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

Here is a fact that should embarrass an entire product category: the two best-selling budget emulation handhelds of 2026 were both released in 2022. Anbernic has shipped something like a dozen new SKUs since. Miyoo has iterated, teased, and been rumored into a Mini 3 that still is not the thing people actually buy. A memory-chip shortage came, went, and came back to gut the mid-range. And through all of it, the Miyoo Mini Plus and the original Anbernic RG35XX keep selling, keep getting recommended, and keep landing in the exact which one should I get search you almost certainly just ran to arrive here.

They are the retro-handheld equivalent of the Toyota Corolla: unglamorous, four years old, and still the correct answer for most people who ask. This article settles which Corolla to buy. It is also, unavoidably, a correction, because the received wisdom about these two devices — including the research brief handed to us for this very piece — is riddled with errors that a five-minute look at the actual silicon disproves. We will fix those as we go, because you cannot recommend hardware you have described wrong.

The Two That Refuse to Die

Before the tables and the benchmarks, understand what you are choosing between, because the marketing on both sides has spent four years muddying it.

Two handhelds, one price bracket, two philosophies

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a deliberately small, deliberately simple device that does one thing — everything up to and including PlayStation 1 — and does it with the best community software in the price class. It is the handheld you keep in a coat pocket. The original RG35XX is a slightly larger, slightly more powerful device from a company that treats handhelds like a printer company treats ink: ship a new one every quarter and let the market sort them out. It out-specs the Miyoo on paper in every category that a spec sheet measures, and it has a genuine, narrow performance lead in exactly one place that matters.

The problem is that a spec sheet does not measure the thing that decides this purchase. In this class — sub-$70, ARM Cortex-A7/A9, no active cooling — the firmware is the product. The chip is a commodity. And that is where the whole comparison inverts.

What you are not choosing between

A public-service announcement, because the search results for this topic are a swamp. This article is about the original Anbernic RG35XX — the one released in late 2022 with the Actions Semiconductor chip. It is not about the RG35XX Plus, the RG35XX H, the RG35XX SP, or the RG35XX 2024, all of which use a completely different Allwinner H700 platform with quad Cortex-A53 cores, a Mali-G31 GPU, 1GB of LPDDR4, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. Those are legitimately more capable machines that push into Dreamcast and PSP, and comparing them to the Miyoo is a different article. Roughly 80% of the blog posts titled Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX silently swap in the Plus's H700 spec sheet halfway through, which is how you end up reading that a $55 device with a PowerVR SGX544 plays Dreamcast. It does not.

If your instinct after reading this is that you want Dreamcast, Saturn, and PSP, then neither of these two 2022 units is your device, and you should skip to the section on who should buy neither.

The thesis, stated plainly

The RG35XX wins the spec sheet and loses the recommendation. For the overwhelming majority of buyers — people who want to play 8-bit, 16-bit, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation 1 games on a pocketable screen without a weekend of configuration — the Miyoo Mini Plus is the better purchase, and the deciding factor is OnionOS, not the processor. The RG35XX earns its keep in a specific minority of cases: you want Nintendo DS, you want to output to a television over HDMI, or you actively enjoy flashing custom firmware. That is the entire argument. Everything below is the evidence.

The Spec-Sheet Showdown

Start with the numbers, then spend the rest of the article explaining why three of them are wrong everywhere else on the internet and why the ones that are right do not mean what you think.

The full comparison table

Three specs the internet keeps getting wrong

The brief we were handed to write this article — sourced, it claims, from a stack of comparison blogs — makes three factual errors that are worth naming, because they are the same three errors you will find repeated across dozens of sites that outrank the sources they plagiarized.

Error one: both devices use the Rockchip RK3326. They do not. The RK3326 is a quad Cortex-A35 chip found in the older RG351 series and a hundred other budget units. The Miyoo Mini Plus uses a SigmaStar SSD202D; the RG35XX uses an Actions ATM7039S. Neither is a Rockchip. This is not pedantry — the two real chips have wildly different core counts, GPUs, and performance profiles, and any "benchmark" derived from an RK3326 assumption is fiction.

Error two: the RG35XX charges over micro-USB. It charges over USB-C, same as the Miyoo. XDA's hands-on review says so in plain text. The micro-USB claim appears to have originated on one comparison blog and been copied verbatim by everyone downstream, which is a useful reminder that a citation count is not a fact-check.

Error three: "Garlic" and "Onion" are people. They are not. OnionOS is a community project (OnionUI on GitHub); GarlicOS was written by a developer who goes by Black Seraph. There is no "Onion" and no "Garlic" the person, and there is definitely no "Nick Waugh of the Miyoo Mini community," a quote that circulates in some briefs and that no primary source anywhere attributes to a real human. We will not print it as one.

How to read this sheet without getting fleeced

Notice what the table does not tell you: which device you will enjoy more. The RG35XX has more cores, a real GPU, and double the RAM, and if hardware determined outcomes this would be a two-paragraph article. It does not, because the games most buyers play — Link's Awakening, Chrono Trigger, Metal Slug, Final Fantasy VII, every Pokemon up to Gen 4 — run perfectly on both. Above that line, the RG35XX pulls ahead. Below it, which is to say for 90% of a normal library, the tie goes to whichever device has the better software and the more comfortable body. Hold that thought through the next two sections.

Silicon: Actions vs SigmaStar

You cannot understand why the weaker-spec device is the better buy without understanding what each chip actually is, because the story is not "one is faster." It is "one is a minimalist and one is an over-achiever that nobody wrote good software for."

SigmaStar SSD202D — two cores, no drama

The Miyoo Mini Plus runs a SigmaStar SSD202D, a system-on-chip designed not for handheld gaming but for smart-home panels, IP cameras, and industrial HMIs. It is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz with an integrated Mali-400 MP2 GPU and 128MB of RAM packaged on-die. XDA's Adam Conway, who scored the Miyoo 9/10, described it with characteristic bluntness: the chip is "not going to be setting benchmark records," but "that's more than good enough for most retro titles." That is the entire design philosophy in one sentence. SigmaStar built a cheap, efficient, thermally trivial chip, and Miyoo built a handheld around exactly the amount of performance it delivers and no more.

The consequence is a device that never gets warm, sips battery, and — critically — has a firmware community that spent four years optimizing for one fixed, well-understood target. When you are only ever going to run two A7 cores at 1.2GHz, you can tune the emulators to the metal. That is why the Miyoo punches so far above its component list.

Actions ATM7039S — four cores and an actual GPU

The RG35XX runs an Actions Semiconductor ATM7039S: a quad-core Cortex-A9 that boosts up to 1.6GHz, paired with a dedicated PowerVR SGX544 GPU running around 384MHz and 256MB of DDR3. On paper this obliterates the Miyoo — twice the cores, a newer and faster core architecture (A9 versus A7), a real programmable GPU instead of an integrated Mali, and double the memory. The PowerVR SGX544, for the historically inclined, is the same GPU family that powered the PlayStation Vita and the iPhone 5; it is a genuinely capable little part.

And the RG35XX does cash some of that in. XDA's review of the original unit — also a 9/10 — is unambiguous: the device "pleasantly surprises with its comfortable build, powerful hardware, and beautiful screen," and, most importantly, it runs "Nintendo DS at full speed, and Pokemon Black 2 runs at full speed." That DS capability is real, it is repeatable, and it is the RG35XX's single best argument. The extra cores and the PowerVR are what make DraStic — the Nintendo DS emulator — viable here in a way it simply is not on the Miyoo's two A7 cores.

128MB vs 256MB — why the smaller number wins the sale

So the RG35XX has double the RAM and double the cores. Why does the headline of this article say 128MB beats 256MB?

Because RAM and cores are inputs, not outputs. Below the DS tier — everything up through PlayStation 1 — neither device is memory-constrained or core-constrained running the emulators people actually use. A SNES core needs a rounding error of RAM. A PS1 core (Beetle PSX or PCSX-ReARMed, and choosing between them is its own rabbit hole we cover in our guide to picking the right RetroArch core) fits comfortably in 128MB. The extra 128MB on the RG35XX sits unused for the vast majority of a normal library. It is capability you paid for and, unless you specifically play DS, never touch.

Meanwhile the thing that does get touched every single time you turn the device on — the interface, the box-art scraper, the save-state manager, the sleep/resume behavior, the battery indicator — is software, and that is a category the Miyoo wins so decisively that gogamegeek's comparison reduces to five words: "The miyoo has a far better custom OS." That is the whole trade. You are choosing between latent hardware headroom you will rarely use and daily software polish you will use constantly. For most people that is not a close call, which is the entire thesis compressed into a RAM figure.

Performance: Where the Ceiling Sits

Enough theory. Here is what actually runs, sourced from people who put a stopwatch and a frame counter on these devices rather than copying a spec table.

The 8- and 16-bit floor: both flawless

Everything through the 16-bit era is a solved problem on both machines, and it is not worth agonizing over. NES, SNES, Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Master System, PC Engine, Neo Geo — all run at full speed with headroom to spare. PropelRC's Miyoo review, which landed at 8.5/10, put a real number on it: Chrono Trigger held a "Perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough." Game Boy Advance, the trickiest of the pre-32-bit systems because of its higher clock, also runs clean on both; XDA's Miyoo review notes that "Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly, PlayStation 1 games are a treat to play."

If your library stops at the 16-bit line — and for a huge number of buyers, honestly, it does — this entire performance section is moot, and you should be choosing on software, size, and battery. Both devices are overkill for a SNES library, and the Miyoo is the more pleasant overkill.

PlayStation 1 — the shared summit

PS1 is the ceiling both devices were built to reach, and both reach it, with the RG35XX having marginally more comfort at the top. PropelRC noted only "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2" on the Miyoo — a demanding 3D racer, and a minor wobble at that. DROIX's testing of the RG35XX found its 3D chops solid across the genre: "Tekken 3, Gran Turismo and Ridge Racer 4... did not spot any slowdown," with a measured PS1 runtime of three hours and three minutes on a charge. The extra cores and the PowerVR give the RG35XX a slightly larger cushion for the heaviest 3D titles, but on the Miyoo the difference is the occasional dropped frame in a racing game, not a broken experience. Call PS1 a draw that the RG35XX wins on points.

Nintendo DS and N64 — the Anbernic's private lead

This is the RG35XX's territory and the reason it exists in this comparison at all. Nintendo DS emulation via DraStic runs "at full speed" on the RG35XX per XDA, including a notoriously heavy title like Pokemon Black 2. The catch, and it is a real one, is battery: XDA measured only "two to three hours of playtime with Nintendo DS emulation," because pushing all four A9 cores drains the modest 2,600mAh cell fast. There is also the ergonomic reality that DS is a two-screen system running on one screen, so you are toggling between top and bottom or squashing both — playable, not luxurious.

On the Miyoo, DS is a different story. OnionUI's 4.3 line technically added a Nintendo DS core, so the claim that the Miyoo "can't do DS" is now outdated — but two A7 cores at 1.2GHz cannot drive DraStic at full speed, and with no touchscreen and a single display it is a technical curiosity rather than a way to actually play Castlevania. Treat DS as out of practical scope on the Miyoo and as a genuine feature on the RG35XX.

Nintendo 64 is a wash of disappointment on both, which is the honest verdict for every device in this class. The GBAtemp community's testing lines up with the general consensus: light N64 titles run near full speed, demanding ones sit at 70–85%, and you would not choose either of these to play N64 seriously. Retro Game Corps' guidance for the broader Anbernic family applies to both units and is worth heeding — the harder systems "cannot play every game at full speed, and so performance may vary." Above PS1, "may vary" is doing a lot of load-bearing work. If N64, PSP, and Dreamcast are non-negotiable, you have out-scoped both devices, and a Retroid Pocket-class handheld is where you should be looking instead.

Firmware: OnionOS vs GarlicOS

If you take one section from this article, take this one, because it is where the purchase is actually decided. The chips are close enough that the software running on them is the product, and in July 2026 the two software stories could not be more different.

OnionOS — the reason the Miyoo sells

OnionOS — properly OnionUI, a community project on GitHub — is the best budget-handheld firmware ever made, and it is not especially close. It replaces Miyoo's serviceable stock OS with a genuinely polished front end: a clean GameSwitcher that resumes any game instantly, per-game and per-system settings overrides, a box-art scraper, RetroAchievements support, an activity tracker, and a battery-and-brightness experience that just works. PropelRC credits it with "vastly improved battery life (4 hours → 7 hours)" over stock, plus "RetroAchievements support" — the firmware makes the hardware measurably better, not just prettier. DROIX, reviewing a competing device, conceded the point outright by calling OnionOS the thing to beat.

The 2026 status: stable OnionUI sits at v4.3.1-1, and the current development frontier is v4.4.0-beta-20260120, released January 21, 2026, which brings netplay (including a link between two Mini Plus units), RTC detection for newer hardware revisions, and CPU overclock hotkeys. There is an honest caveat buried in those version numbers, and we will not hide it: the stable branch has not moved since mid-2024. OnionOS is mature to the point of being nearly finished, and "finished" and "abandoned" can look similar from the outside. But a January 2026 beta with active feature work is a living project by the standard of this category, and it is a thriving metropolis compared to what is happening across the aisle.

GarlicOS — brilliant, and on ice

GarlicOS, written by Black Seraph, was the RG35XX's OnionOS — a night-and-day improvement over Anbernic's stock firmware, with fast boot, clean menus, and excellent out-of-the-box emulator configs. When it was current, it was the reason to own the device. Past tense is doing work in that sentence. GarlicOS 2.0, the rewrite meant to carry the platform forward, is, per Retro Game Corps, "still in an early alpha state, and while it's available for the public, I would recommend waiting until it is in a beta release state." That guidance was written in 2024 and it is, remarkably, still current in mid-2026, because development is on hold while the developer recovers his health. That is a human situation deserving of nothing but sympathy, and it is also a hardware-buying fact: the RG35XX's flagship firmware has been paused at an alpha for the better part of two years.

So the firmware scoreboard reads: the Miyoo's best software is mature and still getting beta updates; the RG35XX's best software is excellent-but-frozen and its successor is stalled. In a category where firmware is the product, that gap is the ballgame.

The alternative-firmware bench: MinUI, Batocera, Koriki

The RG35XX is not firmware-orphaned — it has the deeper bench of alternatives, which is a real point in its favor for tinkerers. MinUI offers a stripped-to-the-studs, one-list-of-games minimalism for people who find even OnionOS too busy. Batocera has builds for the original unit, though note that the broader Batocera-for-handhelds effort has largely rebranded to Knulli, which targets the newer H700 Anbernics rather than the original RG35XX's Actions chip. Koriki is another actively-developed front end for the family. If you want to spend a Saturday flashing microSD cards and A/B-testing front ends, the RG35XX is the more fun toy, and Batocera in particular is worth understanding on its own terms — see our Batocera setup walkthrough for the full picture.

The Miyoo's alternatives are thinner — there is a small ecosystem beyond OnionOS, but nobody uses it, because OnionOS is already the destination everyone else is trying to reach. That is the difference in a sentence: on the RG35XX you flash firmware to find something as good as OnionOS; on the Miyoo you are already there on day one.

Hardware: Screen, D-Pad, Battery

The silicon is a draw-that-tilts-Anbernic and the firmware is a rout-that-tilts-Miyoo. The physical hardware — the part your hands actually touch — mostly tilts back toward the Miyoo, with two real exceptions.

Screens and D-pads

Both devices use a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480 in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio, and both are genuinely good — sharp, bright at roughly 450 nits, with proper pixel-integer scaling for the systems whose native resolution divides cleanly. This is a tie, and a pleasant one; there are no bad screens in this comparison. The 4:3 ratio matters more than the numbers suggest, because it means retro games fill the panel instead of floating in a letterbox, and neither company cheaped out here.

The D-pad is where the Miyoo quietly wins a category that platformer and fighting-game players care about more than anything on the spec sheet. The Mini Plus has one of the best D-pads in the entire budget class — crisp, positive, with clean diagonals and no mushy pivot. The RG35XX's is fine; the Miyoo's is a reference. If you play a lot of Super Mario World, Street Fighter, or anything that punishes an accidental diagonal, this is not a small thing.

Battery and charging

The Miyoo carries a larger 3,000mAh cell (XDA's unit measured 3,200mAh) against the RG35XX's 2,600mAh (some listings say 2,100), and it converts that into materially better endurance: PropelRC logged 6.5 hours on SNES and 7.5 hours on Game Boy, and XDA rounds it to "up to six hours" across mixed use. The RG35XX manages a respectable four to five hours on lighter systems but collapses to "two to three hours" once you push it into DS emulation, per XDA. Both charge over USB-C — to say it a third time, because the internet keeps saying otherwise, neither uses micro-USB — and the Miyoo takes around three hours for a full charge. Advantage Miyoo, comfortably, unless your primary use is DS, in which case you are living on the RG35XX's charger regardless.

Ports — HDMI, Wi-Fi, and the micro-USB myth

Here are the RG35XX's two other real wins, and they are worth being precise about. First, HDMI-out: the original RG35XX has a mini-HDMI port that outputs at 720p, which the Miyoo simply does not have. DROIX's line is the cleanest statement of it — "One thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port, something both RG35XX models have." If you want to dock the thing to a TV and play NES on the big screen, the RG35XX is your only option here; the Miyoo is a strictly handheld proposition. Second, two microSD slots versus the Miyoo's one, which is a genuine convenience for keeping firmware on one card and a bulging ROM library on another.

The Miyoo answers with the one connectivity feature the RG35XX lacks entirely: Wi-Fi. The Mini Plus has 802.11 b/g/n, which OnionOS uses for over-the-air firmware updates, network game transfer, RetroAchievements, and even light online play in the beta. The original RG35XX has no wireless of any kind — every transfer is a microSD card in and out of a reader. Neither device has usable Bluetooth. So the ports war splits cleanly by intent: the RG35XX is the one you tether to a television, the Miyoo is the one you update and sync over the air.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

Both devices are four years old and priced like it, which is the best news in this entire article. You are choosing between two very good handhelds that cost less than a single new AAA game.

The pricing table

Where to buy without getting burned

The pricing reality is the same for both: you buy direct from AliExpress or the manufacturer's own store and pay roughly $50–55, or you buy from Amazon for the convenience of two-day shipping and a return window and pay a $15–25 premium for it. There is no meaningfully "official" US retail channel for either at the low price — both are Chinese-manufactured devices whose economics assume you order from Shenzhen and wait ten days. The RG35XX skews slightly cheaper on the gray market, occasionally dipping under $45 during AliExpress sales; the Miyoo holds its price a touch better because demand for it has never really softened.

One buying note specific to the Miyoo: there are hardware revisions (V2, V3, V4) that differ in screen supplier and internal tweaks, and OnionUI's newer builds added support for the V4's revised panel. Any current unit is fine; just do not buy a suspiciously cheap "Mini Plus" that turns out to be the smaller original Miyoo Mini, which is a different, less capable device.

The costs nobody prints on the box

The sticker price is not the total. Budget for a larger microSD card, because the bundled card is small and slow, and a screen protector, because both panels scratch. And then there is the cost the marketing never mentions: the games. Neither device ships with a legal library. The preloaded ROMs that gray-market sellers stuff onto the included card are, to be precise about it, copyright infringement, and no amount of "but the games are out of print" changes that under current law. The Miyoo's own library situation is such a mess of unofficial aggregations that we wrote an entire piece on how there is no real Miyoo Mini Plus game list — the widely-cited "6,041 games" figure is a retailer's marketing aggregation, not a catalog anyone official ever sanctioned.

The clean path exists and it is not even hard: the emulators themselves are legal — Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix settled that in 2000 — and you are entirely within your rights to dump your own cartridges. That is a genuine weekend project with a real payoff; our guide to dumping SNES and Genesis carts covers the whole chain. Factor a cartridge dumper into the budget if you want to own this hobby cleanly, and treat any "comes with 10,000 games" listing as the legal liability it is.

Who Each One Is For

Enough hedging. Here are the specific people each device is correct for, because "it depends" is not a recommendation and you came here for one.

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus if…

You want the best out-of-box experience with zero configuration. Flash OnionOS once — or buy it preloaded — and you are done. The interface is intuitive, sleep/resume is instant, and you never think about the software again. For a gift, for a non-technical partner, for your own "I just want to play, not tinker" evenings, this is the device.

You prioritize pocketability and battery. The Miyoo is the smaller-footprint device (108mm wide against the RG35XX's 117mm) and the longer-lasting one — 6 to 7 hours against 4 to 5. It is the coat-pocket, commute, waiting-room handheld. If it lives in a bag and comes out in five-minute windows, the Miyoo's endurance and size win.

You play mostly 8-bit through PS1, and you want a great D-pad for it. This is the majority of buyers whether they admit it or not. If your dream library is SNES RPGs, GBA, Genesis, and the PS1 back catalog, the Miyoo runs all of it flawlessly with the best D-pad in the class, and the RG35XX's DS capability is capability you will never use.

Buy the RG35XX if…

You specifically want Nintendo DS. This is the clearest single reason to choose the RG35XX. It runs DraStic at full speed, including heavy titles like Pokemon Black 2, and the Miyoo cannot match it. If your library leans on the DS — the Ace Attorney games, the Castlevania trilogy, Mario Kart DS — this is your device, battery caveats and all.

You want to output to a television. The mini-HDMI port makes the RG35XX a tiny home console when docked, at 720p. For a bedroom TV, a hotel-room setup, or couch play, that is a feature the Miyoo structurally cannot offer.

You enjoy the tinkering itself. The RG35XX has the richer alternative-firmware scene — MinUI, Batocera, Koriki, GarlicOS — and two microSD slots to experiment across. If flashing and comparing front ends is part of the fun rather than a chore, the Anbernic is the better sandbox.

Buy neither if…

You want N64, PSP, Dreamcast, or Saturn. Both devices choke above the DS line, and no amount of core-swapping fixes a hardware ceiling. If the systems on your wishlist include those, you have out-scoped this entire price class. Step up to an Allwinner H700 device (the RG35XX Plus, confusingly) for a modest bump, or to a Snapdragon-class handheld — our Retroid Pocket 5 vs 6 comparison maps out where that money goes and what it buys you. Do not buy a $55 handheld expecting God of War on PSP; that is a category error the marketing encourages and physics forbids.

Migration Guide: Switching Sides

Suppose you own one and this article has talked you into the other, or you are adding a second device and want your saves to follow you. Here is how to move, in both directions, without losing your progress.

Miyoo → RG35XX

The mental adjustment moving from the Miyoo to the RG35XX is that you are trading a finished software experience for a more configurable, less polished one. Do not expect OnionOS; expect to spend an evening deciding on firmware. The practical steps:

1. Decide on firmware first. GarlicOS 1.x is the stable, recommended default — do not chase the 2.0 alpha unless you enjoy bug reports. MinUI if you want minimalism; Batocera or Koriki if you want a scraper-heavy front end.
2. Flash the chosen firmware to a fresh microSD using the official instructions. The RG35XX's two slots let you keep OS and games separate.
3. Rebuild your ROM folder structure. This is not drag-and-drop — the folder tags differ between OnionOS and GarlicOS (see the layout below), so you are re-sorting into the new firmware's expected directory names.
4. Copy your save files and save states across (details in the last subsection), then rescrape box art on the new device.

RG35XX → Miyoo

Moving the other way is the easier trip, because you are migrating to the finished experience. The single instruction that matters: install OnionOS immediately and never look back. The steps:

1. Download the current stable OnionUI (v4.3.1-1) from the official GitHub releases page.
2. Format a microSD as FAT32 and extract OnionOS onto it per the install guide; boot the Miyoo once to let it expand the installation.
3. Connect the Miyoo to Wi-Fi and run the OTA updater — a luxury the RG35XX never gave you — to pull any newer files.
4. Drop your ROMs into OnionOS's Roms folders, copy saves across, and use the built-in scraper over Wi-Fi to pull box art automatically.

Moving saves and states without losing progress

The one genuine gotcha in either direction: save states are not portable, but in-game saves usually are. A save state is a raw memory snapshot tied to a specific emulator core and often a specific version, so a state made on the RG35XX's PS1 core may not load on the Miyoo's, and vice versa. In-game saves — the battery-backed SRAM saves and memory-card files the original games wrote — are far more portable, because they are the actual game's save format, not the emulator's. The rule: before you migrate, load each state and save in-game inside the actual game, then move the in-game save files. Here is the rough shape of what you are copying, and why it is not one clean folder:

/Roms
  /GBA      (.gba, .zip)      # OnionOS tag differs from GarlicOS
  /SFC      (SNES)            # e.g. "SNES" on some GarlicOS builds
  /FC       (NES)
  /PS       (PlayStation .chd/.cue/.pbp)
/BIOS       (system BIOS files, per-core)
/Saves
  /.../saves    <-  in-game SRAM saves  = PORTABLE, copy these
  /.../states   <-  emulator snapshots  = NOT portable, leave behind

Copy the saves directory, treat the states directory as disposable, and confirm each game's BIOS requirement is met on the destination device — a missing PS1 BIOS is the most common reason a migrated library boots to a black screen. Do that and your hundred hours of Final Fantasy IX follow you across the aisle intact.

The Verdict: 128MB Wins

Two 9/10 reviews, two four-year-old chips, two firmware communities headed in opposite directions. Here is the call, with the pros and cons laid bare first so you can argue with the reasoning rather than just the conclusion.

Miyoo Mini Plus — pros and cons

RG35XX — pros and cons

The Machine's call

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. For the person who wrote the search that brought you here — someone weighing two budget handhelds for a mostly-retro library — it is the correct default, and the reason is the one this article has hammered from the first paragraph: in a class where the chips are commodities, the firmware is the product, and OnionOS is the best firmware anyone has ever shipped for a device this cheap. It is mature, it is still getting beta updates in 2026, and it turns a modest two-core SigmaStar chip into a device that runs everything most people play flawlessly, with the best D-pad and the longest battery in the bracket. The RG35XX's superior silicon is real and it is also, for the majority of buyers, latent — 128MB of RAM you use beats 256MB you don't, and a paused GarlicOS is a warning the spec sheet cannot show you.

Buy the RG35XX if, and only if, you fall into one of three specific buckets: you want Nintendo DS, you want HDMI-out to a television, or you genuinely enjoy flashing custom firmware as a hobby unto itself. In those cases the extra cores, the PowerVR GPU, the video-out port, and the deeper alternative-firmware bench earn the device its place, and XDA's 9/10 is fully deserved. Outside those buckets, you are paying — in battery, in bulk, in software polish — for capability you will admire on paper and never touch in practice.

Four years on, the market has produced a dozen alleged successors to both of these, and the two 2022 originals are still the answer. That tells you something the benchmarks don't: in the sub-$70 tier, the ceiling stopped moving a while ago, and the only thing that still separates good hardware from great is the software running on top of it. On that axis the Miyoo wins, the RG35XX earns a respected second place, and the RK3326-quoting, micro-USB-claiming comparison blogs that got you here lose. As they should.