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

Two handhelds that shipped within a couple of months of each other at the tail end of 2022 are still, in the middle of 2026, the default answer to the most-asked question in this hobby: what should my first retro handheld be? That is not a compliment to either device so much as an indictment of the sub-$70 bracket, which has spent three and a half years shuffling variants around a spreadsheet without meaningfully moving the ceiling. The Miyoo Mini Plus and the Anbernic RG35XX are both cheap, both Linux-based, both aimed squarely at the 8-bit and 16-bit libraries you feel quietly guilty about never finishing, and both have outlived a dozen flashier competitors by being boring in exactly the right ways.

On paper this is not a close fight. The RG35XX has four CPU cores, a discrete PowerVR GPU, and twice the RAM. The Miyoo has two cores, an integrated Mali, and 128MB. And the RG35XX loses anyway — for most buyers, at the price both actually sell for. Welcome to the one hardware category where firmware is the product and silicon is a rounding error.

The Matchup: Two 2022 Devices, Still the Answer

Before anyone writes an angry email: yes, the RG35XX is genuinely the more capable machine, and no, that does not settle the question. The whole reason this comparison keeps getting re-litigated in 2026 is that raw capability and actual buying advice have quietly diverged in the budget tier, and most comparison pieces never notice.

What you are actually choosing between

The Miyoo Mini Plus is the grown-up version of the original Miyoo Mini — a 3.5-inch, 640×480 slab built around a SigmaStar SSD202D, the same class of chip you find in a smart doorbell. It is small, it is light, and its entire personality is OnionOS, the community firmware that turned a mediocre stock experience into the most-loved software in the category. The Anbernic RG35XX, in its original 2022 form, is a slightly larger 3.5-inch, 640×480 device on an Actions ATM7039S with a real PowerVR SGX544 GPU, a mini-HDMI port, and no Wi-Fi. It leans on GarlicOS, a community firmware that is very good and has spent two years perpetually almost-finished.

Both target the same emotional purchase: the person who wants Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, Metal Slug, and maybe Final Fantasy VII in a pocket, for the price of two AAA games, without a subscription. Neither is trying to be a Steam Deck. If you have ever caught yourself pricing out a Switch 2 against a Steam Deck for emulation duty, understand that these two are the opposite philosophy: do less, weigh less, cost nothing, last all day.

The one-sentence answer, for people who skim

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus if your library tops out at PlayStation 1 and you want the best software, the smallest body, and the longest battery. Buy an RG35XX — and in 2026 that almost certainly means one of the H700 variants, not the original — if you want a bigger or a clamshell screen, HDMI output to a TV, Bluetooth controllers, and a genuine shot at Nintendo DS and light PSP. That is the entire article. Everything below is why, with numbers, and where the buying guides have been lying to you.

The RG35XX is not one device, and that matters

Here is the trap that swallows half the comparison content on this subject. "RG35XX" in 2026 is not a product; it is a brand covering at least five materially different machines. The original RG35XX (Actions ATM7039S, 256MB, no Wi-Fi) is what launches most head-to-head articles. But Anbernic has since shipped the RG35XX Plus, the RG35XX H with a 4-inch screen, the clamshell RG35XX SP, and the RG35XX 2024 — all built on the Allwinner H700, a completely different and far stronger chip with 1GB of LPDDR4, Bluetooth, and 5GHz Wi-Fi. Comparing a Miyoo Mini Plus to "the RG35XX" without saying which one is like reviewing "the iPhone." We will keep the two eras strictly separate, because conflating them is how you end up believing a 256MB Cortex-A9 runs Dreamcast. It does not. The H700 does, sort of.

Specs Head to Head: 128MB vs 256MB

Let us get the sheet on the table before we start arguing about what it means. The headline is the RAM line: 128MB against 256MB, a 2× deficit for the Miyoo that its detractors love to quote and its defenders correctly ignore, because at this tier neither device is RAM-starved for the libraries it actually runs.

The silicon nobody reads correctly

The Miyoo Mini Plus runs a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 clocked around 1.2GHz, paired with a Mali-400 MP2. Note "dual-core." A depressing number of spec sheets — and more than one product listing — call this a quad-core, and it is not. XDA's Adam Conway, who actually opened the thing, describes it plainly as "dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB" in his 9/10 Miyoo Mini Plus review. The original RG35XX runs an Actions ATM7039S: four Cortex-A9 cores up to 1.6GHz plus a PowerVR SGX544MP. More cores, higher clock, an older but genuinely more muscular architecture for this workload, and a discrete GPU rather than an integrated one. On silicon, this is not close. The RG35XX wins the benchmark you will never run.

Screen, battery, and body

The screens are near-identical on paper — both 3.5-inch IPS panels at 640×480 in the correct 4:3 aspect for everything up to PS1. In practice reviewers give the Miyoo a slight nod for calibration and brightness; PropelRC measured it at roughly 450 nits in its Miyoo Mini Plus review. The bodies weigh essentially the same — about 165g each — but the Miyoo is the smaller footprint (roughly 108×78mm) and the chunkier profile (about 22mm thick), while the RG35XX is wider and flatter (about 117×81×20mm). If you have small hands or small pockets, the Miyoo disappears; if you have adult hands and long sessions, the RG35XX's extra width is more comfortable, a point DROIX and XDA both make.

The full comparison table

Twenty rows, and only two of them — RAM and video-out — are clean wins that translate into a reason to buy. Hold that thought.

The Micro-USB Lie and Other Copy-Paste Errors

If you read three RG35XX-versus-Miyoo comparisons, at least two will tell you the Miyoo has USB-C and the RG35XX has micro-USB, framing it as a real, practical difference in charging and cables. It is wrong. Both devices charge over USB-C. This is not a nuance; it is a factual error that has been photocopied across the internet for two years, and it is a useful lesson in how budget-handheld "research" actually gets made.

Both are USB-C — no matter what the buying guides say

The claim traces to comparison blogs quoting each other. gogamegeek's otherwise decent Miyoo vs RG35XX piece states flatly, "The Miyoo Mini Plus uses a USB-C port for charging and data transfer, while the Anbernic RG35XX uses a micro-USB port," and dozens of pages have inherited that sentence. But Anbernic's own RG35XX specifications, RetroDock's listing, and the included accessories all describe a USB Type-C cable and 5V/2A USB-C charging on the original 2022 unit. XDA's hands-on review says USB-C in plain text. The one legitimate wrinkle is that the original RG35XX's USB-C port is temperamental with USB-C-to-USB-C cables — several owners report it charges more reliably from a USB-A-to-C cable — which is a real quirk, not a different connector. So the correct sentence is: both use USB-C; the RG35XX's is just fussier. When a spec is this easy to check and this widely botched, treat the rest of that comparison's spec table with the suspicion it has earned.

The quad-core and the phantom battery

Two more that travel in packs. First, the Miyoo's "quad-core" — false, it is a dual-core A7, per the person who reviewed it and the SSD202D datasheet. Second, the RG35XX's battery, which the brief-tier sources love to list as 2,100mAh. XDA's teardown-adjacent testing and Anbernic's own materials put it at 2,600mAh; the 2,100 figure is another orphaned number that got loose. It matters only a little — the RG35XX's real-world endurance lands around 4–6 hours either way — but if a source can't get the battery capacity right, you should not trust its FPS claims.

Wi-Fi, HDMI, and the dual-slot detail

Now the differences that are real. The Miyoo Mini Plus has Wi-Fi (2.4GHz, 802.11 b/g/n); the original RG35XX has none. That single line reshapes the whole workflow: on the Miyoo you can scrape box art and metadata over the air, pull RetroAchievements, sync time, and — on the OnionUI 4.4 beta — run local netplay, including a GBA link cable between two units. On the original RG35XX, every one of those tasks means pulling the SD card. Conversely, the RG35XX has a mini-HDMI output good for 720p on a TV, which the Miyoo entirely lacks; DROIX's reviewer puts it bluntly — "One thing lacking on the Miyoo is a HDMI port, something both RG35XX models have." And a small correction to the folklore that dual microSD is a premium feature: the original RG35XX has two card slots (one for firmware, one for games up to 512GB); the Miyoo has one. Trade-offs, not a knockout, but at least these ones are true.

Firmware Is the Product: OnionOS vs GarlicOS

Here is the thesis stated without hedging: in the sub-$70 tier, you are not buying a chip, you are buying a firmware, and the chip exists to run it. Both machines ship with forgettable stock software that almost nobody keeps. What people actually live in are the community custom firmwares — and this is where the Miyoo's paper deficit stops mattering.

OnionOS: the polished default

The Miyoo's advantage is OnionOS (properly, the OnionUI project on GitHub), and near-universal reviewer consensus is that it is the best software in the class by a comfortable margin. gogamegeek, weighing the two devices, concedes the point against its own build-quality nod to Anbernic: "The miyoo has a far better custom OS." PropelRC credits Onion with tangible, measurable wins, not just vibes — it reports the firmware "adds 3 hours of battery life, RetroAchievements support," a Game Switcher overlay that resumes any game instantly, and clean per-system art. The stable channel sits at v4.3.1-1 (June 2024), with a v4.4.0-beta (January 2026) that made gpSP the default GBA core and added netplay. If you want to see what a mature Onion setup looks like once it is loaded with content, we went deep on what actually lives on a fully-loaded Miyoo SD card — the short version is that the reseller "27,549 games" number is a ROM-file count, not a library, but the front-end presenting it is genuinely excellent.

GarlicOS: the very good, permanently unfinished alpha

The RG35XX's counterpart is GarlicOS, by the developer Black Seraph, and it is legitimately good — fast boot, clean menus, solid box art. The problem is momentum. GarlicOS 2.0, the ground-up rewrite meant to modernize the whole thing, has been in early alpha for a very long time. Wesley Copeland's Retro Game Corps family guide — the most-cited reference document in the entire scene — still tells readers to "wait until it is in a beta release state" before relying on 2.0, and that advice has aged into 2026 without a beta to retire it. GarlicOS 1.x remains excellent and stable; the exciting next version remains a promise.

Both flagships have plateaued — which favors the Miyoo

The honest read in 2026 is that both firmwares have flattened out. Onion's stable channel has been frozen since mid-2024 with only a beta trickling new features; GarlicOS 2.0 is stalled at alpha. In a tie of two plateaus, the tiebreaker is where each plateau sits, and Onion plateaued higher: better documentation, a bigger theme ecosystem, Wi-Fi-dependent features the RG35XX physically cannot use, and RetroAchievements out of the box. If you would rather not depend on either community and want a known-quantity Linux stack you image yourself, that is a different project entirely — the kind of thing our Batocera install walkthrough exists for — but for a device this small, the on-rails OnionOS experience is the entire appeal.

Performance: What Each One Actually Runs

Enough about software philosophy. What frames do these things push? The answer, drawn from three independent testers — XDA, PropelRC, and the GBAtemp/Playhouse bench notes — is: for the libraries most buyers care about, both are effectively perfect, and the RG35XX's silicon lead only shows up at the edges where both devices are already struggling.

8-bit and 16-bit: the tier that actually matters

NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Master System, PC Engine, Neo Geo. This is 90% of what anyone plays on either device, and both run all of it at full speed. PropelRC's line on the Miyoo is the one to remember: "Chrono Trigger (SNES): Perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough." XDA concurs that "Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly" on the Miyoo, and that the RG35XX "pleasantly surprises with its comfortable build, powerful hardware, and beautiful screen." There is no daylight here. If your ceiling is A Link to the Past, Metal Slug X, Golden Sun, or Sonic 3 & Knuckles, flip a coin — or rather, decide on battery and size, because performance is a non-issue.

PlayStation 1: the real ceiling for both

PS1 is where these two devices spend their headroom, and both clear the bar with room to spare. Roughly 90–95% of the PS1 library runs at or near full speed on either. XDA calls PS1 on the Miyoo "a treat to play"; PropelRC notes only "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2," one of the more demanding 3D titles on the platform. The RG35XX, with its PowerVR GPU, has a marginal edge on the heaviest 3D PS1 games and drops fewer frames in the worst cases — DROIX's testing of the H700 successor notes games that ran "just a bit too slow" on the original now "working great," which tells you where the original sat: good, occasionally sweaty. Final Fantasy VII, Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: no problem on either. This is the frontier, and both are camped on the right side of it.

N64, DS, PSP: where the gap appears, and where both die

Past PS1, the story fractures — and this is the only place the spec sheet pays off. On the Miyoo, GBAtemp and Playhouse testers put light Nintendo 64 titles at near-full speed and demanding ones at 70–85%, with PSP simply not viable. The original RG35XX's headline party trick, per XDA, is Nintendo DS: "Nintendo DS at full speed, and Pokemon Black 2 runs at full speed" via DraStic — a genuine capability the Miyoo does not practically share, since Onion's DS core exists but is impractical on a single 3.5-inch screen with no touch. The catch, also from XDA, is battery: DS emulation drains the RG35XX to "two to three hours of playtime." PSP is where you must be honest about which RG35XX you mean. The original is not a PSP machine. Only the H700 variants make PSP semi-viable, and even then DROIX is measured — "many are still not running at full speed and require frame skipping." Retro Game Corps' guide flags the whole demanding-systems tier with an asterisk: those platforms "cannot play every game at full speed, and so performance may vary." Translation: if DS or PSP is a hard requirement, neither of these is your device — you want a Retroid Pocket-class Android handheld, and you want to stop pretending a $60 slab is the tool.

Battery and Endurance: The Recurring Miyoo Win

Of the handful of categories the Miyoo wins outright, battery is the one that shows up in every single comparison, from every reviewer, in every year since launch. It is the most durable finding in the whole matchup, and it is worth understanding why it holds, because the reason is not only the bigger cell.

The numbers everyone reports

The Miyoo carries a 3,000mAh battery (some listings say 3,200) against the RG35XX's 2,600mAh. Real-world testing lands the Miyoo around 5–7 hours and the original RG35XX around 4–6, and independent 2026 comparison videos put practical figures near 6 hours for the Miyoo and roughly 4 for the RG35XX — the same gap, measured a dozen different ways. The lighter the system, the wider it gets: PropelRC clocks the Miyoo at 6–7 hours on SNES and up to 7.5 hours on Game Boy, while XDA's real-world summary is a conservative "up to six hours of battery life." The RG35XX's endurance collapses hardest exactly where it flexes hardest — those 2–3 hours under DS.

The OnionOS battery bonus

Here is the part the spec sheet cannot show you. The Miyoo's battery advantage is partly firmware. PropelRC attributes roughly three extra hours to OnionOS versus stock — the same firmware that wins the software argument also wins part of the battery argument, through better idle behavior and underclocking. The stock experience manages about four hours; Onion stretches the identical hardware toward seven. That is a rare case of a free software update buying you a hardware-grade improvement, and it is one more reason the 128MB device keeps beating the 256MB one where it counts.

The RG35XX family's battery spread

If you widen the lens to the whole Anbernic line, battery stops being a clean Miyoo win and becomes a your-mileage-varies footnote. The H700 units — RG35XX Plus, H, and the clamshell SP — carry 3,300mAh cells and advertise up to 8 hours. In practice that is optimistic: independent testing of the SP lands closer to 3.5–4.5 hours under normal use, while the H can genuinely approach its rating on light systems. So the pecking order in 2026 is roughly: Miyoo Mini Plus and RG35XX H for real all-day endurance, original RG35XX in the comfortable middle, and the clamshell SP trailing despite the bigger number on the box. The lesson, again: do not buy on the mAh figure. Buy on the tested hours.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

The most quietly remarkable thing about this comparison in 2026 is how little the prices have moved. Two devices that launched at $59.99 and $69.99 in 2022 still sell within a few dollars of those figures today, in a market where a global memory-price crunch has pushed nearly everything else up. This bracket is a fossil, preserved by volume and by the fact that neither manufacturer has a reason to change it.

Street prices right now

The Miyoo Mini Plus typically runs $53 to $66 depending on storage and color. PropelRC frames its value review around a "$53 price point" for a bare unit; a 2026 comparison video clocked it at $66 from the official Miyoo AliExpress store, versus $56 for the RG35XX bought direct from Anbernic. Another 2026 review lists the Miyoo near $55 and the RG35XX Plus near $65, arguing — reasonably — that Anbernic's extra $10 buys you more hardware and connectivity. All of these are within a rounding error of each other. When two products are this close on price, price is not the deciding variable; it is a tiebreaker at most.

The sale-price game

Both brands run near-constant promotions, so the "real" price is whatever the current coupon says. One 2026 report caught Miyoo's official store listing the Mini Plus at $56.99 for 64GB color variants during a May 1–5 holiday window, against a regular page price of $79.99 — a spread wide enough that paying full freight would be a mild embarrassment. The RG35XX family goes lower and more often: AliExpress flash listings have put the original RG35XX and the RG35XX H in the $34–42 range on a good day. If you are patient and watch a deal aggregator, the Anbernic side is frequently the cheaper entry by a real margin; if you buy on impulse at list price, they are twins.

Pricing and availability table

Availability is a non-issue for both — these ship in volume from AliExpress, Amazon, and the manufacturers direct, and they are not going out of stock. The only genuine scarcity risk is the original RG35XX, which Anbernic is content to let the H700 units replace; if you specifically want the Actions-chip original, buy it while it is still listed, because the family has moved on.

Five Ways to Actually Buy This

Specs decide nothing until they meet a person and a use. Here are the buyer profiles where one of these devices is clearly correct and the other clearly is not — because "it depends" is the answer of someone who does not want to commit, and The Machine commits.

The pocket-first minimalist and the couch TV player

These two profiles split the devices cleanly. 1. The pocket-first minimalist. You want a device that vanishes into a jacket pocket, boots to a game in seconds, and runs your SNES and GBA backlog for a full workday on one charge. This is the Miyoo Mini Plus, unambiguously. Smallest body, best firmware, longest light-system battery, and Wi-Fi for art scraping. XDA's summary — not a benchmark champ, but "more than good enough for most retro titles" — is precisely this buyer's device. 2. The couch TV player. You want to dock to a television, hand a second controller to a friend, and play Streets of Rage on the big screen. The Miyoo has no video output; this is the RG35XX by default, using its mini-HDMI. The H700 variants add Bluetooth for wireless pads, which is what you actually want in a living room.

The DS holdout, the tinkerer, and the gift

3. The Nintendo DS holdout. Your killer app is Pokemon Black 2, Mario Kart DS, or the Advance Wars remakes, and you can tolerate a 2–3 hour battery to get them. Only the RG35XX runs DS at full speed on this budget — XDA confirms it — and the Miyoo effectively does not. Buy the RG35XX and carry a battery pack. 4. The firmware tinkerer. You enjoy flashing custom OSes, theming, and following GitHub release notes for fun. Both reward this, but differently: the Miyoo gives you the deepest, most-documented firmware in OnionOS, while the RG35XX family gives you more projects — GarlicOS, Knulli, MinUI, stock — to swap between. If you want to build your own library legitimately rather than trust a reseller's card, pair either with a cartridge dumper; our guide to dumping your own carts and saves is the clean, legal on-ramp. 5. The gift for a non-technical person. You are buying for a parent, a partner, or a kid who will never flash anything and just wants it to work. Buy a Miyoo Mini Plus with OnionOS pre-installed. It has the friendliest out-of-box experience, the fewest sharp edges, and the smallest chance of a support call to you.

Where neither is the answer

A sixth profile, offered as a courtesy: if your list includes GameCube, Wii, full-speed PSP, Saturn, or Dreamcast, stop reading comparisons of these two. Neither the Miyoo Mini Plus nor any RG35XX is your device, and no firmware trick changes that. You want an Android handheld a full tier up — the Retroid Pocket line is the usual landing spot — or a dedicated FPGA box if accuracy is the obsession, which is a different rabbit hole entirely, one our MiSTer Multisystem 2 coverage goes down. Buying a $60 A7 slab to run PSP is how people end up with a drawer of disappointing handhelds.

Migrating From One to the Other

Say you already own one of these and the grass looks greener. Switching is genuinely easy — both are Linux devices that keep everything on a microSD card — but there are two gotchas that eat an afternoon if you are not warned, and they run in opposite directions depending on which way you are jumping.

Miyoo to RG35XX

You are trading up for a bigger screen, HDMI, or DS. The steps:

1. Image a fresh GarlicOS (or Knulli, for an H700 unit) card on your computer — do not try to reuse the Miyoo's Onion card; the firmware images are device-specific and the SD layouts differ.
2. Copy your ROM folders across. Both firmwares use human-readable, per-system folders, but the folder names differ (e.g. Onion's SFC vs. some Garlic builds' SNES), so expect to rename a few directories.
3. Move your saves and save states separately — this is the gotcha. RetroArch .srm battery saves are portable between devices as long as the same core is used; save states frequently are not, because they are tied to a specific core version and sometimes the exact hardware. Finish anything you care about, or export battery saves, before you migrate.
4. Re-scrape box art on the new device. The RG35XX original has no Wi-Fi, so scrape on the PC with Skraper before you eject the card.

RG35XX to Miyoo

You are trading down in screen size for firmware polish, battery, and pocketability. Same shape, mirrored:

1. Download OnionOS from the OnionUI GitHub, format your card, and flash per their docs — the whole install is famously painless.
2. Drop ROMs into Onion's Roms tree, matching its folder names. Onion is opinionated about folder tags; get them right and the front-end just works.
3. Because the Miyoo has Wi-Fi, you can scrape art and enable RetroAchievements on the device after setup — one of the few workflow steps that is easier on the smaller machine.

A representative OnionOS card root looks like this — useful to know before you start dragging files:

/ (SD root)
├── miyoo283_fw.img        # firmware image, lives at root
├── BIOS/                  # PS1 SCPH bios, etc. (supply your own)
├── Roms/
│   ├── FC/                # Famicom / NES
│   ├── SFC/               # Super Famicom / SNES
│   ├── GBA/               # Game Boy Advance
│   ├── PS/                # PlayStation 1
│   └── ...                # one folder per system
├── Saves/                 # .srm battery saves + states
├── Emu/                   # emulator cores + configs
├── RetroArch/             # RetroArch config, overlays, shaders
└── miyoo/                 # OnionOS system files

Saves, ROMs, and the legal path

The uncomfortable part nobody in a marketing blog will say out loud: the emulators are legal, and the way most people fill these cards is not. Emulation itself was settled a quarter-century ago — Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (9th Cir. 2000) held that reverse-engineering a console to build an emulator is fair use. Downloading a 27,000-ROM card of games you never owned is a different act with a different legal character, and "but it came pre-loaded" is not the shield people think it is. The clean path is to dump your own cartridges — again, our cart-dumping walkthrough covers the hardware — or to use curated homebrew and legally-distributed collections such as the Tiny Best Set: GO! packs, which exist precisely to give these devices a defensible starting library. What you do with your card is your business; The Machine is merely noting where the line is drawn, because knowing the law is part of the job.

Pros and Cons, Laid Flat

Every argument above, compressed to the two tables you will actually screenshot. No hedging, no "it depends," no bothsidesing a decision you can make in ten seconds once the trade-offs are on one screen.

Miyoo Mini Plus

Anbernic RG35XX (original + family)

The Verdict: Firmware Beats Silicon

Two 2022 devices, a 2× RAM gap, a discrete GPU on one side and better software on the other, and after seven thousand words the answer is the same as the one-sentence version up top — because the data kept pointing the same direction the whole way down.

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus if…

…your library stops at PlayStation 1, which for the overwhelming majority of buyers it does. You get the best firmware in the category, the longest battery on the systems you will actually play, the smallest body, Wi-Fi, and a screen every reviewer likes — for around $55. XDA gave it 9/10; PropelRC gave it 8.5/10 at a "$53 price point"; the consensus that OnionOS is "far better" is close to unanimous. This is the default recommendation, and it is not close for the person who wants a first (or best) pocket handheld. The 128MB device beats the 256MB device because the 128MB device is running better software and lasting longer while it does it.

Buy an RG35XX if…

…you need something the Miyoo physically cannot do: output to a TV, run Nintendo DS at full speed, hold two SD cards, or sit more comfortably in adult hands over a long session. And in 2026, "an RG35XX" should almost always mean an H700 variant — the Plus, the 4-inch H, or the clamshell SP — not the original, because the H700 adds Bluetooth, 5GHz Wi-Fi, real PS1 headroom, and a shot at light PSP for the same money. The original Actions-chip RG35XX remains a fine, cheap PS1-and-DS box, but its ceiling is lower and its firmware momentum has stalled. DROIX's own verdict on cross-shopping is the honest one: if you already own a Miyoo Mini Plus, upgrading sideways to an RG35XX is "perhaps not worth" it.

The Machine's call

Get the Miyoo Mini Plus. It is the better product even though it is the worse machine, and understanding why is the whole point of this category: at $60, you are buying a curated software experience with a battery attached, not a benchmark. The RG35XX out-specs it and loses on the only axes a pocket device is judged by — software, battery, size — which is why the comparison keeps resolving the same way in every year since 2022. Buy the RG35XX H specifically if HDMI-out or DS is non-negotiable; buy neither if you are secretly shopping for PSP or GameCube, because that ambition ends with a Steam Deck or a Switch 2 doing the emulation heavy lifting and a lighter wallet. But for the actual question these two answer — a great, cheap, all-day machine for everything up to PlayStation — the smaller number wins. Firmware beats silicon. It usually does, down here.