Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX 2026: 2x RAM Loses to Onion

Two vertical, Game Boy-shaped handhelds. The same 3.5-inch screen. Roughly the same $70. And a comment section that has been arguing about them since 2023 without ever once agreeing. This is the most consequential budget-handheld matchup in retro gaming, and the reason it stays unresolved is that the two devices win on different axes — one on silicon, one on software — and which axis matters is entirely a question of what you intend to play. Let us settle it with numbers.

The Verdict, Up Front

The One-Sentence Answer

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. Then read the rest of this article to find out whether you are one of the roughly one-in-four people who should have bought an Anbernic RG35XX instead. That is the entire comparison compressed into two sentences, and if you close the tab now you will not have made a mistake. But the interesting part of any handheld comparison is never the winner — it is the size of the asterisk attached to it, and this one has a large asterisk shaped like a Sega Dreamcast.

Here is the paradox that makes the matchup worth seven thousand words. The RG35XX has double the RAM of the Miyoo — 256 MB against 128 MB — a newer Cortex-A9 CPU core generation, a brighter screen, louder speakers, and an HDMI port the Miyoo will never have. On a spec sheet it wins going away. And yet review after review, from the British tech press to the retro-handheld cottage industry, keeps naming the Miyoo the overall winner. The reason is not hardware. It is software, and at the sub-$80 tier software eats hardware for breakfast.

Why This Isn't Actually Close

The Miyoo Mini Plus wins because of three things the spec table undersells: OnionOS, Wi-Fi, and a 3,000 mAh battery that OnionOS stretches past the marketing number. OnionOS is the most mature custom firmware in this entire price bracket — years of community development, a deep theme system, a “Game Switcher” that turns save-state juggling into a single button press, and near-zero configuration out of the box. The Wi-Fi is not for browsing; it is for syncing RetroAchievements and pulling over-the-air firmware updates without ever removing the microSD card. The original RG35XX has none of that. It has an HDMI port and a micro-USB charging jack that belongs in 2014.

The Asterisk You'll Ignore Until It Bites

The asterisk is emulation ceiling. The Miyoo tops out, in practical terms, at Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1 — and even N64 is a negotiation, not a guarantee. The RG35XX reaches higher, and the H700-based RG35XX Plus that replaced it in 2025 reaches higher still, into genuinely playable Dreamcast, Nintendo DS, and PSP territory. If any of those three systems is on your must-play list, the one-sentence answer inverts and you should skip to the buyer's guide below. If they are not — if your library ends at Symphony of the Night and Chrono Trigger — then the extra silicon is horsepower you will pay for and never use. Most people's libraries end there. Hence: buy the Miyoo.

The Specs That Actually Matter

The Full Comparison Table

Below is the whole argument in one grid. I have included three device columns rather than two, because pretending the original RG35XX is the device you will actually buy in 2026 would be dishonest — the Anbernic you find in stock today is almost certainly an H700-based model. More on that immediately after the table. Every number here traces to a manufacturer spec or a review cited later in this piece; where a figure is a real-world observation rather than a rated spec, it says so.

Reading Between the Rows

Three rows decide this comparison and the rest are tie-breakers. The first is RAM: 128 MB versus 256 MB versus 1 GB is not a rounding difference, it is three different classes of what the device can hold in memory at once — bigger save states, heavier cores, more aggressive texture caching. The second is native firmware: OnionOS versus GarlicOS is the difference between “polished for years” and “polished for months.” The third is connectivity: the Miyoo's Wi-Fi and the RG35XX's HDMI are mirror-image trade-offs — one device talks to the internet, the other talks to your television, and neither does both until you reach the RG35XX Plus.

Notice what is not a differentiator. Both panels are the identical 3.5-inch, 640×480, 4:3 IPS glass — same resolution, same aspect ratio, same pixel-perfect fit for the 8- and 16-bit systems that were themselves 4:3. Both are Game Boy-shaped verticals with a D-pad, four face buttons, and two shoulders. If you are choosing between these two for the screen resolution, stop; there is no decision to make there.

The RG35XX Plus Changes the Math

The original RG35XX launched in 2023 on an aging 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 SoC. In 2025 Anbernic effectively retired it in favor of the RG35XX Plus, which swaps in the Allwinner H700 — a quad-core Cortex-A53 cluster clocked up to roughly 1.5 GHz — paired with a dual-core Mali-G31 MP2 GPU and a full 1 GB of LPDDR4. It also adds Bluetooth 4.2, dual-band Wi-Fi 5 across both 2.4 and 5 GHz, and a larger 3,300 mAh battery rated for up to eight hours. That is not a refresh; it is a different tier of device wearing the same shell. Throughout this article, when I say the RG35XX “reaches Dreamcast,” I mean the H700 family. The 2023 original reaches for it and mostly comes up short.

The Silicon: A7 vs A9 vs H700

Four Little Cores vs One Bigger Idea

The Miyoo Mini Plus runs a 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7. The original RG35XX runs a 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9. Same headline clock, different philosophies. The Cortex-A7 is an in-order, power-sipping little core — the “LITTLE” half of ARM's big.LITTLE designs — and the Miyoo carries four of them. The Cortex-A9 is an older but out-of-order, superscalar design with meaningfully higher instructions-per-clock on the single-threaded workloads that most emulators actually are. This is the counter-intuitive heart of the hardware story: at the same clock speed, one good A9 thread can out-execute one A7 thread, which is exactly why the RG35XX punches above what “128 versus 256 MB” alone would suggest on the heavier systems.

But most retro emulation does not parallelize across four cores, so the Miyoo's core count is less of an advantage than it looks, and the A7's efficiency is more of one. This was Miyoo's deliberate trade: a cooler, longer-lasting chip tuned for everything up to PS1, rather than a hotter, thirstier chip chasing systems the form factor was never going to do comfortably anyway. The result is a device that is slower on paper yet, per the 2025 review consensus, actually feels quicker in day-to-day use — edging the RG35XX on loading times and general UI responsiveness. That is an optimization win, not a compute win, and it tells you where each company spent its effort.

Why 128 MB Is Enough Until It Isn't

128 MB of RAM sounds indefensible in 2026. It is not, because of what it is being asked to hold. A Super Nintendo has 128 KB of work RAM; a PlayStation has 2 MB. You could fit the entire live memory state of a SNES game several thousand times over in the Miyoo's 128 MB and still have room for the emulator, the frontend, and a save state. Where 128 MB starts to hurt is precisely at the ceiling — Nintendo 64's unified memory, PSP's large working set plus textures, Dreamcast's 16 MB main plus 8 MB video — where the emulator's overhead and the guest system's footprint stop being a rounding error. The RG35XX's 256 MB buys headroom exactly where the Miyoo runs out of it, and the H700's 1 GB removes the constraint entirely.

Retro Catalog put the practical upshot bluntly, rating the RG-35XX as “much more powerful” than the Miyoo Mini Plus, largely on the strength of its GPU headroom for shaders. That is true and also slightly beside the point for a buyer whose ceiling is PS1 — which is the tension this whole comparison keeps circling. More power you never draw on is not a feature; it is a line item.

The H700 Is a Different Conversation

Drop the Allwinner H700 into the discussion and the CPU argument stops being close. Four Cortex-A53 cores are a full architectural generation ahead of both the A7 and the A9 — 64-bit, higher IPC, higher clocks — and the Mali-G31 MP2 is a real GPU rather than a token one. This is the chip that makes Dreamcast a reasonable ask, DS genuinely playable, and PSP a “most of the library” proposition rather than a “don't bother.” It is also why, if you have decided you want an Anbernic, you want the Plus and not the museum-piece original. The 256 MB A9 model exists in this article mainly as the historical control group: the device the Miyoo was originally measured against, and the one whose weaknesses explain why the H700 refresh happened at all.

Emulation Ceilings, Benchmarked

8-bit Through PS1: A Tie Nobody Loses

Everything from the Atari 2600 up through the PlayStation runs beautifully on both devices, and pretending otherwise would be manufacturing drama. In its hands-on review, PropelRC clocked “Chrono Trigger (SNES): Perfect 60fps throughout my 12-hour playthrough” on the Miyoo — which is the entire 16-bit era in one data point, because if a device holds a locked 60 through a 12-hour JRPG it is not going to stumble on Sonic or Super Mario World. The same review rated PlayStation 1 as “Excellent for most games, minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2,” which is exactly the correct level of honesty: PS1 is playable across the vast majority of the library, with the occasional demanding 3D title asking for a frameskip.

The RG35XX handles this range identically well, with the added benefit that its GPU headroom makes shaders — scanlines, LCD grids, CRT masks — cheaper to run without a framerate tax. If your emulation ambitions stop at the PS1, and statistically they probably do, both devices clear the bar and the decision moves entirely to software, battery, and ports.

N64 and PS1: Where the Miyoo Taps Out

Nintendo 64 is where the Miyoo's ceiling becomes visible. Community testing consolidated on GBAtemp and elsewhere lands on a consistent split: light N64 titles run at or near full speed — Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, GoldenEye with frameskip — while demanding N64 games run at roughly 70–85% with noticeable slowdown in busy scenes. Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Conker's Bad Fur Day are the usual names on the wrong side of that line. This is playable-with-caveats, not clean emulation, and it is the honest top of the Miyoo's range.

PSP is simply not on the menu. The quad-A7 and 128 MB combination cannot brute-force PSP's 3D workloads, and no amount of setting-fiddling changes the arithmetic. The correct expectation for the Miyoo Mini Plus is: flawless through PS1, a mixed bag on N64, and a hard stop before PSP, Dreamcast, and DS. That is not a criticism — it is a device that does exactly what its silicon allows and does it well.

Dreamcast, DS, and PSP: The RG35XX's Territory

Here the RG35XX earns its RAM. XDA's reviewer, scoring the device 9/10, wrote that “it can play games on handhelds as recent as the Nintendo DS at full speed, and Pokemon Black 2 runs at full speed” — a sentence the Miyoo cannot honestly print. The catch, and there is always a catch, is that DS emulation on a single-screen vertical means cramming two screens onto one and faking a touchscreen with buttons; certain DS games are awkward-to-unplayable for reasons that have nothing to do with framerate. Dreamcast is the bigger prize, and it comes with the standard asterisk. Retro Game Corps, cataloguing the H700 family's compatibility, warned that the systems “noted with an asterisk cannot play every game at full speed, and so performance may vary” — and Dreamcast, N64, PSP, and Saturn all wear that asterisk. Translation: lighter Dreamcast titles run well, moderately demanding ones want a frameskip, and the hardest games ask you to drop resolution. That is a real Dreamcast machine with realistic expectations, which is exactly what the Miyoo is not. If you want to understand how these ceilings get set in the first place, the emulator cores doing the work are worth learning; our walkthrough on installing 200-plus RetroArch cores covers which core does what and why some are far heavier than others.

The OS War: Onion vs Garlic

OnionOS: The Reason the Miyoo Wins

If the hardware chapter belongs to Anbernic, the firmware chapter belongs to Miyoo, and firmware is what you actually touch every time you turn the thing on. OnionOS is the native custom-firmware standard for the Miyoo Mini and Mini Plus — a community project that has spent years sanding down every rough edge. It boots straight into a console-organized library, asks you to configure almost nothing, and ships with a theme system deep enough to have its own scene. Its signature feature is the Game Switcher: a quick-launch overlay that lets you jump between the save states of recently played games without ever backing out to a menu, which is the single most quality-of-life thing any of these frontends does.

The reviewers are not subtle about it. DROIX called OnionOS “simply phenomenal — fast, polished, intuitive and packed with clever features like a Game Switcher”, and PropelRC noted that flashing it “adds 3 hours of battery life, RetroAchievements support, and makes the interface actually enjoyable.” Read that last quote twice: the firmware does not just look nicer, it measurably extends runtime and unlocks online achievement tracking that the stock software leaves on the table.

GarlicOS: The Same Idea, One Step Behind

The RG35XX's answer is GarlicOS, and the honest description — which is also the one the research keeps repeating — is that GarlicOS is nearly identical to OnionOS in concept and layout. Same clean, console-organized philosophy; same community-driven polish. The difference is maturity and timing. On the original A9 RG35XX, GarlicOS was excellent and stable. On the H700 family, GarlicOS 2.0 had to be substantially rebuilt, and Retro Game Corps cautioned that the new build was “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” — noting it lacked hardware rendering and was not yet fit as a daily driver. That gap has narrowed over time, and alternative firmwares like muOS have picked up the slack, but the point stands: the Miyoo's software was finished when the RG35XX's was still compiling.

Stock Firmware and Why You'll Replace It

Both devices ship with functional stock firmware, and on both devices you will replace it. Anbernic's factory OS is serviceable and does the one thing GarlicOS historically could not guarantee day one — hardware-accelerated rendering — but it lacks the polish, the theming, and the frictionless save-state flow of the community options. The Miyoo's stock firmware is likewise fine and likewise abandoned within the first hour by anyone who reads a setup guide. The practical takeaway: neither device is really judged on the software it comes with, but on the software the community built for it, and OnionOS's decade-adjacent head start is the single most decisive fact in this entire comparison. Software is not a footnote at this price. It is the product.

Screen, Battery, and Ports

Two 640×480 Panels, One Brighter

The panels are the same on paper — 3.5 inches, 640×480, IPS, 4:3 — and different in the hand. The consensus from 2025 screen comparisons is that the RG35XX runs brighter with warmer color reproduction and pairs it with louder built-in speakers; the Miyoo's panel is good but comparatively cooler and dimmer, and its speaker is quieter. Concretely, PropelRC measured the Miyoo's IPS panel at 450 nits — “making it playable outdoors, with minimal ghosting” — which is perfectly usable, just not the brighter of the two. If you play in sunlight or you care about speaker volume for that authentic tinny-chiptune experience without headphones, the Anbernic has the edge. If you always wear headphones and play indoors, this row is noise.

Battery: 3,000 mAh, 2,100 mAh, and the Onion Bonus

Battery is a genuine Miyoo win, and it is not close against the original RG35XX. The Miyoo Mini Plus packs a 3,000 mAh cell rated at 4–5 hours; the original RG35XX packs a smaller 2,100 mAh cell that reviewers put at roughly three hours. XDA's tester reported “roughly two to three hours of playtime with Nintendo DS emulation” on the Anbernic — heavier systems drain faster, which tracks. And the Miyoo's real number beats its rated one: with OnionOS managing power, PropelRC saw 6–7 hours on SNES and up to 7.5 on Game Boy. The one caveat is the RG35XX Plus, whose 3,300 mAh cell and efficient H700 push rated life up to eight hours, retaking the battery crown from the original's weakest stat. So: Miyoo beats the original RG35XX decisively on runtime, and roughly ties or trails the RG35XX Plus.

USB-C vs Micro-USB and the HDMI Card

Two port decisions define this row. First, charging: the Miyoo Mini Plus uses USB-C, and the original RG35XX uses micro-USB — a genuinely dated choice in a 2023 device that the H700 refresh mercifully corrected to USB-C. If carrying one cable for everything you own matters to you, the original Anbernic is an immediate and slightly insulting no. Second, and pulling the other direction: the RG35XX has HDMI output and the Miyoo does not, full stop. That is the Anbernic's trump card — plug it into a television and play your library on the big screen, something the Miyoo cannot do at any price. It is a narrow use case, but for the person who wants a pocket console that doubles as a couch console, it is decisive. If big-screen output is the whole point for you, note that a Raspberry Pi or mini-PC running Batocera off a USB stick does living-room emulation far better than any 3.5-inch handheld's HDMI-out afterthought.

What the Reviewers Actually Said

On the RG35XX's Hardware

I do not fabricate quotes, and I do not launder marketing copy as journalism, so everything in this section is verbatim from a named, linkable source. Start with the hardware case for Anbernic. XDA Developers, awarding the RG35XX a 9/10, concluded: “I wasn't sure what to expect of the Anbernic RG35XX, but it pleasantly surprises with its comfortable build, powerful hardware, and beautiful screen.” On capability, the same review is the one that put DS “at full speed” on the record. DROIX, reviewing the H700 Plus, went further into hyperbole but earned it: “The Anbernic RG35XX Plus proves that raw power is the ultimate feature… it transcends the definition of a simple handheld and becomes a legitimate £60 hybrid console.” On ergonomics, DROIX added that the Anbernic “feels denser, more durable” and that its “chunkier profile with stacked shoulder buttons provide superior comfort for longer sessions” — a real advantage for anyone with adult-sized hands.

On the Miyoo's Software

The Miyoo's case is a software case, and the reviewers make it in software terms. PropelRC's line is the most quotable because it is the most measurable: OnionOS “adds 3 hours of battery life, RetroAchievements support, and makes the interface actually enjoyable.” DROIX — reviewing an Anbernic, note, not a Miyoo — still volunteered that “OnionOS is simply phenomenal,” which is the kind of cross-aisle admission that tells you the software gap is real and widely acknowledged. And on the compatibility ceiling, Retro Game Corps' asterisk warning — “cannot play every game at full speed, and so performance may vary” — is the single most useful sentence a buyer can internalize, because it applies in both directions: it is why the RG35XX's Dreamcast is real-but-caveated, and why the Miyoo's N64 is playable-but-negotiated.

The Unverifiable Quote We Left Out

Now the part where I show my work. A quote circulates through the comparison-blog ecosystem attributing a specific opinion — that the RG35XX Plus has the better build and chip while the Miyoo has the more stable OnionOS experience — to a named developer in the Miyoo community. I went looking for the primary source. I could not find it: no forum post, no video, no interview, nothing that a named human actually said in a place I could link. The claim itself happens to be true — it is the thesis of this entire article — but a true claim wearing a fabricated attribution is still a fabricated attribution, and it is not going in with a name on it. If you see that quote elsewhere presented as expert testimony, treat it the way you would treat a ROM site's “100% safe” banner. The lesson generalizes: in a niche this small, secondary blogs cite each other in circles until a plausible sentence acquires a fake source, and the only defense is to click through to something real. Everything above this paragraph clicks through.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

The Street-Price Table

A caveat before the numbers: these are observed 2026 street prices from AliExpress, Amazon, and the usual retro storefronts, not manufacturer MSRP, because at this tier MSRP is a suggestion and the real price is whatever a flash sale says this week. Treat the table as a range, not a receipt.

Where the RG35XX Family Fragmented

The Miyoo side of the aisle is simple: there is the Miyoo Mini Plus, and you buy it. The Anbernic side is a hydra. The original A9 RG35XX is being cleared out; the RG35XX Plus is the vertical H700 flagship; the RG35XX H is the same H700 guts in a horizontal shell with Bluetooth; the RG35XX SP is a clamshell homage to the Game Boy Advance SP; and there is a plain “RG35XX 2024” muddying search results further. They largely share the H700 platform, so the performance conversation is the same across them — the choice among them is purely form factor. If a listing does not clearly say which one it is, assume nothing and check the port layout and the chip.

The Hidden Costs: SD Cards and microSD Sins

Neither device ships with the storage you actually want, and the microSD card is where budget-handheld dreams go to die. Buy a reputable card — a genuine SanDisk or Samsung from a seller you trust — because the counterfeit microSD trade is enormous and a fake card that claims 256 GB and delivers 8 GB of working space will corrupt your saves in ways that look exactly like emulator bugs. The Miyoo Mini Plus's second card slot is a genuine convenience here: system on one card, ROMs on the other. And the ROMs themselves are your responsibility and your legal exposure — you are expected to supply your own, ideally by dumping cartridges you own. If you want to do that the correct way, our 14-step cartridge-dumping walkthrough produces clean, legal images without touching a single ROM site, which is the only sourcing method I will put in writing.

Five Buyers, Five Verdicts

The Commuter and the Couch Gamer

The pocket commuter. You play in 20-minute windows on a train, your library is Game Boy through SNES with some Genesis and GBA, and the device lives in a jacket pocket. This is the Miyoo Mini Plus's home turf. It is the more pocketable of the two despite being marginally thicker (16 mm at the top versus the RG35XX's 14.5 mm, but a smaller overall footprint), OnionOS's Game Switcher is built for exactly this stop-start play pattern, and the 6–7 hour real-world battery outlasts a work week of commutes between charges. Verdict: Miyoo Mini Plus, no hesitation.

The couch gamer. You want to sink into a sofa and put the game on the television. The Miyoo cannot do this. The RG35XX's HDMI output can, turning a $70 handheld into a passable big-screen retro box for the length of a lazy Sunday. It is not the ideal way to do living-room emulation — a dedicated box does it better — but as a dual-purpose device it is the only one of the two that offers the option at all. Verdict: RG35XX (any HDMI-equipped model).

The Achievement Hunter and the Tinkerer

The RetroAchievements hunter. You want the modern meta-game layered over old cartridges, with unlocks syncing to your online profile. This requires Wi-Fi, which immediately eliminates the original RG35XX — it has none. The Miyoo Mini Plus syncs achievements natively over its 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and the RG35XX Plus does too over dual-band Wi-Fi 5. Between those two, the Miyoo's more mature OnionOS integration makes it the smoother experience. Verdict: Miyoo Mini Plus, or the RG35XX Plus — never the original.

The tinkerer. You consider the firmware part of the hobby: themes, custom cores, overlays, boot logos, the works. Both ecosystems welcome you, but OnionOS is the deeper pool with the larger theme scene and the longer paper trail of guides. You will spend a happy weekend either way; you will find more to tinker with on the Miyoo. Verdict: Miyoo Mini Plus, narrowly.

The Kid, the Gift, and the Purist

The set-and-forget gifter. You are buying this for a parent, a partner, or a child, and you want to hand over a finished object that needs no support calls. Pre-flash OnionOS, load a curated library, and the Miyoo becomes exactly that — a device that turns on and works. Our rundown of a 6,041-game Miyoo library is a sensible starting manifest so you are not hand-picking ROMs at midnight. Verdict: Miyoo Mini Plus.

The Dreamcast/DS/PSP believer. Your must-play list includes Sonic Adventure, a stylus-light DS RPG, or a PSP library. The Miyoo is out — it cannot run these at a quality worth your time. You want the H700-based RG35XX Plus, with its 1 GB of RAM and Mali GPU, and you want to keep your expectations calibrated to Retro Game Corps' asterisk. Verdict: RG35XX Plus.

The “I'll grow out of this” buyer. If you already suspect that N64 and PS1 are floors rather than ceilings — that in six months you will want GameCube, PS2, or Saturn done properly — buy neither of these. Spend up. Our comparison of the Retroid Pocket 6 versus the G2 lays out where the money goes when you outgrow the $70 tier, and it is money better spent once than twice. Verdict: skip both; buy a Retroid.

Switching From One to the Other

Before You Migrate: What Doesn't Transfer

People switch between these devices constantly — a Miyoo owner who finally wants Dreamcast, an RG35XX owner tired of the micro-USB cable — and the migration is mostly painless if you know what carries and what does not. What carries: your ROMs (they are system files, device-agnostic), your BIOS files (same story), and your battery saves — the .srm files that represent an in-cartridge save — as long as you are moving between the same RetroArch core on both ends. What does not carry: your save states, which are tied to a specific emulator build and will corrupt or refuse to load across different cores, firmware versions, or devices; your themes, because OnionOS and GarlicOS use incompatible theme formats; and your device-specific control and per-game configuration. Plan to rebuild states natively and re-theme from scratch.

Miyoo → RG35XX: The GarlicOS Route

Going from the Miyoo to an Anbernic means learning GarlicOS's layout, which — conveniently — is nearly identical to OnionOS's. The folder philosophy is the same; the per-system folder names differ slightly, so you cannot just clone the card. The clean approach is to flash GarlicOS to a fresh card, then transfer your content into the new structure rather than copying the old card wholesale. Below is the practical shape of both card layouts and exactly what to move.

RG35XX → Miyoo: The Onion Route

Going the other direction is the more common migration, because it is usually an upgrade in daily-driver software. Flash OnionOS, drop your ROMs into Onion's per-system folders, restore BIOS and battery saves, and re-login to RetroAchievements. The .srm-not-savestate distinction below is the one that trips everyone up.

# OnionOS card layout (Miyoo Mini Plus)
/Roms/     per-system folders: SFC, GBA, PS, FC, MD, N64 ...
/Saves/    .srm battery saves  +  .state save states
/BIOS/     scph1001.bin, gba_bios.bin, etc.
/Themes/

# GarlicOS card layout (Anbernic RG35XX)
/Roms/     per-system folders (naming differs slightly)
/Saves/
/BIOS/
/CFW/

# What migrates  (portable?)
ROMs ...............  yes  (device-agnostic)
BIOS ...............  yes
.srm battery saves .  yes  (same core on both ends)
.state save states .  NO   (tied to emulator build)
Themes .............  NO   (Onion and Garlic formats differ)
RetroAchievements ..  re-login on the new device

And the ordered version, because a checklist beats a paragraph when you are elbow-deep in a microSD card:

1. Back up the entire old card to your computer before touching anything.
2. Flash the destination firmware (OnionOS or GarlicOS) to a fresh, reputable card.
3. Copy your ROMs into the destination's per-system folders — mind the folder-name differences.
4. Copy your BIOS files into the destination BIOS folder.
5. Copy only your .srm battery saves; leave the save states behind.
6. Boot the device and let it scan and build the library.
7. Re-enter your Wi-Fi and RetroAchievements credentials (Miyoo and RG35XX Plus only).
8. Rebuild any save states you cared about, natively, on the new device.
9. Re-apply a theme in the new firmware's format.
10. Spot-check five games across five systems before you trust it.

Do that and the whole migration is a coffee's worth of file copying plus one relogin. The only irreversible loss is the save states, and only if you skipped step 8.

Pros, Cons, and the Final Call

Miyoo Mini Plus: Pros and Cons

The Miyoo is the device that knows precisely what it is. It does not chase systems its silicon cannot handle; it does everything through PS1 flawlessly, wraps it in the best software in the price bracket, and gets out of your way. The cons are all “it is not a more expensive device,” which is the correct kind of con to have.

RG35XX / RG35XX Plus: Pros and Cons

The RG35XX is the device with the higher ceiling and the messier story. Buy the right model and you get a genuine Dreamcast-and-DS pocket machine with a lovely screen and TV output; buy the wrong one and you get a Wi-Fi-less relic with a micro-USB port. The burden is on you to know which box you are clicking.

The Final Call, With Numbers

Strip away seven thousand words and the recommendation is the one I opened with, now with the evidence stacked behind it. For most people, buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. The decisive factors are not the ones that win spec-sheet arguments — they are OnionOS's maturity, the Wi-Fi that syncs your RetroAchievements and updates the firmware without a card-pull, the USB-C port, and a battery that OnionOS pushes to a real 6–7 hours. Multiple independent reviewers reach the same verdict for the same reason: at this price, the finished software beats the faster silicon, because the faster silicon is aimed at systems most buyers never load. The Miyoo does everything through PS1 flawlessly, and everything through PS1 is what most retro libraries actually are.

Buy the Anbernic — specifically the H700-based RG35XX Plus, not the 2023 original — if you fall into one of two camps. Either you need HDMI output to play on a television, which the Miyoo cannot do at any price, or your library genuinely reaches into Dreamcast, DS, and PSP, where the 1 GB of RAM and the Mali GPU turn “unplayable” into “playable with settings.” For those buyers the extra hardware is not overkill; it is the entire point, and the RG35XX Plus's brighter screen, louder speakers, Bluetooth, dual-band Wi-Fi, and eight-hour battery are the tie-breakers that make it a comfortable daily driver rather than a compromise. What you should not buy is the original 256 MB RG35XX: in 2026 it is the worst of both worlds — no Wi-Fi, micro-USB, and a compatibility story the H700 already obsoleted.

And if any part of you suspects your ceiling is really a floor — that GameCube, PS2, or Saturn are coming for your wishlist — then the honest, law-and-lore answer is to buy neither $70 handheld and spend once on something that will not need replacing in a season. Everything else is a rounding error against buying the right class of device the first time. The Machine has spoken; your saves are your own responsibility.