the entire point.

Two Handhelds, Three Machines, One Bad Argument

The core problem with this matchup is that one of the two names is a lie of omission. Miyoo Mini Plus refers to exactly one device. RG35XX refers to at least three, and Anbernic has done nothing to make that easier, because Anbernic ships a new vertical-format 3.5-inch handheld roughly every fiscal quarter and names them all after the same four characters.

Why 'RG35XX' Is a Trick Question

There are two families hiding under the RG35XX badge. The original RG35XX, released in late 2022, runs an Actions Semiconductor ATM7039S — a genuinely ancient quad-core Cortex-A9 paired with a PowerVR SGX544 GPU and 256MB of DDR3. It has no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, a mini-HDMI port, and two microSD slots. Then there is the H700 generation — the RG35XX Plus, RG35XX H, RG35XX SP, and RG35XX Pro, which began landing in 2024 and run an Allwinner H700 (quad-core Cortex-A53 at 1.5GHz), a Mali-G31 GPU, and a full gigabyte of LPDDR4. They add Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth. They are, functionally, a different console wearing the same jacket.

This matters because the two generations sit on opposite sides of the Miyoo. The original RG35XX is the Miyoo's contemporary and its closest natural rival — same era, same class, same ceiling. The H700 models are a tier above and change the entire conversation. Any comparison that does not name which RG35XX it means is not a comparison. It is noise with a title.

The Thesis: 128MB Beats 256MB

Here is the claim I am going to defend for the next six thousand words. On paper, the original RG35XX beats the Miyoo Mini Plus in nearly every measurable category: four CPU cores against two, a dedicated PowerVR GPU against an integrated Mali-400, double the RAM, a physical video-out port the Miyoo simply does not have, and an extra storage slot. By the numbers, it is not close. In practice, the Miyoo is the one people keep in their pocket, and the reason is that the Miyoo's firmware — the community-built OnionOS — is so far ahead of anything Anbernic shipped in the box that it erases the silicon gap and then some. Firmware beats silicon in this class. Every time.

What I'm Actually Comparing

To be honest about it, this is a three-way. The Miyoo Mini Plus sits in the middle. On one side is the original RG35XX, which it beats on software and battery and ties on screen. On the other side is the H700 RG35XX family, which genuinely out-muscles it and reaches emulation targets the Miyoo cannot touch. Pretending otherwise — pretending there is one RG35XX and it either wins or loses cleanly — is how you end up recommending a 2022 Actions chip to someone who wanted Dreamcast. I will keep all three in frame the entire way through, because the honest answer to which should I buy depends entirely on which RG35XX is on the table.

The Spec Sheet, Corrected

Let us start with the numbers, because the numbers are where the confusion lives. The table below covers all three machines. Read it once, then read the section after it, because at least four of the specs you have seen elsewhere are wrong, and I am going to tell you which.

The Full Comparison Table

The Errors Everyone Copies

Four things in that table contradict the majority of write-ups online, and all four contradictions are in my favor, because the majority is wrong.

The Miyoo is dual-core, not quad-core. The research brief I was handed for this article claims the Mini Plus runs a 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex-A7. It does not. The SigmaStar SSD202D has exactly two Cortex-A7 cores. XDA's reviewer Adam Conway, who took the thing apart, describes the SoC verbatim as having dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB of memory. If you have read that the Miyoo is quad-core, you read a spec sheet that copied another spec sheet that guessed. The delicious irony is that the same briefs often list the RG35XX as a single-core A9 when it is the one with four cores. The internet gave the core-count advantage to precisely the wrong device.

Both charge over USB-C. A whole cluster of comparison pages — including at least one that everyone else cites — insist the original RG35XX uses micro-USB. It does not. XDA's teardown says USB-C, flatly. Both of these consoles use USB-C. If a buying guide tells you the Anbernic is stuck on micro-USB in 2026, close the tab; the author never held one.

The RG35XX's HDMI is a real, dedicated mini-HDMI port at 720p. Some sheets describe it as HDMI over micro-USB, which is a contradiction in terms and also false. It is a discrete mini-HDMI jack. The Miyoo has no video output of any kind.

The original RG35XX battery is closer to 2600mAh than 2100mAh. XDA measured and lists 2,600mAh; some retail listings say 2,100. Either way it is smaller than the Miyoo's 3000mAh, and it drives an older, hungrier quad-core chip, which is why the Anbernic runs down faster despite being the bigger device.

Screen Parity: The One Honest Tie

Here is the spec that is actually identical, and the one place the marketing does not lie: both devices use a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640x480. That works out to roughly 228 pixels per inch on both, which is dense enough that individual pixels disappear at normal viewing distance. The Miyoo's panel is frequently measured a little brighter — around 450 nits per PropelRC's review — but this is a difference you notice on a sunny patio and nowhere else. For 8-bit and 16-bit content, which is what both of these are built to run, the screens are a wash. Nobody is choosing between these two on image quality. If you want a deeper look at what that panel is actually feeding, our breakdown of the Miyoo's real game catalog walks through what the 640x480 IPS handles cleanly and where it starts to strain.

Silicon: Four A9s vs Two A7s

The chips are the heart of the on-paper argument, so let us take them seriously, because the story they tell is genuinely counterintuitive: the objectively more powerful silicon lives in the console I am about to tell you not to buy.

Actions ATM7039S: Four Cores and a Real GPU

The original RG35XX runs an Actions Semiconductor ATM7039S. This is a quad-core Cortex-A9 clocked as high as 1.6GHz, and — crucially — it is paired with a PowerVR SGX544, a dedicated GPU with real, programmable shading hardware. Four A9 cores and a discrete GPU is, on paper, a meaningfully stronger arrangement than anything in the Miyoo. The A9 is an older architecture than the A7 in absolute terms — it predates it in ARM's roadmap — but it is a wider, out-of-order design, and four of them running near 1.6GHz is simply more compute than two in-order A7s at 1.2GHz. The 256MB of RAM gives emulators more headroom for larger cores and heavier games. This is why the original RG35XX can, with the right firmware and the right emulator, pull off something the Miyoo struggles with: full-speed Nintendo DS. XDA's review of the original RG35XX is blunt about it — it pleasantly surprises with its comfortable build, powerful hardware, and beautiful screen, running Nintendo DS at full speed, with Pokemon Black 2 running at full speed as well. That is a real capability the Miyoo does not credibly have.

SigmaStar SSD202D: Two Cores, One Job

The Miyoo Mini Plus runs a SigmaStar SSD202D — two Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2GHz, a modest integrated Mali-400 MP2, and 128MB of RAM. On every axis that a spec sheet measures, it is the weaker chip. Half the cores, an older and less capable GPU, half the memory. The SSD202D was not designed to be a games console at all; it is an industrial and smart-home part, the kind of chip that runs a video doorbell. And yet it does exactly one job extremely well, which is run 8-bit, 16-bit, and PlayStation-era emulators at full speed with a tiny power budget. XDA's verdict on the Miyoo's silicon is the whole thing in one sentence: it is not going to be setting benchmark records, but that's more than good enough for most retro titles. The chip is a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. It does less, on purpose, and sips power doing it.

Why the Bigger Number Loses

So the RG35XX has the better chip. Why does it lose? Three reasons, and none of them are silicon. First, the Actions SoC is old and poorly documented, which means its emulation software — even good community firmware — never extracted the theoretical performance cleanly; heat and driver immaturity ate the margin. Second, the Miyoo's software stack, OnionOS, is tuned to that exact chip with a fanaticism Anbernic's stock firmware never approached, so the Miyoo runs closer to its ceiling than the RG35XX runs to its higher one. Third — and this is the part the spec-sheet crowd forgets — raw compute past the PS1 threshold is worthless if the battery dies in two hours and the OS is a mess. Both consoles nail everything up to PlayStation. Above that line, the RG35XX's extra power buys you a handful of DS games at the cost of half your battery life. The Miyoo declines the trade. If you genuinely care about squeezing cycle-accurate behavior out of retro hardware, neither of these is your endgame anyway — that is a conversation about FPGA machines like the MiSTer Multisystem, which reproduce the original silicon instead of approximating it. These two are software emulators, and software emulators live and die by the software.

Firmware Is the Product

If you take one idea from this article, take this one: in the budget handheld class, you are not buying hardware. You are buying a hardware-plus-firmware bundle, and the firmware is worth more than the hardware. Both of these devices boot ugly, limited, borderline-unusable stock operating systems out of the box. Both are transformed by community firmware. The difference is that the Miyoo's community firmware is arguably the single best piece of software in this entire product category, and the RG35XX's is a buffet of good-but-fragmented options.

OnionOS: The Community Masterpiece

The Miyoo Mini and Mini Plus run OnionOS, built by the volunteer OnionUI project. It is not a skin. It is a complete overhaul — box art, per-system emulator tuning, save states, in-game menus, RetroAchievements, sleep and resume that actually works, and a battery-life gain that PropelRC's reviewer credits directly to the software, noting OnionOS adds 3 hours of battery life, RetroAchievements support, and a raft of quality-of-life features on top of the raw emulation. The project is on its 4.x line as of 2026, with the 4.4.0 build adding netplay and switching to the gpSP core as the default for Game Boy Advance. This is community software with more polish than most shipping commercial products, and it is the reason the Miyoo punches so far above its silicon. Under the hood it is a tuned build of the same RetroArch cores that power almost every emulation handheld, but the integration — the way it hides RetroArch's notorious complexity behind a clean front end — is the actual product.

GarlicOS, MinUI, Koriki, Knulli: The Anbernic Buffet

The RG35XX story is messier, and messiness is a cost. The original RG35XX's headline custom firmware is GarlicOS, and it is genuinely excellent — fast, clean, well-loved. But GarlicOS 2.0, the rewrite, spent a long time in rough shape; Retro Game Corps warned readers that it was still in an early alpha state and recommended you wait until it is in a beta release state unless you want to be at the forefront of Garlic testing. Alongside it sit MinUI (minimalist, purist, rock-solid) and Koriki. For the newer H700 models, the landscape shifts again: stock Anbernic Linux is passable, and the serious options become Batocera, Knulli, and MinUI. This is a lot of choice, and choice in firmware is a double-edged thing — it means the ceiling is high, but it also means a first-time buyer has to make a research project out of picking an OS before the console is even fun. OnionOS asks you to make no such decision. It is simply the answer.

There Is No Man Named Garlic

One more correction, because it is everywhere and it is embarrassing. Comparison pages routinely credit the Miyoo's firmware to a developer named Onion and the RG35XX's to a developer named Garlic. Neither person exists. OnionOS is the work of the OnionUI community project — a group of volunteers on GitHub, not an individual. GarlicOS was built by a developer who goes by Black Seraph. Nobody is named after a vegetable. If a spec sheet invents a person to credit, treat every other fact on the page with the same suspicion, because it means the author was pattern-matching product names into biographies instead of checking anything.

Performance: Where Each One Taps Out

Enough theory. Here is what actually runs, drawn from four independent reviewers rather than one manufacturer's marketing. The pattern is clean: both machines are perfect up to a line, and the only real question is where that line falls.

8-bit and 16-bit: Both Flawless

NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, PC Engine, Neo Geo — all of it runs at full speed on both consoles, full stop. This is the bread and butter, it is what 90% of buyers will actually play, and neither device breaks a sweat. PropelRC's Miyoo review reports Chrono Trigger (SNES): Perfect 60fps throughout a full playthrough. XDA notes Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly on the Miyoo. The RG35XX, with more silicon, is if anything even more comfortable here — which is a bit like being told a Ferrari is very good at the school run. At this tier the two are indistinguishable, and if 16-bit is your ceiling, you are choosing on battery, size, and firmware, not performance.

PlayStation 1: The Real Battleground

PS1 is where the interesting differences start, and it is still a comfortable win for both, with an asterisk. XDA calls PS1 on the Miyoo a treat to play; PropelRC notes it is excellent with only minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2 — the usual heavy-3D suspect. On the RG35XX, PS1 is also strong. Where the H700 RG35XX Plus pulls decisively ahead is in the hardest PS1 titles: DROIX's review found Gran Turismo 2 which was smooth as silk and Crash Bandicoot 3 which works perfectly on the Plus, precisely the games that make the smaller chips stutter. The takeaway: for the PS1 library at large, the Miyoo and the original RG35XX are both fine and the H700 is flawless. If your dealbreaker is running the heaviest PS1 racers without a single dropped frame, that is a reason to reach for the H700 tier, not the Miyoo or the 2022 Anbernic.

N64, DS, Dreamcast: The Asterisk Tier

Above PS1 is where the machines separate, and where honest reviewers start attaching asterisks. Retro Game Corps puts it plainly for the whole demanding-systems category: those systems cannot play every game at full speed, and so performance may vary. The Miyoo does light N64 near full speed and demanding N64 at maybe 70-85% per GBAtemp community testing — playable-ish, not good; N64 is not a system you buy a Miyoo for. Nintendo DS on the Miyoo technically exists in recent OnionOS builds but is impractical on a single 3.5-inch screen with no touch input. The original RG35XX, by contrast, genuinely runs DS at full speed via DraStic (XDA's Pokemon Black 2 runs at full speed), which is its one real party trick over the Miyoo — though XDA also notes it costs you dearly, delivering only two to three hours of playtime with Nintendo DS emulation. Dreamcast and PSP are the exclusive domain of the H700 models: DROIX heard no lags on Crazy Taxi on Dreamcast, and clocked PSP's Tekken 6 at around 70% speed — playable for lighter titles, not a PSP replacement. The table below maps the whole ladder.

Battery and the Meaning of 'Mini'

This is the category where the Miyoo stops merely holding its own and starts genuinely winning against the original RG35XX. Portability is not a tiebreaker for a device whose entire premise is that it lives in your pocket. It is the premise.

3000mAh vs 2600mAh

The Miyoo Mini Plus carries a 3000mAh cell driving a two-core chip that barely draws power. The original RG35XX carries roughly 2600mAh (some listings say 2100) driving a four-core A9 and a discrete GPU that draw considerably more. The result is not close. XDA credits the Miyoo with up to six hours of battery life; PropelRC measured longer still on lighter systems — around six to seven hours on SNES and up to seven and a half on Game Boy. The original RG35XX, by contrast, is a three-to-four-hour device on light systems and collapses to two or three hours the moment you fire up the DS emulation that is supposed to be its headline feature. A bigger battery feeding a smaller chip is the whole ballgame here, and the Miyoo has both.

Size and Weight

The Miyoo weighs about 118 grams. The original RG35XX weighs 165. That is a 40% difference in mass, and you feel every gram of it in a shirt pocket. The Miyoo earns the word Mini; it is one of the smallest devices that can still run PS1 comfortably, small enough that you forget it is on you. The RG35XX is a denser, wider slab — a genuinely nice object to hold, which reviewers consistently praise, but not one you forget about. XDA's Miyoo review flags the tradeoff honestly: the plastic build can make it feel cheap next to the Anbernic's more substantial shell. That is real. The Miyoo buys its pocketability with a lighter, plasticky chassis. Whether that is a bug or the entire feature depends on why you are buying a device called Mini.

The H700 Rewrites the Battery Math

Bring the H700 models into it and the battery story changes again. The RG35XX Plus packs a 3300mAh cell and, because the H700 is a modern, efficient part despite its higher clock, delivers up to around eight hours — beating even the Miyoo. So the battery ranking is not Miyoo wins, Anbernic loses. It is: the Miyoo crushes the original RG35XX, and the H700 RG35XX crushes the Miyoo. Which, again, is why you cannot answer this question without naming the exact model. The 2022 Anbernic and the 2024 Anbernic sit on opposite sides of the Miyoo on battery, on power, and on price.

HDMI, Wi-Fi, and the Two-Slot Question

Connectivity is where the original RG35XX earns back some of the ground it lost on firmware and battery, and where the marketing gets sloppy in both directions. Two features here are genuinely decisive for the right buyer, and one is smaller than the spec sheets imply.

HDMI: The Anbernic's Trump Card

The single most important hardware difference between these consoles is video output. Every RG35XX — original and H700 — has a mini-HDMI port and can plug straight into a television. The Miyoo Mini Plus cannot. It has no video out of any kind, and no software workaround changes that; the silicon does not route a display signal off the device. DROIX's review names this exactly as the Miyoo's key structural weakness: One thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port, something both RG35XX models have. If any part of your fantasy involves sitting on a couch and playing 16-bit games on a 55-inch screen, that fantasy is an RG35XX and it is not a Miyoo. This is not a firmware gap OnionOS can close. It is a wire the Miyoo does not have.

Wi-Fi: RetroAchievements, OTA, Netplay

The Miyoo swings the connectivity fight back the other way on wireless. The Mini Plus has 2.4GHz Wi-Fi; the original RG35XX has none at all. On the Miyoo, Wi-Fi is not a checkbox — OnionOS actually uses it, for RetroAchievements (unlocking trophies in old games), over-the-air firmware updates, and, in the 4.4.0 line, netplay between two units. The original RG35XX is an island: no Wi-Fi hardware means you are loading everything by pulling the SD card. The H700 models close this gap and then some, adding Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 for wireless controllers and headphones — a category the Miyoo cannot enter at all, since it has no Bluetooth. So on wireless, the ranking mirrors everything else: Miyoo beats the original RG35XX, H700 beats the Miyoo.

Storage: Two Slots vs One

The brief makes much of the RG35XX's dual microSD slots against the Miyoo's single slot, and it is true — the Anbernics, both generations, take two cards while the Miyoo takes one. But be honest about what that buys you. A second slot is convenient: you can keep the OS on one card and a giant ROM library on another, or hot-swap collections. It is not transformative. A single 512GB card in the Miyoo holds more retro games than any human will play in a lifetime — the entire cartridge history of five console generations fits with room to spare. The two-slot advantage is real and worth noting; it is not a reason to buy a worse-fitting console. File it under nice-to-have, not deal-maker.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

Both of these launched cheap and have stayed cheap, which is the entire appeal. But 2026 pricing has a wrinkle the launch-price tables miss, and it is worth understanding before you buy.

What You Pay Today

Launch prices were $69.99 for the Miyoo Mini Plus and $59.99 for the original RG35XX. In 2026 the street prices have compressed into roughly the same band — both float in the $50-70 range depending on retailer, sale, and phase of the moon, with the original RG35XX often the cheapest of the lot on AliExpress and the H700 models sitting a little higher for the extra hardware. The table below is the honest current picture.

The DRAM Crunch Tax

Here is the wrinkle. The 2025-2026 memory-price crunch — the same one that pushed Android handheld makers to quietly discontinue their high-RAM configurations — hits these four devices unevenly. The originals, with their tiny 128MB and 256MB of ancient DDR3, are largely insulated; there is so little memory in them that its cost is a rounding error. The H700 models, carrying a full gigabyte of LPDDR4, feel more of the squeeze. The practical effect is that the price gap between the cheap 2022-class devices and the H700 tier has widened slightly, not narrowed. If your read on the market was wait a year and the H700 will be dirt cheap, the memory crunch is working against you. The floor is holding higher than it would in a normal year.

Where to Buy, What to Avoid

Buy from Anbernic and Miyoo's official storefronts, or from reputable retailers like DROIX, or from AliExpress with eyes open about shipping times. Avoid two things. First, avoid any listing whose spec sheet contains the errors I catalogued earlier — micro-USB on the RG35XX, quad-core on the Miyoo, a firmware developer named after a vegetable — because a seller who cannot describe the product accurately is a seller I would not trust with my card number. Second, avoid preloaded SD cards sold as a feature. A card stuffed with thousands of ROMs is not a bonus; it is a legal liability the seller is handing to you, and I will get to why in the law section. Buy the console clean and fill it yourself.

Six Buyers, Six Answers

The honest answer to which should I buy is who are you. Here are six real buyers and the device each one should walk away with. Find yourself.

The Pocket Purist and the Couch Player

The Pocket Purist wants the smallest possible device that plays everything up to PS1, wants it to last all day, and never intends to plug it into anything. This is the Miyoo Mini Plus, and it is not close. 118 grams, six-plus hours of battery, the best firmware in the class, and a form factor that genuinely disappears into a pocket. Everything the Purist wants, the Miyoo is optimized for, and everything the RG35XX offers over it — HDMI, a second SD slot, DS emulation — the Purist does not want.

The Couch Player has a television and a fantasy of playing Super Metroid on it from across the room. This buyer must have HDMI, which eliminates the Miyoo entirely. The answer is an RG35XX — the H700 Plus if they want the output to look good and the option to reach Dreamcast, the original if they just want the cheapest path to a big screen. No amount of OnionOS polish puts a picture on a TV the Miyoo cannot address.

The Tinkerer and the Gift-Buyer

The Tinkerer enjoys the firmware rabbit hole — flashing GarlicOS, then MinUI, then Knulli, then Batocera, comparing boot times and theming everything. This buyer is happiest on an RG35XX, ideally an H700 model, precisely because its firmware ecosystem is fragmented and deep. The fragmentation that is a liability for a first-timer is a feature for someone who considers the operating system part of the hobby. Give the Tinkerer choices and a soldering-adjacent afternoon.

The Gift-Buyer is purchasing for someone who is not technical and will be frustrated by a research project. This buyer wants the device that is best out of the box with the least setup friction. That is the Miyoo Mini Plus with OnionOS — one firmware, one obvious choice, a clean front end that hides RetroArch's complexity entirely. Hand someone a Miyoo and they play games. Hand someone an RG35XX and its stock firmware and they Google how to install GarlicOS before they have any fun.

The Completionist and the Upgrader

The Completionist wants to reach as high up the emulation ladder as this price class allows — Dreamcast, light PSP, the systems with asterisks. The Miyoo and the original RG35XX both tap out at PS1. The only answer here is an H700 RG35XX Plus or Pro, which DROIX confirms handles Dreamcast cleanly and light PSP acceptably. If your want-list includes Crazy Taxi on the actual device, you have left Miyoo territory.

The Upgrader already owns one of these and is wondering whether to jump. DROIX's advice is the sober word here, and it applies both directions: if you already have a Miyoo Mini or Miyoo Mini Plus... it is perhaps not worth the upgrade unless you specifically want faster PS1 and Dreamcast. Sidegrading between a Miyoo and an original RG35XX is a waste of money; both do the same job. The only upgrade that changes your life is jumping a whole tier — to the H700 for Dreamcast, or clean out of this class entirely to an Android handheld. If that is the itch, our Retroid Pocket 5 vs 6 comparison maps the next rung up, where the ceiling is PSP, Saturn, GameCube, and beyond.

Migrating From One to the Other

Suppose you own one and want to switch, or you keep both and want your library to move between them. The good news is that the underlying emulators are the same RetroArch cores, so most of your data is portable. The bad news is that the two firmwares organize the SD card differently, name the system folders differently, and — critically — handle save states in incompatible ways. Here is how to do it without losing your progress.

Miyoo to RG35XX

Moving from the Miyoo to an RG35XX means moving off OnionOS and onto GarlicOS or Knulli, which means the SD card layout changes. Your ROMs move fine — a SNES game is a SNES game — but they have to be re-sorted into the destination firmware's folder names. Your in-game battery saves (the .srm files that hold your Pokemon party) are portable between RetroArch-based systems and should be copied across. Your save states — the full-memory snapshots — are effectively not portable; a save state written by one build of one core on one device is not guaranteed to load on another, and across different firmware it usually will not. Beat a boss and hit a real in-game save before you migrate; do not rely on a save state surviving the trip.

RG35XX to Miyoo

Going the other direction — downsizing from an RG35XX to a Miyoo — is the more common move, because people buy the Anbernic for the specs and then discover they wanted the Miyoo's convenience. Flash OnionOS to a fresh card following the OnionUI documentation, then reverse the folder mapping. The one thing you lose in this direction is any content above the PS1 ceiling: if you were playing DS or Dreamcast on the RG35XX, those libraries have no home on the Miyoo, and no amount of copying changes that. Bring your 8-bit through PS1 collection; leave the asterisk systems behind.

The Universal Rules: Saves, BIOS, Folder Names

Three rules hold regardless of direction. First, folder names differ between firmwares — OnionOS uses short codes, GarlicOS uses others — so a straight drag-and-drop of the whole ROM tree will fail; you sort by system into the destination's expected folders. Second, BIOS files (for PS1, and for a few other systems) live in specific per-firmware locations and must be present or those systems silently refuse to boot. Third, back up before you touch anything. The layout difference looks like this:

# OnionOS (Miyoo Mini Plus) - single card
/Roms/
  /GBA/     Game Boy Advance
  /SFC/     Super Nintendo
  /PS/      PlayStation (.cue/.bin or .chd)
/Saves/     in-game .srm saves  -> PORTABLE
/States/    RetroArch save states -> NOT portable
/BIOS/      place PS1 BIOS here

# GarlicOS (RG35XX original) - typically 2nd card
/Roms/
  /GBA/     same
  /SNES/    note: NOT "SFC" like Onion
  /PS1/     note: NOT "PS" like Onion
/BIOS/      per-firmware path; verify before booting

# Rule of thumb:
#   .srm  save files  -> copy, they travel
#   states/snapshots  -> do NOT trust across firmware
#   folder names      -> re-sort per destination
#   BIOS              -> re-place, or PS1 won't boot

The Law and the Lore

No honest article about emulation handhelds skips the legal part, because the legal part is where most buyers quietly break the law and where a small amount of knowledge keeps you clean. The short version: the machines are legal, the software that runs on them is legal, and the games most people load onto them are not — but there is a clean path, and it is not even hard.

Emulators Are Legal. Connectix Said So.

Emulation software itself is legal, and it is legal because of a specific, load-bearing court case. In Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., decided by the Ninth Circuit in 2000, Sony tried to kill a PlayStation emulator called Virtual Game Station by arguing that reverse-engineering the PlayStation BIOS to build it was copyright infringement. The court disagreed, holding that intermediate copying for the purpose of reverse-engineering — to achieve interoperability, to build a new compatible product — is fair use. That ruling, alongside the earlier Sega v. Accolade, is the reason RetroArch, GarlicOS, and OnionOS can exist and ship without Sony's or Nintendo's permission. The emulator on your Miyoo is not a legal gray area. It is settled law, and Sony lost.

Your ROM Folder Is a Different Question

The games are where it gets uncomfortable. A ROM is a copy of copyrighted software, and downloading one you did not create is copyright infringement, full stop — there is no abandonware exception in the statute, no they don't sell it anymore defense, and the fact that the publisher no longer profits does not transfer the rights to you. This is why I told you to avoid preloaded SD cards: a card sold stuffed with thousands of ROMs is a stack of infringing copies, and the legal exposure comes with it whether you asked for it or not. The console is clean. The catalog someone else put on it is the problem. Nintendo has spent the better part of a decade making examples of ROM sites precisely to keep this ambiguity from feeling safe.

The Clean Path: Homebrew and Dumping Your Own

There are two ways to fill one of these devices without breaking anything. The first is homebrew — original games written for old hardware and given away freely, like the open-source GBA title Apotris. Homebrew is a clean, legal, and genuinely good use of the screen, and there is more of it than most people realize. The second, and the one that unlocks your actual childhood library, is dumping your own cartridges: if you own the physical Chrono Trigger cartridge, pulling the ROM off it for your own use sits on far firmer ground than downloading a stranger's copy. That requires a cartridge reader, and if you want to walk that path properly, our guide to dumping SNES and Genesis carts with a Retrode lays out the whole process. Own the cart, dump the cart, play the dump. That is the version of this hobby that does not require you to look over your shoulder.

The Verdict

After six thousand words, the recommendation is boring, and it is boring because it is correct: for most people, buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. Not because it is the more powerful device — it is measurably not — but because power is not what this class is for, and the Miyoo wins every category that actually matters at this size and price. Let me lay out exactly who should ignore that advice.

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus If...

You want the best pocketable sub-$70 handheld for everything up to PlayStation, you value all-day battery and clean, zero-friction software over raw specs, and you will never plug it into a television. That is the majority of buyers, and for them the Miyoo is the answer. PropelRC scored it 8.5 out of 10 at its price point; XDA gave it a 9. Those scores are earned by the firmware and the battery, not the chip, which is the whole thesis in miniature.

Buy an RG35XX If...

You need HDMI output, you want to reach Dreamcast or light PSP (H700 models only), you enjoy firmware tinkering as part of the hobby, or you specifically want full-speed DS on the cheap (original model, at a brutal battery cost). Pick the H700 Plus or Pro for the higher ceiling and modern wireless; pick the original only if it is meaningfully cheaper and you know you want the 2022 chip. Retro Game Corps' framing is the right one — the H700 line is an excellent combination of affordability and performance — just do not confuse it with the 2022 original, which is a different and older machine.

The Machine's Call

Firmware beats silicon in the budget class, and the Miyoo Mini Plus is the cleanest proof of it on the market — a two-core, 128MB handheld that out-satisfies a four-core, 256MB one because the software is better and the battery is bigger and it fits in a pocket the other one does not. That is the default recommendation and it is the right one for most of you. But the moment your requirements include a television, a Dreamcast library, or an afternoon spent flashing operating systems for fun, the Miyoo's optimizations stop being advantages and the RG35XX — the right RG35XX — becomes the answer. Just know which one you are buying. There are three of them, they sit on both sides of the Miyoo, and the difference between the 2022 Actions chip and the 2024 Allwinner is the difference between a sidegrade and a genuine step up. Choose the device that fits the life, not the one that wins the spec sheet. The spec sheet, as we have thoroughly established, is the least reliable narrator in the room.