A Review of the Miyoo Mini Plus

Recently, much of my days are spent outside the house. I’m often out and about and I have these spurts of free time. It could be some time spent on public transit or just natural downtime during my day, either way I need something to fill it with. My solution? A handheld emulator, specifically the Miyoo Mini Plus.

But why? My smart phone can do everything it can and more, so why bother? Well, my phone needs to be a phone, not a gaming device. My current phone is a budget phone from 2019, it was never the best, and its really showing its age. Not in terms of processor speed, but more so battery life. Making it a gaming device wouldn’t help me in making it through the day. That aside, the lack of physical buttons is a huge turn off, and using an external controller lacks convenience. So, a dedicated device it was.

Now, why the Miyoo Mini? At the time, it was one of the best price to performance devices. GBA, SNES, and PSX for around 60 USD? Sign me up. It has a nice 3.5 inch back-lit screen, USB C charging, and a compact vertical layout. A huge improvement over the front-lit GBA SP I was using, especially if I were to mod it to have similar features. It does have worse controls in my opinion. One of the things that kept me coming back to the SP were the controls. I really love the clicky switches for the buttons in the SP, and having proper hinges for triggers is a huge plus. The MMP (Miyoo Mini Plus) uses a rubber membrane for the button mechanism. Its okay, a bit too soft for my tastes. The d-pad isn’t bad, I feel like it could use a little more travel, but rolling your thumb around it is pretty good. The face buttons are a bit too weak for my tastes. There is hardly any resistance and they just feel so much weaker than the d-pad. They aren’t horrible, they just are not what I look for in a device. On the back you have the triggers. They’re inline and they use those clicky switches. Ergonomically, these are terrible. Always awkward to access and use, although I have to give points for having the inner most triggers raised, so its easy to tell the difference.

But it would be a shame to ignore the other options at this price range. The biggest competitor is the RG35XX. Its pretty similar, both have similar performance and screens, but there are some differences that influenced my decisions. The first is physical design, the RG35XX is slightly bigger than the MMP, it might be better if you have larger hands. I will say I don’t find the size of the MMP uncomfortable, but I’ve never tried a RG35XX so I can’t say how it stacks up. I also never had discomfort playing a GBA SP which is also rather compact, keep that in mind. The RG35XX also has protruding triggers, they flare out from the handheld. The MMP doesn’t have this, making it flatter and easier to slip in and out of a pocket. There is only one more major difference between the two, and that is wifi. Or RTC and HDMI out. It depends on which one you get. The MMP has wifi, and the RG35XX has RTC and HDMI out. Personally I can live without either. Well, RTC would be nice given the amount of Pokemon I play, but MMP has a workaround. In my opinion, both wifi and HDMI out are gimmicks, but especially the wifi, but if you think otherwise take it into account. What did it for me was the physical design, I liked the smaller and more compact nature of the device.

Using is a joy. First things first, if you get any handheld emulator, the SD card it comes with is likely of poor quality. Throw it out and get a good quality one. The next thing is to install Onion OS. Its a alternative to whatever comes on there, it adds a ton of features, is easy to use, and has sane defaults. Emulators are set up to have good performance and great scaling. What I enjoy the most is the auto save states. Whenever you close a game, it takes a save state, and when you reopen it, that state gets loaded. Its even nicer when you consider this works for powering on/off the device. You can just turn it off whenever, and when you turn it back on it puts you straight back to where you left off, no need to go through menus. This is wonderful as it makes playing in short bursts so easy. Grab it, play it, and put it away. It really adds this convenience factor that I appreciate.

Onion OS has some other cool features. Themes, simulated clock, basic apps (image/video/file viewer), box art in game list, easy multiplayer, and even some game ports. I don’t have much to say because I’m there for the games, but if you’re the type to want to get the most of our device there is a lot to check out. I will say, I have gotten use out of the music player it has. The MMP has a headphone jack, something modern devices can’t say. I think the most useful apps are the cloud sync apps available. This is the only practical use for the wifi I can think of. Under the hood, Onion OS is just Linux. It uses all the same standard emulators as you would on a computer, meaning you can pick up where you left off on your computer. Might not be HDMI out, but is still a neat feature. Another little bonus is the DS emulator available. The MMP is not close enough to running DS at full speed, and frankly its a compromised experience. The screen is too small to play games with dual screen layout, and DS games are really designed around the original hardware. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t games that cannot be enjoyed one screen at a time. I wouldn’t expect to play everything you’d want, but the fact that you can try to play some is incredible. Its a great bonus.

Over 3 months later, what do I think? Its worth the price. I’ve played on it enough to have made it worth while, and its become a favorite time killer of mine. Its not perfect, the controls could be better and the battery indicator tends to be inaccurate, but for what it is I like it. If you want an convenient way to play retro games on the go, its not a bad buy.