Miyoo Mini+ (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
Review Approach:
Review unit provided by Keepretro.com - get your Miyoo Mini+ from Keepretro.com
Retro gaming handhelds have seen a resurgence in recent years. They are easy to produce thanks to powerful yet compact components, and they feed the nostalgia of the players who want to relive their youth at an affordable price.
The Miyoo Mini Plus is the latest iteration of Miyoo's GameBoy-inspired lineage, but this time with enhancements and features that come bundled in one incredibly well-made package.
Retro Gaming Simplicity
Opening the box the Miyoo Mini Plus looks entirely familiar, with SNES throwback button colouring, a 4:3 ratio, 640×480 3.5" IPS Display, which is all powered by an ARM Cortex A7 Dual-Core Processor (1.2GHz) paired with 128MB's of RAM.
The version I opted for was the Smokey Grey clear black model, and it just looks incredible with its "funtastic" retro aesthetic.
Going around the unit, you have three LED's on the top with a rather small power button. The left-hand side has the volume rocker, the right is notably absent of anything. The bottom elevation contains a USB-C charging port and the rear of the device has four shoulder buttons (L1/L2/R1/R2) with a notably staggered layout as opposed to the previous model's row configuration. The front, as mentioned before has the SNES style quad colour action buttons, the iconic speaker slashes, a rather black nice concave D-Pad and then finally some nicely uncluttered Start/Select/Menu buttons to keep every function at your fingertips.
Firing it up you find the class 10, U3 (30MB/s) 64GB SD card packed to the rafters with "content" and a rather basic Linux-based OS. Miyoo has always focussed on ease of use and for the most part I have to admit that the OS is incredibly lightweight, and does exactly what it says on the tin, but it's very underwhelming in terms of looks and wow factor.
Going through the settings menus, I changed the default theme for one of the Nintendo Switch-inspired skins and I have to say it looks great and feels a little more stylish than the stock UI. You can also turn off the godawful BG music, and change basics like brightness, language, keymaps, set when to hibernate, etc.
Wifi settings are a cinch thanks to the nifty well presented OSK, and setting this up means you will have access to the netplay features of each emulator that is included. Yes, this means that if any of your pals are playing on the same cores you can join up and play no matter what the platform.
Emulation-wise the Miyoo Mini Plus come with 16 categories comprising of:
- "Arcade" (254 games including CPS1/2/3 and IGS)
- MAME (412 games)
- Famicom (692 games)
- GameBoy (715 games including GameBoy Colour)
- GameBoy Advance (908 games)
- Megadrive (635 games)
- NeoGeo (151 games)
- NeoGeo Portable (39 games)
- OpenBOR (9 titles)
- PC Engine (77 games)
- PlayStation 1 (49 games)
- Super Nintendo (1498 games)
- Sega Master System (127 games including Game Gear)
- "Shoot" (183 vertical shooters)
- Wonder Swan Colour (70 games)
- FFPlay (Movie player)
(Total games included 5819 approx)
Great D-Pad, Solid Buttons & A Gorgeous Screen
As a huge Street Fighter fan, I gravitated immediately towards Street Fighter 3: Third Strike on the Arcade (CPS3) category, and I was not disappointed! The game takes a little while to boot (some 30+ seconds), but when it's running it is flawless. The default overlay throughout the various cores is that of CRT scanlines with curved corners, so it looks fantastic from the off, and it runs as silky smooth as you would want it to.
That concave D-Pad lends itself particularly well to fighters on this handheld too, with a really good feel to those directions, ease of input for fireballs and dragon punches, and overall a really smooth feeling to it. The face buttons are shiny and tactile too, though they can get a little slippy if you have sweaty thumbs, thankfully that wasn't really an issue for me, and I had a wonderful time playing countless hours per day!
The 3.5" glass screen is bright, vibrant and beautifully sharp with no ghosting on the IPS at all. Colour saturation and luminance are perfect for on-the-go gaming, and I was very impressed with the representation I was seeing on screen regardless of what emulator I started up, and I really liked seeing a proper 4:3 ratio!
Setting the screen to 6 or 7 brightness is enough for most indoor gameplay, and turning it down to 3 or 4 for nighttime definitely saves on the juice used to power it, though outdoor cranking it up to 7 or 8 was the best option now that the summer sun is upon us.
Soundwise, the speaker is only mono, and a little tinny for my liking. I understand this was the issue with the previous models too, so it's sad to see little to no improvement in that area, and though it mitigates that somewhat with the 3.5mm headphone jack, it would have been great to incorporate Bluetooth so that wireless headphones could be used as an option too, though I do not know what kind of hit the battery would take with BT turned on during play, so perhaps that's not such a good idea until the battery is bulked up further again to accommodate additional features like that.
Emulation is Rock Solid in Most Scenarios
Notably in the ROM selection (the number of included games varies from each vendor) there was an obvious lack of Nintendo's first-party games. As we know, Nintendo like to DMCA and C&D everyone and their mates these days, so it's understandable that the inclusive list of games won't contain any first-party titles because they have been removed from most ROM hosts in recent years. Fear not because if you own the game, or can dump your own ROM then it's as simple as dragging and dropping the ROMs on yourself, along with some box art, and your golden is just a few minutes. The included charging cable cannot be used to put ROMs on the device, but the included SD card adaptor will get you playing whatever you want very easily.
Amazingly the device I was sent also contained the Linux port of the famously decompiled: Super Mario 64 ROM, which in this iteration is significantly scaled down to accommodate the ARM v7 architecture. The game itself runs incredibly smoothly, and as a Proof-of-Concept it's insane, though the omission of the analogue stick and obvious missing face buttons definitely detracts from the gameplay somewhat.
Emulation on the Miyoo Mini Plus is amazing. Everything from 8-bit to PlayStation One runs exceptionally well with very few hiccups. I mainly played SNES, GBA, NeoGeo and CPS1/2/3 titles, but the big draw was definitely playing PS1 games like Tekken, and Crash Bandicoot in the palm of my hand. With custom ROMs and openBOR too, you can easily play a variety of bootlegs, mods, and crazy hacks: and you can store favourites to a sub-section of the menu too.
Saving and loading is almost instant, with 10 slots per game to satiate those who use save games to TAS games. When loading a game again it often auto-reloads your most current save upon load, which is handy for lone players, but not so much for guest players checking out the system. The Menu button brings up these options along with netplay, so you can also get online and batter your mates with ease, or quit back to the main menu and find another game/system to hammer.
Though I had a wonderful experience throughout testing this device, I have to say that notably, the GBA emulation (gpSP) runs genuinely well but displayed a little frame lag here and there which gets annoying at times, especially in fast-moving games, like Mario Kart Super circuit. Thankfully there is a fix: read on below!
The Li-Po 3.7v 3000 mAh rechargeable battery gave me around 5-6 hours per charge on average, with level 6 brightness and moderate volume and was, therefore, enough juice for several lunch hours and some commuting in the daily grind. The supplied USB-C cable is super short, which is usually a complaint of mine, but actually, it was just enough to plug it in next to me whilst I worked or whack it into a power bank in the same pocket.
Thinking Outside The Box: Custom OS
Snooping around the SD card I found that the built-in FFPlay app had a hidden Rick Roll (thanks guys) and that there were traces of other, unused emulators such as those for Atari Lynx. This got me thinking: can we add more cores? The answer is thankfully a resounding yes!
OnionUI, which is the basis for the Miyoo Mini Plus' OS gives you access to Retroarch out the box, which is fine if you know what you're doing, but for the uninitiated, it might be a little daunting. Heading over to https://github.com/OnionUI/Onion I located the latest OnionOS (Onion V4.1.4 stable or Onion V4.2.0.2-beta DEV at the time of writing) and was met with the possibility of adding around 100 emulators to the native UI with very little fuss.
Formatting a spare 128GB SD card to FAT32, I proceeded to drag and drop the Onion 4.2 release on, eject the card, pop it into the Miyoo and power it up. I was met with an absolute boatload of QOL fixes and additions that up until today: I hadn't realised the base OS was lacking. Options such as display calibration, start-up/shutdown configuration, shortcuts, activity tracker, screenshots, title search, FPS counter, vibration intensity, sorting/cleaning sd card, and it adds in a music player, a PDF reader and OTA updating to boot!
4.2's built-in package manager allows you to add or remove emulators, themes, apps and (in expert mode) experimental emulators with a few clicks of the A button, bringing you extremely fast access to customising and personalising your device on the go and adding/removing or swapping to different cores very quickly. Another bonus was the FTP/HTTP and SSH access granted by the OS, which makes it even easier to access without having to remove the SD card.
I opted for testing out a couple of the alternative emulators, such as Lynx emulation via the Handy emulator and I was impressed, with flawless Atari Lynx gaming on the move. Why Miyoo removed that is perhaps due in some part to optimisations the community have put forward since the sadly woeful stock OS provided, or perhaps it was a planned feature that got cut at the last minute. Either way, the Miyoo Mini Plus is a machine that can be much improved if you put a little time and effort into seeing what the community has done to advance the OS.
Other emulators such as mGBA actually improved what I was experiencing on gpSP eliminating any small frame stutters, and additionally using alternate cores for some systems, instead of the ones provided in the default loadout, yielded better results along with a far tighter UI experience overall.
One downside to Onion V4.1.4 is that the battery logic is broken and so you cannot tell what your battery life is throughout your gameplay because it just reads "0%", also the shutdown function seemed to work, but actually just reboots. Fear not because these things are working in the Onion V4.2.0.2-beta and will be included in the upcoming 4.2 stable release, so I very much look forward to that and more as the Miyoo Mini Plus matures!
Overall I think the Miyoo Mini Plus is a solid option for people who want to buy a device and play. Tinkerers such as myself can also get a heck of a lot more out of the device and vastly improve the stock experience far beyond what I thought was possible just by dragging and dropping on a custom OS.
With a price tag of $69.99 at most retailers, it's a great price to get instant access to a lot of games, quickly, and with minimal fuss!
Sure, people may argue that a VITA or PSP could be purchased for under $60 and filled to the brim with emulators and additional content, but the Miyoo offers a package that means even the most un-tech-savvy people can pick up and play their favourite retro titles in a matter of seconds after opening the box.
We have to remember that not all people have the acumen for hacking or modding, some just like to buy it pre-prepared, and not have to stress about configurations or sourcing ROMs or emulators that are compatible: and Miyoo makes this an incredibly attractive purchase!
Verdict
- Fantastic 3.5" 4:3 display
- Excellent D-Pad and buttons
- 4-6 hour battery life (depending on usage)
- 128GB max storage size (64GB provided)
- Pocket-sized portability
- Comes with 64GB card, a hard protective case, glass screen protector, SD card reader, & charger cable!
- Onion OS 4.2 gives it a much-needed overhaul (installed separately)
- Cruddy stock UI installed
- Tinny sound
- Basic vibration
- GBA/PSX is the absolute upper limit
- Cannot be used as a removable drive through USB.