There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when you load up a ROM of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on a handheld device the size of a chocolate bar, curl up on the sofa at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, and feel the years dissolve. The television in the corner goes dark. The obligations of adulthood recede. For a few hours, you’re sixteen again, and Alucard is descending into Dracula’s castle, and everything is exactly as it should be. This is what the best retro handhelds deliver — not just games, but a kind of temporal alchemy.
In 2025, the market for these devices has matured into something genuinely extraordinary. What started as a cottage industry of enthusiasts importing grey-market curiosities from Chinese manufacturers has become a legitimate, thriving ecosystem with its own media coverage, its own influencer economy, its own passionate communities on Reddit and Discord, and — most importantly — its own genuine hardware competition. The devices have got better, faster, cheaper, and more refined with almost shocking speed. And right now, at the sixty-dollar price point that represents the sweet spot for casual buyers and committed collectors alike, two devices dominate every conversation: the Miyoo Mini Plus and the Anbernic RG35XX H.
Both cost roughly the same. Both run a variant of Linux. Both will play your Game Boy, SNES, Mega Drive, GBA, PS1, and most of the retro library you actually care about. Both fit in your pocket. And yet they are, in meaningful and sometimes profound ways, completely different objects designed for subtly different people. Choosing between them is not just a question of specs — it’s a question of philosophy, of use case, of what you actually want from a retro gaming device in the year 2025. This is the definitive breakdown.
A Brief History of the Affordable Retro Handheld: How We Got Here
To understand why the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX H matter so much in 2025, you need to understand the journey that brought us to this moment. The history of dedicated retro emulation handhelds is longer and stranger than most people realise, and it reaches back well before the current golden age.
The first wave of Chinese emulation handhelds arrived in the early 2000s — primitive, plasticky devices running pirated NES ROMs on cheap MIPS processors, sold in market stalls and on early eBay with names like “PocketFami” and “Game Boy King.” They were, to be blunt, garbage. Screen quality was abysmal, button responsiveness was a nightmare, and they ran a fixed library of games burned onto ROM chips with no facility for loading your own content. But they demonstrated a demand. People wanted to play old games on portable devices, and they were willing to spend money to do it.
The second wave, roughly 2010 to 2017, brought devices like the Dingoo A320 and the GCW Zero — genuinely interesting pieces of hardware that ran open-source Linux-based firmware and could emulate a reasonable spread of systems. The Dingoo in particular built a devoted community around it, with custom firmware projects like Dingux that dramatically extended its capabilities. These were the devices that proved the concept: a cheap Chinese handheld running Linux could be a legitimate gaming platform if the community got behind it.
But the real revolution came with the Bittboy in 2018. Bittboy — the company, not just the device — took the open-source emulation scene seriously, built decent hardware, and priced it aggressively. Their original device was rough around the edges, but it sold. It proved that there was a mass market for these things beyond hardcore hobbyists. And it established the brand template that Miyoo, their successor company under the same corporate umbrella, would eventually refine into something genuinely great.
The Miyoo Origin Story
Miyoo launched the original Miyoo Mini in late 2021, and it caused something close to a sensation in the retro handheld community. Here was a device the size of an original Game Boy Pocket — smaller, actually — with a genuinely excellent 2.8-inch IPS screen, a comfortable D-pad, and a price point around $60 that felt almost irrationally low for what you were getting. The form factor was immediately divisive: some loved its extreme portability, others found it too small for adult hands. But its quality-to-price ratio was undeniable.
The Miyoo Mini Plus, launched in 2023 and still very much in active production and sale in 2025, addressed most of the original’s limitations. The screen grew to 3.5 inches. The battery expanded dramatically. A physical shoulder button layout was refined. Wi-Fi support arrived. The device became, in the estimation of most community observers, the default recommendation for anyone entering the retro handheld space under $100. “Just get a Miyoo Mini Plus” became the standard advice on r/SBCGaming with the kind of weary authority that only comes from watching a thousand beginners ask the same question.
Anbernic’s Journey to the RG35XX H
Anbernic has been doing this longer than Miyoo. The company has been producing retro handhelds since at least 2019 with their original RG350 line — devices built around a JZ4770 MIPS processor that were, for their time, genuinely impressive. The RG350M in particular, with its aluminium shell and excellent D-pad, built Anbernic a reputation for quality construction that persists to this day.
Over the following years, Anbernic released devices at a dizzying rate. The RG351P, RG351MP, RG351V, RG552, RG503, RG353P, RG353V — the naming conventions became a running joke in the community, and the product cadence became almost overwhelming. But through all of it, Anbernic maintained a consistent identity: solid build quality, genuine attention to ergonomics, and a willingness to experiment with different form factors. Vertical Game Boy-style devices, horizontal landscape handhelds, clamshell designs, wide-screen portrait units — they tried everything.
The RG35XX line, launched in 2023, represented Anbernic’s attempt to compete directly with Miyoo at the budget end of the market. The original RG35XX was a portrait-mode Game Boy-style device that ran Anbernic’s stock firmware competently enough but didn’t set the world on fire. Then came the RG35XX H — the “H” standing for “Horizontal” — which took the same chipset and stuffed it into a landscape form factor broadly similar to a Game Boy Advance, but with a slightly wider screen and analogue sticks. And suddenly, the conversation changed.
The Hardware: Specs, Screens, and Build Quality
Before we get into the subjective experience of using these devices, let’s establish the objective reality of what you’re actually buying. Both the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX H are built around similar-generation ARM processors running Linux-based firmware, but the details matter enormously.
Miyoo Mini Plus: The Specifications
- Processor: Ingenic T618 ARM Cortex-A55 dual-core (clocked at 1.2GHz)
- RAM: 128MB DDR2
- Storage: MicroSD card slot (no internal storage)
- Display: 3.5-inch IPS, 640×480 resolution (4:3 aspect ratio)
- Battery: 3000mAh — typically delivering 6-8 hours of gameplay depending on system being emulated
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (2.4GHz only), USB-C for charging
- Audio: Mono speaker, 3.5mm headphone jack
- Controls: D-pad, four face buttons, two analogue sticks, L1/L2/R1/R2 shoulder buttons, Start/Select/Menu
- Dimensions: 113 × 63 × 18mm
- Weight: Approximately 145g
- Price (2025): $59.99 / approximately £48-52 depending on retailer
The T618 chip at the heart of the Miyoo Mini Plus is a known quantity by now — it’s the same processor found in the original Miyoo Mini (in its later hardware revisions) and has been thoroughly understood, optimised for, and stress-tested by the community. It handles everything up to and including PlayStation 1 with aplomb, manages a significant percentage of the N64 library acceptably, and struggles with Dreamcast and anything above. That’s the honest ceiling, and for the $60 price point, it’s an entirely reasonable one.
The display deserves particular attention because it’s one of the Miyoo Mini Plus’s genuine standout qualities. That 3.5-inch IPS panel running at 640×480 is, in practical terms, nearly perfect for retro gaming. The 4:3 aspect ratio means that SNES, Genesis, Game Boy Color, GBA, and PS1 games display natively without any geometric distortion. Colours are rich but not oversaturated. Viewing angles are excellent. Brightness is more than adequate for indoor use and surprisingly acceptable in moderate outdoor lighting. Several community members have compared the image quality to the Nintendo DS Lite’s screens, which is genuine high praise — Nintendo’s IPS work on handheld screens remains a gold standard even now.
Anbernic RG35XX H: The Specifications
- Processor: Allwinner H700 ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core (clocked at 1.5GHz)
- RAM: 256MB DDR3
- Storage: Dual MicroSD card slots
- Display: 3.5-inch IPS, 640×480 resolution (4:3 aspect ratio)
- Battery: 3500mAh — typically delivering 7-9 hours
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (2.4GHz only), USB-C for charging and OTG
- Audio: Mono speaker (bottom-firing), 3.5mm headphone jack
- Controls: D-pad, four face buttons, two analogue sticks, L1/L2/R1/R2 shoulder buttons, Start/Select/Function, dedicated volume buttons
- Dimensions: 155 × 70 × 19mm
- Weight: Approximately 165g
- Price (2025): $59.99 / approximately £48-52 depending on retailer
The Allwinner H700 in the RG35XX H is architecturally more capable than the T618 on paper — quad-core versus dual-core, more RAM, higher clock speed — but raw specs in retro emulation are profoundly misleading. The T618 has been in the community’s hands longer, has more mature driver support, and in the Miyoo ecosystem runs firmware that’s been obsessively optimised by both Miyoo themselves and the community behind the OnionOS custom firmware. The H700 is theoretically faster and has been catching up in terms of software optimisation, particularly under GarlicOS equivalents on the Anbernic side and the stock Anbernic OS which has improved substantially in 2024 and 2025 updates.
In practice, both devices achieve essentially identical results for the systems that matter most: NES, SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Neo Geo, MAME arcade, and PlayStation 1 all run flawlessly on both devices. Where differences begin to emerge is at the edges — N64, PlayStation Portable (PSP), and Dreamcast — where the H700’s extra headroom gives the RG35XX H a measurable but not transformative advantage.
The Physical Build: Feeling Them in Your Hands
Specs on paper only tell half the story. The other half is told by the experience of actually holding these things, and this is where the two devices diverge most dramatically in character.
The Miyoo Mini Plus is small. I want to be precise about this: it is genuinely, surprisingly small in a way that photographs don’t fully communicate. At 113mm wide, it’s narrower than an original Game Boy Advance, which itself was considered compact. The shell is plastic throughout, with a satisfying matte finish on the back and a glossy front surround around the screen. It feels like a premium toy — which is exactly the right description. Nothing about it feels flimsy, but nothing about it pretends to be grown-up engineering either. The buttons have a satisfying clickiness to them. The D-pad, which is crucial for retro gaming in a way that analogue sticks simply aren’t when you’re playing Mega Man X, is genuinely excellent — circular in layout, with good pivot action and distinct click feedback that makes precision platforming feel natural.
The analogue sticks on the Miyoo Mini Plus are serviceable but not distinguished. They’re small nubs, similar in size and feel to those on the PlayStation 3’s DualShock 3, and they do the job for the games that need them. But this is fundamentally a device designed for the pre-analogue era, and everything about its construction reflects that priority.
The RG35XX H is bigger. At 155mm wide, it’s closer in size to a Game Boy Advance SP opened flat, or a Nintendo Switch Lite at the slim end. It fits differently in the hands — more like an actual modern controller, with the analogue sticks positioned symmetrically on either side of the D-pad in a layout that will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has used a PlayStation controller. This isn’t an accident. Anbernic clearly designed the RG35XX H for the person who wants to play fifth and sixth-generation games — PS1, N64, Dreamcast — where analogue sticks are genuinely necessary, not just present for completeness.
The build quality on the RG35XX H is marginally superior in terms of materials — the plastic has a slightly more substantial feel to it, and the overall construction has a bit less flex when pressure is applied to the chassis. But the Miyoo Mini Plus punches above its weight in this regard. Neither device is going to embarrass you in the build quality stakes.
The Software Ecosystem: Stock Firmware vs. Community Custom OS
This is, in many ways, the most important section of this entire feature, because the software experience defines the retro handheld experience more than any single hardware specification. You can have the most powerful chipset in the world running terrible firmware and end up with a device you hate using. Conversely, you can take modest hardware and pair it with exceptional software and end up with something genuinely wonderful. Both companies have learned this lesson — but they’ve learned it to different degrees.
Miyoo Mini Plus: OnionOS and the Custom Firmware Revolution
The stock Miyoo firmware — sometimes called Miyoo Mini OS or just the official firmware — is perfectly functional. It’s clean, it boots fast, and it gets out of the way. But the community around the Miyoo Mini Plus is almost uniformly running OnionOS, the custom firmware project that has become so dominant that even Miyoo themselves effectively endorse it at this point, with the device’s official packaging sometimes shipping alongside OnionOS installation instructions from third-party retailers.
OnionOS is, simply put, one of the finest pieces of software in the entire retro handheld ecosystem. Built on a foundation of RetroArch — the multi-system emulator frontend that serves as the backbone of almost all serious retro emulation — but wrapped in a custom, beautifully designed interface that makes game discovery and navigation an absolute pleasure, OnionOS transforms the Miyoo Mini Plus from a competent device into a genuinely exceptional one.
The interface presents your library in clean, skinnable menus that can be customised with box art, themed backgrounds, and organised by system. The Package Manager system allows you to install additional emulators, themes, and utilities without any terminal work. The Clock Speed management allows you to dial in exactly the right processor speed for each system — running the CPU at full speed when playing N64, dropping it back to conserve battery when playing NES. The Miyoo Mini Plus running OnionOS achieves battery life that regularly exceeds the quoted specifications because of this intelligent power management.
But the killer feature — the thing that makes OnionOS genuinely special — is its Game Switcher. Like a spiritual ancestor of the Switch’s quick-resume functionality, Game Switcher allows you to hold the Menu button and immediately suspend any game, drop back to the main menu, launch something else entirely, and then return to your suspended game exactly where you left off. For someone who rotates through multiple games the way most retro enthusiasts do, this is transformative. You can have Street Fighter Alpha 3 suspended mid-match while you check on your Pokémon Crystal save, then flip back in an instant. It sounds like a small thing. It absolutely is not.
The OnionOS community on GitHub and the associated Discord server is extraordinarily active. Regular updates address bugs, add emulator cores, improve compatibility, and refine the interface. As of early 2025, OnionOS has reached version 4.3, and it remains under active, enthusiastic development. There’s a reason r/MiyooMini is consistently one of the most positive and helpful communities in the retro gaming space — the software just works, the community just helps, and the whole ecosystem has a virtuous-cycle quality to it.
Anbernic RG35XX H: GarlicOS, MinUI, and the Stock Experience
The Anbernic software story is more complicated, and that complexity is both the source of the RG35XX H’s greatest frustrations and some of its most interesting possibilities.
Anbernic’s stock firmware for the RG35XX H — which they update semi-regularly — has improved significantly from its early days. The interface is clean enough, based on a RetroArch frontend similar in concept to OnionOS but less polished in execution. Game library management is adequate. Emulator core selection is reasonable. Wi-Fi functionality, which allows for RetroAchievements tracking (more on this shortly), works acceptably. If you’re someone who just wants to load the thing up and play games with zero tinkering, Anbernic’s stock firmware on the RG35XX H is a perfectly functional starting point.
But the custom firmware situation for Anbernic’s H700-based devices is genuinely more complex than the Miyoo situation, and the honest assessment is that it hasn’t yet reached the same level of maturity. The big name here is GarlicOS — which, despite being originally designed for the RG35XX (the portrait model), has been extended to support the H variant. GarlicOS offers a similar philosophy to OnionOS: clean interface, smart power management, excellent game library organisation. In its current 2025 incarnation, it’s genuinely good.
However, the community around GarlicOS hasn’t quite reached the self-sustaining critical mass of the OnionOS community. Development has been less consistent. There have been periods of reduced activity from the main development team. And the hardware ecosystem around Anbernic’s H700 devices is, frankly, more fragmented — there are multiple devices using similar but not identical chipset configurations, which makes targeted optimisation harder.
The sleeper option for the RG35XX H — and the one that genuinely knowledgeable community members are increasingly recommending — is MinUI. Originally developed by Jim Gray (known online as shauninman), MinUI is a deliberately minimal, deeply opinionated custom firmware that strips retro handheld operation down to its absolute essence: you turn it on, you select a system, you select a game, you play. No themes, no box art, no settings menus seven layers deep. Just games, presented in a clean list, launching instantly.
MinUI’s philosophy runs directly counter to OnionOS’s. Where OnionOS is an enthusiast’s paradise full of customisation options and features, MinUI is a monk’s cell of purposeful simplicity. And for a certain kind of retro gamer — the person who just wants to play Contra III: The Alien Wars on their lunch break without navigating three menus — MinUI is arguably the better experience. It also has outstanding battery life management and some of the best audio latency in the business, which matters more than people realise when you’re playing rhythm-adjacent games or precision platformers.
It’s worth noting that MinUI also runs on the Miyoo Mini Plus, where it has an equally devoted following. But the argument for it is slightly stronger on the RG35XX H, simply because the stock Anbernic experience is more frustrating to live with long-term and the alternatives are less fully-featured than OnionOS.
Performance: The Games That Actually Matter
Enough about chips and firmware. Let’s talk about games. Because ultimately, the test of a retro handheld is not whether it passes benchmarks — it’s whether Mega Man X feels right. Whether Castlevania: Rondo of Blood runs without frame drops. Whether Metal Gear Solid loads in a reasonable time and doesn’t crash during the Psycho Mantis fight.
The Core Library: NES to PS1
For the bulk of retro gaming history — NES (1983-1995), SNES (1990-1998), Mega Drive/Genesis (1988-1997), Game Boy/GBC/GBA (1989-2008), Neo Geo (1990-2004), and PlayStation 1 (1994-2006) — both devices are essentially perfect. I’m going to be emphatic about this because it matters: if your retro gaming interests live primarily in these eras and these systems, you will experience no meaningful performance difference between the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX H. Both run these systems at full speed, with accurate audio emulation, with all the save state and rewind functionality you could ask for, with RetroAchievements support when connected to Wi-Fi.
The nuances emerge when you start pushing at the edges. PS1 emulation on both devices is excellent under the PCSX ReARMed core, but there are specific games that will stress-test any emulator. Ridge Racer Type 4, with its highly demanding 3D geometry and smooth framerate requirements, runs impeccably on both. Gran Turismo 2 — one of the most computationally demanding PS1 titles — runs at full speed on both. Tekken 3, the gold standard test for PS1 fighting game emulation, is flawless on both. Even demanding late-era PS1 titles like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy IX behave correctly.
Where you’ll notice differences is in demanding SNES titles using the Mesen-S core (the accuracy-focused SNES emulator) versus the lighter Snes9x core. The RG35XX H handles Mesen-S slightly more comfortably for the most demanding SNES titles — things like Super Mario RPG, which pushed the SNES hardware hard enough to require a custom chip (the SA-1) — though both devices manage adequately in practice.
N64: The Real Differentiator
Nintendo 64 emulation is where the conversation gets genuinely interesting, because N64 remains the most difficult system to emulate well at this price point. The N64’s architecture — with its MIPS R4300i CPU, Reality Signal Processor, and unusual memory architecture — has been a nightmare for emulator developers for thirty years, and even the best modern N64 emulators on PC occasionally display quirks and inaccuracies that would horrify the original engineers.
On the Miyoo Mini Plus, N64 emulation under Mupen64Plus Next is what I’d charitably describe as “impressive given the hardware but not something you’d want as your primary N64 experience.” Super Mario 64 runs smoothly and is genuinely enjoyable. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time runs well enough for extended sessions. Mario Kart 64 is solid. But push into more demanding titles — Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark — and you’ll see frame rate fluctuations that break the experience. The Miyoo’s T618 dual-core chip is simply hitting its architectural ceiling here.
The RG35XX H does meaningfully better. The H700’s quad-core configuration and additional RAM give it more breathing room for N64 emulation, and with the right core settings (RICE graphics plugin rather than Glide64, frame limiter adjusted appropriately), games that struggle on the Miyoo run acceptably on the Anbernic. Not perfectly — Perfect Dark still chugs, Conker’s Bad Fur Day remains basically unplayable — but the window of “N64 games that work well enough” is genuinely wider on the RG35XX H.
However — and this is important — if you’re a retro purist whose N64 collection consists primarily of Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, and the first-party Nintendo catalogue, the Miyoo Mini Plus handles your needs perfectly well. It’s only when you venture into the third-party or late-era catalogue that the limitations become constraining.
PSP: The Surprise Test
PlayStation Portable emulation is another interesting dividing line. The PSP, released in 2005, occupies an odd position in the retro landscape — it’s old enough to be considered retro by most definitions, but its games are demanding enough to stress budget hardware significantly. The PPSSPP emulator, the gold standard for PSP emulation, is well-optimised for ARM devices but still requires meaningful processing power for the more demanding titles.
On the Miyoo Mini Plus, PSP emulation under PPSSPP is hit-and-miss. Simpler 2D titles and early-era PSP games — Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, Mega Man: Powered Up, Ridge Racer — run acceptably. But the titles that made PSP genuinely exciting — God of War: Chains of Olympus, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories — are either unplayable or require such significant resolution and framerate compromises that the experience is diminished.
The RG35XX H handles a meaningfully wider PSP catalogue. Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles — one of the finest games on the platform and a genuine object of desire for retro collectors — runs smoothly. Ridge Racer 2 is a delight. Crisis Core is playable, if imperfect. For someone whose retro interests extend into the sixth-generation era and who cares about PSP as a platform, this is a genuine differentiating factor in favour of the Anbernic.
Form Factor Philosophy: The Horizontal Debate
Both of these devices are horizontal, landscape-orientation handhelds. This might seem like a neutral technical detail, but in the retro handheld community, form factor is essentially a political question, and the horizontal vs. vertical debate has been running since the early days of the scene.
The vertical, Game Boy-style form factor has obvious historical resonance. The original Game Boy, the Game Boy Pocket, the Game Boy Color, the Game Boy Advance SP, and the Nintendo DS all used vertical or near-vertical orientations for their primary gaming experience. There’s an argument — made passionately and regularly by certain community members — that playing NES and Game Boy games on a horizontal device feels wrong at a fundamental level. That the original experience of Tetris involved holding the device in a particular way, that the muscle memory and the posture and the physicality of the experience are part of what you’re preserving when you play retro games.
I have some sympathy for this argument, but I ultimately don’t find it compelling when applied to the current market. The horizontal form factor simply suits adult hands better for extended sessions. The NES controller was horizontal. The SNES controller was horizontal. The PlayStation controller was horizontal. The Mega Drive controller was horizontal. The majority of the retro gaming canon was designed to be played on a horizontal input device, even if the screen it was displayed on was vertical. A horizontal handheld that puts the D-pad on the left and face buttons on the right, with shoulders above in the traditional controller layout, is actually more faithful to the original control experience than a vertical device that forces you to contort your grip.
That said, the Miyoo Mini Plus has one genuine advantage in the form factor discussion: its size. It is, quite literally, pocketable in a way that the RG35XX H is not. Not “fits in a loose jacket pocket” pocketable — I mean “fits in the front pocket of normal jeans” pocketable. This sounds like a trivial consideration until you’re standing on a commuter train with no bag, looking for something to do, and realise that the Miyoo Mini Plus is already in your pocket where you put it this morning without thinking. The RG35XX H requires deliberate carry. The Miyoo Mini Plus just comes with you.
Ergonomics Over Long Sessions
For extended gaming sessions of two hours or more — the kind of session where you’re deep into an RPG or working through a lengthy platformer — the ergonomics question becomes more nuanced. The RG35XX H’s larger form factor distributes grip across more of your hand, reducing fatigue. Its analogue sticks are positioned symmetrically and feel more natural for the games that use them. Its shoulder buttons, while not dramatically different from the Miyoo’s, have a slightly longer throw that some players find more comfortable for extended use.
The Miyoo Mini Plus, conversely, can cause some cramping in larger hands during marathon sessions. The grip wings — the curved sections below the face buttons and D-pad — are somewhat shallow, and there’s not quite enough device to fully support a grown adult’s palm during extended play. This is a complaint I’ve heard consistently from community members with larger hands, and it’s not imaginary. The device was clearly designed with smaller hands in mind, or with the expectation that sessions would be shorter and more casual.
There’s a solution to this, incidentally: the Miyoo Mini Plus Bumper Case, a third-party accessory that clips around the device and adds rubber grip wings that dramatically improve the ergonomics for larger hands. It adds a few millimetres to the overall dimensions but makes the device genuinely comfortable for multi-hour sessions. This is worth knowing about, though it does add $10-15 to the total cost and somewhat undermines the “perfectly pocketable” selling point.
The Screen Wars: Comparing IPS Panels in Actual Use
Both devices feature a 3.5-inch IPS display running at 640×480 resolution. On paper, identical. In practice, somewhat different — and this is an area where purchasing forum discussions can get surprisingly heated.
The Miyoo Mini Plus’s screen has developed a reputation over the years for being one of the finest displays in the budget retro handheld category. The panel has excellent colour accuracy, deep blacks (for IPS — this is not OLED territory), and a pixel density that sits in a sweet spot: dense enough to look clean, but not so dense that you lose the authentic feel of pixel art. When you run a SNES game on the Miyoo Mini Plus and apply a light CRT scanline filter through RetroArch, the result is genuinely lovely — it has a quality reminiscent of viewing a small professional monitor rather than a cheap consumer screen.
The RG35XX H’s screen is also very good, but community consensus in 2024-2025 places it as marginally behind the Miyoo’s in colour accuracy and contrast. It’s brighter out of the box — Anbernic tends to set default brightness higher, which some users prefer — but calibrated properly, the Miyoo’s screen edges ahead in image quality for the games that matter most to retro purists. The difference is subtle, the kind of thing you’d only notice in a direct side-by-side comparison, and completely irrelevant in normal use. But for the display-obsessed among us, it’s a real data point.
One specific advantage the Miyoo Mini Plus holds is screen uniformity. Budget IPS panels are notoriously susceptible to “IPS glow” — patches of lighter backlight bleed, particularly in the corners of the screen. The Miyoo Mini Plus’s panel has been notably consistent across production batches in terms of minimal glow. The RG35XX H shows slightly more variation between units, with some examples displaying noticeable corner glow on dark scenes. It’s a manufacturing consistency issue more than a design flaw, but it’s worth knowing about before you buy.
Aspect Ratio and Integer Scaling
Both devices run at 640×480, which is a 4:3 aspect ratio — perfect for the systems that dominated retro gaming from the NES era through PS1. This cannot be overstated as a design decision. A 4:3 screen means that NES games display at pixel-perfect integer scale without any geometric distortion. SNES, Mega Drive, GBA — all native. No letterboxing, no pillarboxing, no algorithmic stretching that subtly smears the clean pixel art you’re trying to preserve.
For retro purists — and this article is explicitly aimed at retro purists — this matters enormously. The move toward 16:9 screens that dominated several generations of handheld design (including the Nintendo DS in its various iterations and every PSP model) required either stretching 4:3 content to fill the screen (ugly) or adding black bars to preserve the ratio (waste of screen space). The 640×480 panels on both of these devices sidestep that problem entirely, which is one of the genuinely smart decisions in this product category.
Integer scaling, which ensures that each original pixel maps to an exact multiple of screen pixels (2×, 3×, 4×) without any sub-pixel interpolation, is supported on both devices through RetroArch’s display settings. Getting this properly configured is one of the first things any serious user should do after setting up their device — it transforms the image quality from “pretty good” to “authentically beautiful.”
Battery Life, Charging, and Practical Day-to-Day Use
The Miyoo Mini Plus ships with a 3000mAh battery. The RG35XX H ships with a 3500mAh battery. In practice, both devices deliver between 6 and 9 hours of gameplay depending on what you’re running, screen brightness, and Wi-Fi usage. N64 and PSP emulation burns battery faster than NES and Game Boy emulation, sometimes dramatically — running PPSSPP on full settings can reduce the RG35XX H’s battery life to 4-5 hours.
Both devices charge via USB-C, which is exactly what you want in 2025 — the days of proprietary charging connectors should be behind us forever, and it’s worth noting that early budget handhelds from the 2019-2021 era were sometimes still shipping with MicroUSB, which felt archaic even then. Full charges take approximately 2.5-3 hours for both devices.
The RG35XX H’s larger battery combined with its more efficient H700 chip (which has slightly better power characteristics at moderate load levels) means that in practical side-by-side testing, it tends to outlast the Miyoo Mini Plus by 30-60 minutes under comparable loads. This is a meaningful but not decisive advantage. Both devices will get you through a long-haul flight, a lengthy train journey, or a full evening on the sofa without needing to reach for a charger.
One practical consideration that doesn’t get enough attention in spec comparisons: the RG35XX H includes dedicated volume buttons on the top edge of the device, separate from the button combinations used for the same function on the Miyoo Mini Plus. This sounds trivial. It is not. If you’ve ever tried to adjust volume on a Miyoo Mini Plus while playing a game — which requires a button combination involving the Menu button — in a quiet public environment where you’ve accidentally cranked the volume and the dramatic death scream of a Final Fight boss is reverberating around a train carriage, you will understand why dedicated volume buttons are a quality-of-life feature of genuine importance.
Wi-Fi, RetroAchievements, and Online Features
Both devices include Wi-Fi support, and in the context of retro gaming handhelds in 2025, this primarily means one thing: RetroAchievements. If you’re not familiar with RetroAchievements — the community-built achievement system that adds Xbox-style trophies to retro ROMs — this is the moment to get familiar, because it has fundamentally changed how a significant portion of the retro gaming community engages with classic games.
The RetroAchievements project, accessible at retroachievements.org, allows players to unlock achievements in thousands of retro games across dozens of systems. When you’re playing Super Metroid and you beat Ridley without taking damage, an achievement notification pops up. When you complete Mega Man 2 without using the E-Tanks, there’s a badge waiting for you. It sounds like a modern affectation — achievement culture imposed on games that predate the concept — and there’s a legitimate critical argument that this misunderstands why these games are special. But in practice, RetroAchievements adds a layer of engagement and motivation that has introduced thousands of players to corners of classic catalogues they’d never have explored otherwise.
Both the Miyoo Mini Plus (running OnionOS) and the RG35XX H support RetroAchievements through RetroArch. The setup process is identical on both: create an account on retroachievements.org, enter your credentials in RetroArch’s settings, enable Hardcore Mode if you want the full challenge experience (which disables save states and rewind), and you’re good to go. It works beautifully on both devices.
Beyond RetroAchievements, Wi-Fi functionality on both devices supports ROM scraping — automatically downloading box art and metadata for your game library to create a more visually polished frontend. It also supports over-the-air firmware updates on the stock firmware of both devices, which is a meaningful quality-of-life improvement over the early days when firmware updates required manual SD card manipulation.
Neither device supports multiplayer gaming over Wi-Fi in any meaningful way, though technically RetroArch’s Netplay feature exists on both. In practice, retro handheld Netplay is a niche interest of niche interests — the latency requirements for accurate emulation over the internet are demanding, and the community engagement around it is minimal. Don’t make this a purchasing consideration.
The Collector Perspective: Which One Actually Belongs in Your Setup?
Let’s talk about the people reading this article. If you’ve made it to this section, you’re not someone who stumbled across retro gaming handhelds by accident. You probably already own at least one of these devices, or you’re considering a serious purchase, or you’re a collector who thinks about this stuff the way other people think about wine or vinyl. You have opinions. You have shelves. You have a MicroSD card full of ROMs that took you a painful weekend to properly organise.
For the collector and enthusiast, the question isn’t just “which one plays games better” — it’s “which one fits the role I need it to play in my setup.” And this is where the conversation gets interesting, because the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX H don’t actually occupy identical niches despite their similar price points and surface-level similarities.
The Miyoo Mini Plus as a Dedicated Carry Device
The Miyoo Mini Plus has emerged, over two years of community consensus, as the ideal answer to one specific question: “I want one device in my pocket at all times for retro gaming, and it needs to cover everything up to and including PS1 flawlessly.” It is the Sony Walkman of retro handhelds — not the most powerful thing available, not the most featured, but refined, pleasant, pocketable, and doing the thing it does better than almost anything else in its category.
For someone whose retro gaming sweet spot is the 8-bit and 16-bit era — the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy line, Neo Geo, TurboGrafx-16, Atari ST and Amiga stuff, arcade classics through MAME — the Miyoo Mini Plus is close to perfect. It handles all of it without breaking a sweat. The OnionOS ecosystem makes it a joy to use. The screen is gorgeous for pixel art. And you’ll actually carry it, which means you’ll actually play it, which is the only metric that actually matters.
The Miyoo Mini Plus is also the recommendation for someone who values community. The r/MiyooMini subreddit, the associated Discord, the OnionOS GitHub — these represent one of the most active, helpful, and positive communities in the entire retro gaming space. If you encounter a problem, there will be a solution documented somewhere, and there will be knowledgeable people willing to help you find it. The network effects of being on the most popular platform in this category are real and substantial.
The RG35XX H as a Secondary or Specialist Device
The RG35XX H makes a different argument. It’s the device for someone who owns a Miyoo Mini Plus already (or a similar device) and wants something that pushes slightly further into the fifth generation — more PS1 games, better N64, actual PSP coverage. Or for someone who wants a slightly more grown-up feel, a device that sits more naturally in the context of fifth-generation game libraries where analogue sticks are essential rather than occasional. Or for someone whose hands are large enough that the Miyoo Mini Plus cramping issue is a real concern.
The RG35XX H’s dual MicroSD card slots are worth highlighting here, because for a collector, this is genuinely useful. One card for the operating system and firmware, one card for your ROM library. This makes storage management cleaner and future-proofing simpler — you can swap in a larger ROM card without touching the system card, and vice versa. The Miyoo Mini Plus uses a single card for both, which is slightly less elegant for heavy library management.
For collectors specifically, there’s also an aesthetic argument for Anbernic’s build. The RG35XX H comes in a range of colour options — transparent black, transparent purple, and transparent gray are the most commonly praised — that have a kind of retro-hardware visual appeal that invokes the transparent limited editions of the late 1990s. The transparent-shell Game Boy Pocket and the Clear Purple Nintendo 64 occupy a special place in collector memory, and Anbernic has clearly tapped into that nostalgia deliberately. The Miyoo Mini Plus comes in more muted, professional-looking finishes that are attractive but less explicitly collector-coded.
The Competition: Where Does This $60 Tier Sit in 2025?
It would be incomplete to discuss these two devices without placing them in the broader market context of 2025. The $60 price point isn’t the only option, and understanding where these devices sit relative to cheaper and more expensive alternatives helps clarify exactly what you’re getting for your money.
Below $60: The Compromises
Below $60, you enter the territory of genuine compromises. The Trimui Smart Pro, which hovered around $40-45 in 2024, offers a wider landscape screen but runs a significantly less mature firmware ecosystem and has documented issues with analogue stick drift. The original Anbernic RG35XX (portrait model) can be found for around $40 and is an excellent NES/SNES/GBA device, but its small screen and limited shoulder button layout make it feel like a step down.
The Powkiddy RGB30, which appeared in late 2023 at around $50, offered an unusual 1:1 square display intended to better represent Game Boy Advance and other non-16:9 formats, and it built a small but devoted community around that proposition. It’s a genuinely interesting device, but the square display is a niche choice that doesn’t serve the broader retro library as well as a traditional 4:3 panel.
Above $60: The Step Up
Above $60, you enter a different conversation. The Anbernic RG353V and RG353VS, around $80-90, add Android support alongside their Linux emulation capabilities, opening the door to emulators with more active development cycles and the Google Play Store ecosystem. The Anbernic RG353M, with its aluminium shell, pushes toward $100 and delivers a premium build quality that makes the budget devices feel like toys by comparison.
At $100-120, the Anbernic RG405V and the Retroid Pocket 3+ bring Android 11, significantly more powerful chipsets, and the ability to comfortably emulate PS2, GameCube, and Wii — systems that are genuinely beyond the capability of anything at the $60 tier. If your retro gaming interests extend into the sixth generation, the right answer is not to push the Miyoo Mini Plus and RG35XX H beyond their limits — it’s to spend more money and get a device that’s actually designed for that work.
The $60 tier specifically represents the sweet spot for the systems that define most people’s retro gaming — everything up to PS1 fluently, N64 adequately. If that’s your era, if that’s your library, then the argument for spending more becomes hard to make. You’re optimising beyond the point of diminishing returns.
The Elephant in the Room: The Steam Deck and Modern Handhelds
Every feature piece about retro handhelds in 2025 has to at least acknowledge the existence of devices like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally. These are not the same thing as what we’re discussing — they’re full PC gaming handhelds that happen to also run retro emulators beautifully, at prices starting around £349 and going significantly higher. But they’re worth naming because they represent a genuine alternative for someone who wants a single device that does everything.
The Steam Deck, running EmuDeck or RetroDECK, is a staggering retro emulation machine. It runs everything up to and including GameCube, Wii, PS2, and Dreamcast flawlessly. It has an OLED screen option (from the 2023 revised model onwards) that makes retro pixel art look extraordinary. It has a thriving community and excellent software support.
But it weighs 640 grams. It costs £350 at minimum. It doesn’t fit in any pocket ever made. And it’s fundamentally a different experience — bigger, more powerful, more capable, but also more demanding, heavier, and more expensive. The Miyoo Mini Plus and RG35XX H serve a different need: they’re devices you carry without thinking, that boot in four seconds, that you can play one-handed while eating a sandwich. The Steam Deck is magnificent, but it doesn’t make these devices irrelevant any more than a full-size arcade cabinet makes a controller irrelevant.
Practical Setup Guide: Getting the Most From Either Device
Let’s get genuinely practical for a moment. If you’ve decided to buy one of these devices — or if you already own one and aren’t getting the most out of it — here is what you should actually do.
Setting Up the Miyoo Mini Plus with OnionOS
First, download the latest release of OnionOS from the project’s GitHub page. At time of writing, version 4.3 is current and stable. Format a quality MicroSD card — Samsung or SanDisk Pro Endurance are the community recommendations, specifically for their reliability in frequent read/write operations — to FAT32 (for cards up to 64GB) or exFAT (for larger cards). Extract the OnionOS files to the root of the card.
Boot the device with the new card installed. OnionOS will complete its installation automatically on first boot — this takes about three minutes and the screen may appear to go black for a period, which is normal. Do not panic and do not power off the device during this process.
Once OnionOS is running, go into the Package Manager and install the emulator cores you need. For the core retro library, you’ll want: MAME 2003 Plus for arcade games, Snes9x 2010 or Mesen-S for SNES, Genesis Plus GX for Mega Drive/Master System, mGBA for Game Boy/GBC/GBA, PCSX ReARMed for PS1, and Mupen64Plus Next for N64. Install ScummVM if you care about point-and-click adventure games from the 1990s — a surprisingly underserved niche on retro handhelds that both these devices handle excellently.
Organise your ROMs into the appropriate system folders on the SD card. OnionOS will scrape box art and metadata automatically when connected to Wi-Fi through its WIFI menu. Set up your RetroAchievements credentials in the RetroArch settings menu (Quick Menu → Achievements → Username/Password). Enable integer scaling in RetroArch’s Video settings. Set up CRT filter shaders if that’s your thing — the zfast-crt shader is a good starting point for performance-friendly CRT simulation.
Setting Up the RG35XX H
The RG35XX H setup depends on which path you’re taking. For the stock firmware path, Anbernic ships the device with a pre-configured SD card that already has the operating system installed. You’ll want a second MicroSD card (the device has two slots) for your ROM library. Anbernic’s firmware structure is well-documented in their packaging and support pages.
For the GarlicOS path: download the latest GarlicOS release, format your OS card accordingly, and follow the installation instructions in the project’s documentation. The process is similar to OnionOS but requires slightly more manual configuration of emulator settings to get optimal performance. The GarlicOS documentation on GitHub is thorough and the community Discord is helpful.
For the MinUI path: MinUI’s installation guide is deliberately detailed and explicit. The developer, Jim Gray, has written excellent documentation that walks through every step. MinUI’s lack of box art and visual library display is immediately obvious to anyone used to prettier frontends, but the boot speed and gameplay-to-gameplay switching speed more than compensate. Notable: MinUI has some of the best audio settings and audio latency of any custom firmware on these devices, which becomes apparent when playing music-heavy games like the Parappa the Rapper series or any rhythm game.
Community Reaction and the State of the Scene in 2025
The retro handheld community in 2025 is a fascinating, occasionally baffling, almost entirely positive corner of gaming culture. Unlike many areas of online gaming discourse, where tribalism and toxicity are endemic, the retro handheld scene tends to be characterised by genuine helpfulness, shared enthusiasm, and the kind of collaborative spirit that reminds you of the early internet. There are flame wars — the OnionOS vs. MinUI debate can get surprisingly heated for something that is, at the end of the day, a choice between two pieces of free software — but they’re generally good-natured flame wars.
On Reddit, the primary community gathering points are r/SBCGaming (for the broader single-board computer gaming community, which includes all retro handhelds), r/MiyooMini (specifically for Miyoo hardware), and r/Anbernic. The activity levels on all three subreddits remain high in 2025, with daily posts covering setup help, game recommendations, custom theme sharing, and the periodic excited announcement of a new community software project.
The YouTube ecosystem around these devices has also matured considerably. Channels like Retro Game Corps (run by Russ Crandall, probably the most respected voice in the retro handheld space and whose systematic device reviews have become a community standard), Taki Udon, and Retro Handhelds have built substantial audiences that rival mid-tier gaming channels, and their videos often serve as the de facto buyer’s guides for newcomers. The existence of this media layer has professionalized the scene in ways that both help and occasionally hurt — there’s more information available than ever before, but there’s also more noise to sort through.
Community sentiment in 2025 about these two specific devices is interesting. The Miyoo Mini Plus is viewed with a kind of warm, settled affection — it’s the known quantity, the reliable choice, the thing you recommend without hesitation. The RG35XX H is viewed with slightly more ambivalence: acknowledged as excellent hardware, but with an asterisk about the software ecosystem being slightly behind the Miyoo’s in terms of polish and community maturity. The consensus is roughly: “Buy the Miyoo for a first device. Consider the Anbernic if you have specific reasons to.”
The Hardware Refresh Question
A question that hangs over any discussion of specific retro handheld models is: when is the next version coming, and should I wait? In a category where Anbernic releases new hardware at a pace that would exhaust a Formula 1 pit crew, this anxiety is understandable.
As of early 2025, there are rumours and early leaks suggesting a Miyoo Mini Plus V4 or equivalent, with potential improvements including a higher-resolution screen option, improved speaker audio, and potentially a slightly more powerful chipset. Miyoo has been careful not to iterate too aggressively on the Mini Plus — they know its strength lies in the deep community investment in the existing platform — but the competitive pressure from Anbernic means standing still is not an option.
Anbernic, meanwhile, has been rumoured to be working on an RG35XX H successor that would bring improved CPU performance and potentially a small display upgrade. Whether this represents a meaningful generational leap or a spec bump will determine whether the existing H remains the value proposition it currently is.
The general community advice on the “should I wait?” question is consistent and sensible: if you want a device now, the current versions of both are excellent and will remain excellent regardless of what comes next. The retro gaming library isn’t growing — the games you want to play exist, they’re already emulated, they run well on current hardware. Future hardware improvements will bring marginal gains in edge-case performance, not fundamental improvements to the core experience. Buy now and play now. Waiting is just another way to not play games.
The Verdict: Choosing Between Two Excellent Devices
After everything we’ve covered — the specs, the screens, the software, the form factors, the community, the performance — the honest verdict is that both of these devices are genuinely excellent for the price. The $60 retro handheld market in 2025 has reached a level of quality that would have seemed extraordinary five years ago, and either of these devices will serve you extraordinarily well for the games that define retro gaming.
But verdicts need to be verdicts, and so here is mine, offered with all the conviction of fifteen years of watching this space and a very full MicroSD card:
Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus If…
- You want the best overall package in this price range with no asterisks or caveats
- Pocketability and always-carry convenience matter to you
- Your retro gaming sweet spot is NES through PS1, Game Boy through GBA
- You value a mature, polished software ecosystem (OnionOS) with an active community
- You’re buying a first retro handheld and want the safest, most recommended choice
- The screen quality and image fidelity for 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art is a priority
- You have average or smaller hands and comfort over long sessions isn’t a concern
Buy the Anbernic RG35XX H If…
- You want to push meaningfully into N64, PSP, and early 3D game libraries
- You have larger hands and need a bigger device for comfort over long sessions
- You already own a Miyoo Mini Plus and want a complementary device with wider capability
- The dual MicroSD slot for cleaner library management matters to you
- You prefer the symmetrical analogue stick layout for PS1-era and beyond
- The aesthetic of the transparent shell variants appeals to your collector sensibility
- You’re comfortable with a slightly less mature software ecosystem in exchange for more headroom
The Recommendation That Actually Matters
If I’m honest — and I mean genuinely, practically honest rather than hedging-both-bets honest — the Miyoo Mini Plus is the better device for the majority of retro gaming enthusiasts at this price point. Not by a massive margin. Not in a way that makes the RG35XX H a bad choice. But the software ecosystem advantage is real, the screen quality advantage is real, the pocketability advantage is real, and the community advantage is real. These are not trivial considerations — they’re the things that determine whether a device stays in your pocket for years or ends up in a drawer after six months.
The RG35XX H is the better device for a specific user: someone who has already outgrown the Miyoo ecosystem’s performance ceiling, who cares specifically about N64 and PSP, and who needs a larger form factor for comfort. For that user, it’s the right choice. But that user is, in my experience of this community, a minority of buyers — most people who want a $60 retro handheld want it to play SNES and PS1 games beautifully, and for that specific application, the Miyoo Mini Plus is as close to perfect as this price point gets.
Looking Forward: The Future of Budget Retro Handhelds
Where does this category go from here? The short-term trajectory is clear: incremental improvements in chipset performance, gradual screen quality improvements, and continued software refinement. The medium-term is more interesting.
There’s a strong argument that the current $60 tier is approaching the point of “good enough” — where the hardware is sufficiently capable for the target library that further improvements are marginal rather than transformative. NES, SNES, Mega Drive, GBA, and PS1 are not going to become harder to emulate. The software improvements that matter most — OnionOS updates, RetroArch core improvements, the gradual enhancement of Anbernic’s stock firmware — are software improvements, not hardware ones.
The genuinely interesting frontier is in display technology. OLED screens at the budget end of the handheld market would be transformative — the Steam Deck OLED demonstrated conclusively that OLED changes the pixel art experience in ways that are difficult to overstate. Deep blacks, perfect contrast, colours that look like they’re lit from within. An OLED Miyoo Mini Plus or an OLED Anbernic at the $80-100 price point would be a remarkable device, and the technology trajectory suggests this is feasible within the next two to three years.
There’s also an interesting conversation to be had about FPGA technology at budget price points. FPGA-based retro gaming — using field-programmable gate arrays to implement original hardware behaviour at the electrical level rather than through software emulation — has been the domain of premium products like the Analogue Pocket ($219) and the MiSTer FPGA (approximately $200-300 for a complete setup). The accuracy and authenticity of FPGA implementations are, in strict technical terms, superior to software emulation. But the price premium has been substantial. As FPGA silicon continues to get cheaper, the question of when a credible FPGA handheld at the $60-100 price point becomes viable is worth watching. It would fundamentally change the conversation about what “authenticity” means in this category.
For now, though, the practical reality is this: you can spend sixty dollars — roughly what four new iOS app purchases cost, or a single new-release game, or a night out that you’ll have mostly forgotten by Monday — and get a device that plays twenty-odd years of gaming history beautifully, fits in your pocket, runs for eight hours on a charge, and connects to a community of enthusiasts who will help you set it up and argue passionately about the correct CRT shader settings. That’s remarkable. That’s the golden age of retro gaming handhelds, right now, in 2025, for sixty dollars.
The Miyoo Mini Plus gets my primary recommendation. But both devices are, in the fullest sense of the word, good. And “good” at this price, in this form factor, for this purpose, is something worth celebrating.
Load up Chrono Trigger. Turn the lights down. Let the years dissolve.
Both the Miyoo Mini Plus and the Anbernic RG35XX H are available from AliExpress, the manufacturers’ official stores, and various third-party resellers. Prices fluctuate between £48-£55 depending on sale periods and retailer. Always verify you’re purchasing from an authorised seller to ensure warranty support.