RG40XX H vs Miyoo Mini Plus: Which Should You Buy in 2025?

Sarah Hargreaves — Culture & Features Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

The Short Answer (Because I Know You’re Already Halfway to AliExpress)

If you want the best all-round budget retro handheld you can buy right now and you’re comfortable spending a little more for a noticeably better experience, buy the Anbernic RG40XX H. If you want something genuinely pocketable, wonderfully simple, and you primarily play Game Boy, GBA, SNES, and Mega Drive games, buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. Both are brilliant. They’re just brilliant at different things, for different people, in different pockets — literally and figuratively.

I’ve been using both of these handhelds for several months, swapping between them on commutes, on the sofa, on a particularly dull family gathering where I absolutely needed to be playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon instead of talking about someone’s loft conversion. The RG40XX H vs Miyoo Mini Plus question comes up constantly in our inbox, and I understand why — at a glance they occupy similar price territory, they’re both running Linux-based custom firmware, and they both let you carry three decades of gaming history in your jacket pocket. But spend a week with each and the differences become vivid. This isn’t a close call dressed up as a difficult decision for the sake of drama. It’s two genuinely distinct philosophies about what a handheld should be.

Let me tell you exactly what those philosophies are, who each device is actually built for, and — crucially — which one you should spend your money on in 2025.

What Are These Devices? A Quick Primer for the Uninitiated

If you’ve landed here knowing exactly what both devices are, skip ahead. But if you’re newer to the Chinese handheld emulation scene — which has exploded in quality and variety over the last four or five years — a brief grounding helps.

The Miyoo Mini Plus is made by Miyoo and sits in a clamshell-adjacent vertical form factor that will immediately remind anyone who grew up in the nineties of a Game Boy Color. It’s tiny. Genuinely tiny. The screen is a 3.5-inch IPS panel, the whole device fits in a jeans pocket with room to spare, and it runs a custom Linux-based OS called OnionOS (when you install it, which you absolutely should). It launched in 2023 and has become one of the defining budget handhelds of the era — so much so that we did a full Miyoo Mini Plus review for UK buyers in 2025 that goes much deeper on its strengths and weaknesses in isolation. Prices in the UK sit around £45–£55 depending on where you buy.

The Anbernic RG40XX H is Anbernic’s answer to the horizontal gaming handheld market — the “H” literally stands for horizontal, as opposed to the vertical RG40XX V. It has a 4-inch IPS screen, a noticeably beefier processor (the JZ4770 running at around 1.2GHz in the H model, though some variants use a slightly different chip configuration), proper shoulder buttons with a satisfying click, and a form factor that sits somewhere between a Game Boy Advance and a PSP. It feels like a proper handheld. It launched in late 2023 and retails around £55–£70 in the UK depending on the seller and whether you’re importing direct from Anbernic’s AliExpress store.

Both devices are what the community calls “mid-range budget” handhelds — they’re not the cheapest things on the market (that’d be something like the RG28XX or older Powkiddy devices), and they’re not pushing into the premium tier occupied by the Analogue Pocket or devices running more powerful chips like the RG35XX Plus or the RGB30. They exist in the sweet spot where price, performance, and portability converge, which is exactly why they’re so frequently compared.

Design and Form Factor: The Fundamental Difference

This is, genuinely, where the decision begins for most people. And it’s more meaningful than it sounds.

The Miyoo Mini Plus: Proper Pocket Gaming

The Miyoo Mini Plus is small in a way that still surprises me every time I pick it up after a few days away from it. It’s 113mm wide, 65mm tall, and about 18mm deep at its thickest point. It weighs 141g without a game card. For context, that’s lighter than a standard deck of playing cards and noticeably smaller than an original Game Boy Color. I’ve carried mine in my shirt pocket. My shirt pocket. That’s not a thing I can say about many gaming devices.

The build quality is better than it has any right to be at this price. The plastic feels solid, the buttons have a decent travel to them, and the d-pad — historically the thing that makes or breaks a budget handheld — is genuinely good. It’s circular, responsive, and diagonals register cleanly, which matters enormously when you’re playing anything with eight-directional movement. The shoulder buttons are small and a bit clicky in a way that feels slightly toy-like compared to premium hardware, but they work reliably. The analogue sticks — yes, it has two small analogue nubs — are the weakest part of the physical design. They’re low-profile, slightly stiff, and you wouldn’t want to use them for anything that demands precision. Think of them as bonus features rather than core controls.

The colour options (white, black, transparent purple, and a few others) are charming. The transparent shell in particular has a very deliberate nod to the original Game Boy Color’s “atomic purple” look, and if you grew up with one of those on a Christmas morning you will feel something when you hold it. That’s not an accident. Miyoo know exactly who their audience is.

The Anbernic RG40XX H: Grown-Up Handheld Energy

The RG40XX H is larger. Not dramatically larger, but noticeably so. At roughly 155mm wide, 73mm tall, and 18mm deep, it’s closer to a GBA SP opened flat — or, for a more contemporary reference, about the size of a Nintendo Switch Lite laid in landscape. It does not fit in a shirt pocket. It fits comfortably in a coat pocket, a bag, or the sort of trouser pockets that are actually designed for things rather than being decorative suggestions.

Where it earns that extra bulk is in the build and the controls. The RG40XX H feels substantial in the hand in a way the Miyoo Mini Plus simply doesn’t. The shoulder buttons have a proper mechanical click that’s satisfying every single time. The d-pad is wide, well-positioned, and accurate — it reminded me of the GBA’s d-pad, which remains one of the best on any handheld Nintendo ever made. The face buttons are adequately sized with a clean response, and the two analogue sticks feel like actual analogue sticks rather than glorified nubs. They’re not dual-shock quality, but they’re usable for N64 and early PS1 3D games without wanting to throw the device across the room.

The overall aesthetic is classic Anbernic: clean lines, a slightly industrial feel, available in several colourways including a very handsome grey-and-black combination. It doesn’t try to ape any specific retro hardware, which I respect. It looks like a modern handheld that’s confident in what it is.

Which Form Factor Is Right for You?

Be honest with yourself about where and how you play. If you’re someone who games primarily on the sofa or in bed, form factor matters less and the RG40XX H’s superior controls will serve you better. If you want something that genuinely disappears into everyday life — that you can pull out on a train, at a lunch break, or at a social occasion without it feeling like a statement — the Miyoo Mini Plus is unmatched at this price point. I found myself reaching for the Miyoo on commutes and the Anbernic in the evenings. That probably tells you something.

Screen Quality: Closer Than You’d Expect

Both devices use IPS panels, which is the baseline expectation for anything worth buying in 2025. The days of the murky TN screens that plagued budget Chinese handhelds through most of the 2010s are, mercifully, behind us.

Miyoo Mini Plus Screen

The Miyoo Mini Plus has a 3.5-inch, 640×480 IPS screen. For the systems it’s primarily designed to emulate — anything up to and including 32-bit consoles — that resolution is essentially perfect. Game Boy games look fantastic. GBA games look fantastic. SNES and Mega Drive games look fantastic. The pixel density is high enough that integer scaling (where each original pixel is represented by an exact multiple of pixels on screen, keeping everything crisp) works brilliantly. The screen is bright and colourful, the viewing angles are good, and under OnionOS you have access to a variety of CRT shaders that can add scanlines and screen curvature if you want your games to look like they did on a CRT television in 1994. I spent an embarrassing amount of time one evening just cycling through shaders on Super Metroid.

One genuine gripe: the screen can pick up fingerprints aggressively, and there’s a very slight gap between the glass and the panel on some units that can attract dust. It’s a minor thing, but at this price point you notice the tolerances.

RG40XX H Screen

The RG40XX H has a 4-inch, 640×480 IPS screen. Same resolution, bigger physical size. This makes individual pixels very slightly more visible if you’re playing with pixel-perfect scaling on systems with low native resolutions — a Game Boy game on this screen will look marginally less sharp than the same game on the Miyoo’s smaller panel, simply because the pixels are bigger. In practice, this is only really noticeable if you’re looking for it, and for most games on most systems it makes zero meaningful difference.

Where the larger screen genuinely helps is with PS1 games and anything pushing into that 240p-to-480i range of content. More screen real estate means more immersion, and games like Crash Bandicoot or Tekken 3 feel more comfortable on the RG40XX H’s display. The brightness and colour reproduction are comparable to the Miyoo — neither screen is going to embarrass itself.

Neither of these devices connects to a TV as a primary use case, so the HDMI output question doesn’t really apply here. If TV output matters to you, this comparison is probably the wrong one — you’d be looking at something in a different tier entirely, and our piece on the best FPGA handhelds for SNES games might be a more useful starting point.

Performance and Emulation Range: Where the RG40XX H Pulls Ahead

This is the section that matters most for anyone who wants to play games beyond the 16-bit era, and it’s where the two devices diverge most clearly.

What the Miyoo Mini Plus Handles Well

Under OnionOS, the Miyoo Mini Plus emulates the following systems with near-perfect accuracy and zero meaningful slowdown:

• Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance
• NES and Famicom
• SNES and Super Famicom
• Mega Drive / Genesis (and 32X, with some caveats)
• Game Gear (and yes, there’s a respectable library there — we’ve written about PAL Game Gear exclusives worth hunting down if that’s your thing)
• Master System
• Neo Geo (MVS and AES ROMs)
• CPS1 and CPS2 arcade games
• PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
• Atari systems
• Wonderswan

PlayStation 1 emulation on the Miyoo Mini Plus is possible but inconsistent. Simple 2D PS1 titles — Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, Tekken 2 — run reasonably well most of the time. But 3D-heavy games, particularly anything that pushes the PS1’s GTE (the geometry transformation engine), can and do slow down noticeably. Frame drops, audio desync, the occasional crash. It’s not the device to reach for if PS1 gaming is a priority. Think of PS1 on the Miyoo as a bonus feature with asterisks rather than a core capability.

Nintendo DS emulation is similarly hit and miss. Some games run, some don’t, and the ones that run don’t always run well. It’s a party trick more than a feature.

What the RG40XX H Handles Well

The RG40XX H covers all the same ground as the Miyoo with equal or better performance across the board, but its real advantage is in that 32-bit-and-beyond territory. PS1 emulation is significantly more reliable. The vast majority of the PS1 library runs at full speed or very close to it, including 3D titles that would stutter on the Miyoo. I played through a large chunk of Metal Gear Solid on the RG40XX H over a fortnight and it was, genuinely, a joy — smooth, with properly functioning audio and none of the performance anxiety you get when you know a demanding scene might tank the framerate.

Saturn emulation is limited on both devices — the Sega Saturn is notoriously demanding to emulate accurately, and neither of these chips is powerful enough to handle it well. If PAL Saturn is your passion, you’re in a completely different price bracket. Nintendo 64 on the RG40XX H is better than on the Miyoo but still inconsistent — simpler N64 titles like Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 run well, but anything with heavy graphical effects will struggle. Game Boy Advance emulation on the RG40XX H is essentially flawless, which delights me every time.

The bottom line: if your gaming interests stop at the SNES/Mega Drive era, both devices handle the job equally well. If you want to get into PS1, the RG40XX H is meaningfully better. If you want to push into N64, PSP, or Dreamcast territory, neither device is really the right tool.

A Note on Custom Firmware

The Miyoo Mini Plus ships with its own stock OS that is perfectly functional but not where you want to stay. OnionOS is the community’s recommended firmware, and installing it is straightforward — it transforms the device. Better emulator cores, better UI, better shader support, better everything. Install it. There’s no debate here.

The RG40XX H ships with Anbernic’s own Linux-based OS, which is similarly functional but similarly improved by third-party options. MinUI is a popular lightweight alternative that strips everything back to the essentials and runs beautifully. KNULLI and ROCKNIX (formerly GarlicOS for other platforms) are other options depending on what you want from your setup. The community around Anbernic devices is active and the firmware situation keeps improving.

Battery Life: A Genuinely Important Practical Consideration

I’m putting this section here because it gets undersold in most comparisons, and it matters enormously in real-world use.

The Miyoo Mini Plus has a 3,000mAh battery. In practice, running 16-bit emulation with moderate screen brightness, you’re looking at roughly 6–8 hours of play. That is exceptional for a device this small. On a typical commute week — say, 45 minutes each way, five days — you’ll charge it once, maybe twice. Running more demanding emulation (PS1, for example) or cranking brightness will pull that figure down toward the 4–5 hour range, but you’re still talking about a device that outlasts any real-world gaming session you’re likely to have.

The RG40XX H has a 3,200mAh battery, which sounds like it should last longer. The larger, brighter screen and slightly more demanding chip means real-world performance is roughly comparable — around 6 hours on 16-bit emulation, dropping to 4–5 hours on PS1 content. Neither device will die on you mid-afternoon if you start playing in the morning. Both charge via USB-C, which in 2025 is table stakes but still worth confirming before purchase.

The practical difference here is small. The Miyoo’s battery feels more impressive relative to the device’s size. The RG40XX H’s battery is perfectly adequate. Neither is a dealbreaker.

Sound, Controls, and the Little Details That Matter Over Time

Audio

Both devices have mono speakers. Both are serviceable. Neither will impress you. The RG40XX H’s speaker is marginally louder and slightly less tinny, but we’re comparing mediocre to slightly-less-mediocre here. Both devices have headphone jacks, which is not something you can take for granted in 2025 (looking at you, almost every phone manufacturer). Listening through earphones on either device is a genuinely pleasant experience — the audio output is clean and the volume range is sensible.

The D-Pad Question

For those of us who grew up on a diet of 8 and 16-bit games, the d-pad is the most emotionally loaded component of any retro handheld. Get it wrong and the whole device feels wrong, no matter how good everything else is. Ask me how it felt to play Street Fighter II on a budget handheld with a mushy, unresponsive d-pad sometime. Actually, don’t. I’ve blocked it out.

Both the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG40XX H have good d-pads. The Miyoo’s is circular and slightly looser in feel — good for platformers, fine for fighting games, excellent for anything requiring diagonal inputs. The RG40XX H’s is more structured and defined — cleaner discrete directions, which some players will prefer for precision platformers and fighting games. This is genuinely a personal preference question rather than one having an objectively correct answer. I slightly prefer the RG40XX H’s d-pad, but I know Miyoo devotees who’d disagree.

Shoulder Buttons

The RG40XX H wins here, cleanly. Four shoulder buttons (L1, L2, R1, R2) with a satisfying click and good positioning. For PS1 games in particular — where L2 and R2 are often critical — this matters. The Miyoo Mini Plus has shoulder buttons that work but feel like an afterthought: smaller, slightly awkward to reach, with a more toy-like feel. For SNES and older systems where you only need L and R, it’s fine. Once you start playing PS1 games that use all four shoulder buttons, the Miyoo’s limitations become apparent.

The Analogue Sticks

The Miyoo Mini Plus’s analogue nubs are, as I mentioned, the weakest part of the device. They’re present and functional but they’re not comfortable for extended use. The RG40XX H has proper thumb sticks — small but actual sticks, with a full range of motion. Neither device is going to have you playing GoldenEye with joy, but the RG40XX H’s sticks are noticeably better for any 3D game that requires them.

Software, Interface, and the Ecosystem Around Each Device

Hardware is only half the story. The experience of actually using these devices day-to-day is shaped by software, community support, and the wider ecosystem each device plugs into.

OnionOS and the Miyoo Ecosystem

The Miyoo Mini Plus, running OnionOS, has one of the most polished software experiences in the budget handheld market. OnionOS is actively maintained, has excellent documentation, and has been refined over years of community feedback. The interface is clean, games launch quickly, save states work reliably, and the sheer volume of customisation options — from UI themes to per-system emulator core selection to CRT shader presets — is genuinely impressive. The Miyoo community on Reddit and various Discord servers is enormous and helpful. Problems get solved quickly because thousands of people have had them before you.

There’s also Miyoo Mini’s integration with various game streaming and cloud saves setups, though that’s getting into territory for a separate article. The key point is that the software experience matches the hardware’s ambitions: simple, focused, excellent at what it does.

Anbernic’s Ecosystem and Third-Party Firmware

Anbernic’s stock firmware is fine. I want to be clear about that — it’s not broken, it’s not a disaster, it just feels less refined than OnionOS at every level. Anbernic have improved dramatically over the years (their early firmware on the RG350 range was a genuine chore), and the current stock OS on the RG40XX H is functional and reasonably intuitive. But the community-developed options are better.

MinUI is my recommendation for the RG40XX H if you want a clean, fast, no-nonsense experience. It strips away complexity, boots quickly, and gets you into games with minimal friction. KNULLI offers more features if you want them. The broader Anbernic community is slightly more fragmented than Miyoo’s — Anbernic makes many more different devices, so community resources are spread across more models — but the RG40XX H is popular enough that support is good.

One thing worth noting about the Anbernic ecosystem more broadly: if you enjoy the RG40XX H and want to eventually upgrade, there’s a clear progression path. The RG35XX Plus, the RG40XX V, the more powerful devices further up the range — they all share broadly similar firmware approaches and community knowledge. There’s an argument that buying into Anbernic is buying into an ecosystem with a ceiling much higher than the entry point. Whether that matters to you depends on where you think your emulation ambitions might go.

Price and Value: What Are You Actually Getting for Your Money?

Let’s talk about actual costs, because this comparison lives and dies in a specific price bracket and handwaving about “good value” without numbers is useless.

Miyoo Mini Plus: UK Pricing in 2025

The Miyoo Mini Plus retails for approximately £45–£55 in the UK in 2025. You can find it on AliExpress direct from Miyoo’s official store, usually around £45–£48 with shipping. Amazon UK and eBay sellers tend to add a few pounds for faster delivery and the reassurance of easier returns. At £50, it represents extraordinary value for what it delivers — a polished, well-built, pocketable device that handles the majority of retro gaming history brilliantly.

The main additional cost is a microSD card. The device ships with one, but it’s usually slow and small. Budget £10–£15 for a decent 128GB card (Samsung or SanDisk, don’t cheap out on storage) and you’ll have a device that’s set up for years.

RG40XX H: UK Pricing in 2025

The Anbernic RG40XX H retails for approximately £55–£70 in the UK in 2025. Anbernic’s official AliExpress store is usually the cheapest source at around £55–£60, while Amazon UK sellers typically price it at £65–£70 for faster shipping. Same microSD advice applies — budget an extra £10–£15 for a quality card.

The price gap between the two devices is, in real terms, about £15–£20. That’s meaningful on a tight budget. It’s also, frankly, not a decision-defining amount if you’re buying a device you’re going to use for several years. The question is whether that £15–£20 premium buys you things you’ll actually use.

The Value Calculation

If you play exclusively 16-bit and older games, the extra money for the RG40XX H buys you marginally better controls and a bigger screen. Whether that’s worth £15–£20 is entirely personal. If you want PS1 capability, the extra money buys you genuinely better performance on a whole additional console generation. That seems like a clear yes to me. The Miyoo Mini Plus is exceptional value; the RG40XX H is excellent value. Neither will make you feel like you’ve been ripped off.

For context on where both devices sit in the broader handheld landscape: they’re both dramatically cheaper than premium options. The gap between a £60 handheld and something like the Analogue Pocket — which sits in a completely different tier of accuracy and build quality, as explored in various articles here including our piece on replacing an Analogue Pocket with a modded GBA for six weeks — is enormous. These devices are not competing with premium hardware; they’re making a compelling argument that you don’t need premium hardware for most retro gaming.

Who Should Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus in 2025?

I’ve spent months watching this community argue about these two devices, and I’ve come to the view that the Miyoo Mini Plus has a very clear ideal owner. You are that person if:

• You primarily play games from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras (NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, GBA)
• Portability is genuinely important to you — you travel, commute, or just hate carrying things
• You want something you can hand to someone who’s never touched a retro handheld and have them understand it within two minutes
• Budget is a meaningful consideration and every pound counts
• You value a device that feels complete — the Miyoo Mini Plus with OnionOS doesn’t feel like a work in progress, it feels finished
• You don’t need analogue sticks in any serious capacity

The Miyoo Mini Plus is also, I think, the better gift for someone you want to introduce to retro gaming. It’s charming in a way that transcends the spec sheet. When I handed mine to my friend’s twelve-year-old daughter at Christmas — who had never played a Game Boy in her life — and watched her start playing Pokémon Red within about four minutes of picking it up, I understood what Miyoo had built. It’s not just a device; it’s a portal. And portals should fit in your pocket.

There’s also something culturally resonant about its size that I don’t think is accidental. We grew up being told that handheld gaming was about trading fidelity for portability — the Game Boy’s pea-soup green screen, the Game Gear’s battery-devouring compromise, the GBA’s screen that required standing near a window. The Miyoo Mini Plus is the device that finally makes small feel like a feature rather than a compromise. That means something to those of us who spent the nineties squinting at tiny screens in the back seats of cars.

Who Should Buy the Anbernic RG40XX H in 2025?

The RG40XX H has an equally clear ideal owner. You are that person if:

• PS1 gaming is important to you — the RG40XX H is genuinely good at it, the Miyoo is not
• You prioritise controls over portability — the buttons, d-pad, and shoulder buttons are all better
• You play longer sessions and want a device that’s comfortable to hold for an hour or two at a stretch
• You want better analogue stick support for 3D titles
• You play fighting games or precision platformers where d-pad feel really matters
• You see the £15–£20 premium as a worthwhile investment in a better day-to-day experience

The RG40XX H is also, I’d argue, the right choice if you’re buying your first serious retro handheld and aren’t completely sure where your emulation interests will take you. Its broader capability means you’re less likely to outgrow it quickly. The Miyoo Mini Plus is perfect for what it does and imperfect for what it doesn’t — if you know what you want, that’s fine. If you’re still exploring, the extra headroom of the RG40XX H gives you more room to discover what you enjoy.

I’ll also put forward a slightly contentious take: the RG40XX H is the better choice if the Game Boy Advance library is central to your plans. I know both devices handle GBA perfectly well, but there’s something about playing a GBA game on a horizontal handheld with proper shoulder buttons and a 4-inch screen that just feels right in a way the vertical Miyoo doesn’t quite match. GBA was always fundamentally a horizontal device — it’s why the SP felt like a slight aesthetic mismatch with the library it played. The RG40XX H, in a very real sense, plays GBA games the way they were meant to be played.

The Historical Context: Why These Devices Matter

I can’t write about budget Chinese handhelds without stepping back and acknowledging what they represent in the longer arc of gaming history, because I think it’s genuinely significant.

When the Game Boy launched in 1989, Nintendo’s stranglehold on portable gaming was absolute. The idea of a device that played games from multiple systems — on a whim, for free, carried in your pocket — was science fiction. By the early 2000s, you had unofficial emulators running on Game Boy Advance flashcarts, which felt genuinely transgressive in a way that’s hard to convey to anyone who didn’t experience it. I remember the specific thrill of playing NES games on my GBA for the first time. The hardware doing something its creators never intended. A secret compartment in a device you thought you already understood.

The intervening years brought GP2X, the Dingoo, various Pandora devices, early Anbernic and Retroid products of varying quality, and a slow but accelerating improvement in what cheap hardware could do. The Miyoo Mini Plus and RG40XX H are the current apex of a twenty-five year journey toward making multi-system emulation genuinely accessible. At £50–£70, running nearly flawlessly, fitting in a pocket — these are extraordinary devices by any historical measure.

There’s a counterargument that goes: “if you love these games, why not play them on original hardware?” And I have sympathy for it. I own original hardware. I understand the appeal of the cartridge, the real controller, the CRT, the whole experience. But Game Boy cartridge prices in 2025 are what they are, and the barrier to entry for collecting original hardware keeps rising. These budget handhelds are not a threat to collecting — they’re a gateway to it. Half the people I know who now collect cartridges started by playing ROMs on a budget handheld and found themselves wanting the real thing. That’s not a contradiction; that’s just how passion works.

There’s also the question of accessibility — physical accessibility, I mean. Retro gaming hardware was not particularly well-designed for players with motor difficulties, and the original cartridge-based systems have all the additional physical demands of handling small media and maintaining ageing hardware. Modern budget handhelds, with their USB-C charging, their digital libraries, their adjustable controls and screen options, represent a genuinely more accessible form of retro gaming for people who couldn’t otherwise engage with the history of the medium. That matters.

The Elephant in the Room: Legality and ROMs

I’m going to address this briefly and honestly because pretending it isn’t part of the conversation is dishonest.

The devices themselves are entirely legal to buy and own. They’re handheld computers running Linux. Nothing about them is inherently infringing on anyone’s intellectual property.

The games you play on them, however, exist in more complicated territory. Downloading ROMs of games you don’t own is, technically, copyright infringement in most jurisdictions including the UK. The law around personal backup copies is murky and has not been definitively clarified by UK courts in a way that provides clear protection for emulation users. What I will say is that the retro gaming community has a long tradition of nuanced thinking on this — many people only play ROMs of games they own physical copies of, others focus on abandonware and titles no longer commercially available, and the major platform holders have shown varied and inconsistent interest in enforcement over the years.

This is a decision each person makes for themselves, and I’m not here to lecture anyone. What I’d say is: if you can buy the game through an official channel — Nintendo Switch Online, the PS Store, GOG, wherever — support the people who made it. These things exist because people created them, and the creators deserve something for that.

Alternatives Worth Considering in 2025

These two devices are the obvious comparison, but the budget handheld market in 2025 is dense with options. A few worth knowing about:

If You Want to Spend Less

The Anbernic RG35XX H (the “budget horizontal”) sits around £35–£45 and delivers a solid 16-bit-focused experience in a horizontal form factor. It’s less capable than the RG40XX H, particularly on PS1, but if you know you’re staying in 16-bit territory and every pound matters, it’s a genuine option. The screen is smaller and the build feels more plasticky, but the fundamentals are sound.

If You Want to Spend More

The Anbernic RG35XX Plus (vertical) and various other mid-range Anbernic devices push into slightly higher performance territory for £70–£90. If N64 and early DS emulation are important to you, they’re worth the additional outlay. Beyond that you’re looking at devices like the Retroid Pocket 4 or the Ayn Odin, which are in a completely different tier of capability and cost.

And then there’s the question of FPGA handhelds — which use field-programmable gate arrays to recreate original hardware at the circuit level rather than emulating it in software. The Analogue Pocket is the king of this category, though the prices for UK buyers are enough to make your eyes water, as we’ve covered in our look at whether the Analogue Nomad is worth importing to the UK. FPGA is a different philosophy entirely — accuracy above all else, at a premium price. It’s wonderful, and it’s not what the Miyoo or Anbernic are trying to be.

My Verdict: Which One Should You Actually Buy?

Right. Here’s where I stop hedging and give you a straight answer.

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus if you primarily play 8-bit and 16-bit games, you want something genuinely pocketable, and £45–£50 is your budget ceiling. It is an exceptional piece of kit that punches far above its weight class, and under OnionOS it’s one of the most enjoyable retro gaming experiences I’ve had in years. The form factor is a genuine pleasure. The battery life is superb. The software ecosystem is polished. If the Game Boy era and the SNES/Mega Drive era are your happy place, this is your device.

Buy the Anbernic RG40XX H if you want PS1 capability, you play longer sessions, you care about control quality, or you’re not quite sure where your emulation interests will take you and you want the headroom to find out. The £15–£20 premium over the Miyoo is completely justified by the broader performance envelope and the more substantial control setup. It’s the more versatile device of the two, and for most people asking this question — particularly those who grew up playing the PlayStation generation as well as the 16-bit era — it’s the right call.

I’ve spent months flip-flopping on this, genuinely. I’ve changed my mind several times while writing this piece. But if I had to hand one of them to a stranger on a train and say “here, this is yours, enjoy thirty years of gaming history,” I’d hand them the RG40XX H. Not because the Miyoo Mini Plus is worse. It isn’t. But because the RG40XX H leaves fewer doors closed, and leaving doors open is how you find out what you love.

Both devices are, in the grand sweep of gaming history, remarkable. The fact that we can have this conversation — that these devices exist at these prices, doing what they do — would have seemed like a fantasy to the kid who sat under a lamp to see his Game Boy screen in 1992. Keep that in mind when you’re agonising over the choice. Whichever one you buy, you’re going to have a brilliant time.