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chuckroThe makers of the Miyoo Mini bring us this tiny little horizontal candy bar with a 2.8 inch screen; clearly they believe that smaller handhelds are the ideal. This is the smallest system I’ve used since the original Trimui Mini; it’s even more compact than the Powkiddy Q90, and it’s shockingly good.
It came with a case, a charging cable, and a USB-C-to-headset dongle. (It doesn’t have a headset jack.) I think I may have gotten a slightly defective power button—it doesn’t depress. I can press on it to turn the system on or off, but I’m not sure what it’s actually registering, and that’s somewhat unnerving. It’s reasonably comfortable to hold, and I think I actually find it more comfortable than the Miyoo Mini+ because the horizontal layout means there’s less need to wrap your fingers awkwardly around it.
I lost track that I had ordered this without an SD card, so I tried swapping in the SD card from my Miyoo Mini+, only to discover that one had started to go bad. So I’m going to need to flash fresh SD cards for both of them, irritatingly. Ah, well, at least that means I can put my Ideal Roms List on from the get-go.
There was a lot of complaining that the stock OS had badly optimized emulators and features, so in turn there’s a grand selection of alternate operating systems, and I decided to go ahead with the “Better Than Nothing” update to stock. It keeps the standard Miyoo menu (with “Native Menu” access to Retroarch) but also has standalone Retroarch cores where the hotkeys take you straight to the Retroarch menu. I’ll admit that I find Function + X annoying as a way to get to the menu when a single-tap would be a perfectly fine option, but most people seem to prefer hotkeys. The Function button (at the top of the device) isn’t terribly well-located, but again, it’s manageable, and there isn’t a lot of real estate to work with on this thing.
My first tests indicated that SNES runs beautifully and cheats work. Of all the lower-end systems I tried, only Lynx didn’t run properly. (I’m betting it’s missing the bios file and I could drop that in.) Pico-8, doesn't work either, and I suspect that's also a missing bios somewhere. N64 ran decently and NDS ran pretty well (though the screen is very small for it), which says they’ve done a good job of optimizing the system settings. It’s easily on par with the RG35XX-H in terms of performance, just smaller.
My biggest complaint about BTN is that it doesn’t let you hide unused icons in the games system list, so there’s an overwhelming list of systems and half of them are empty. It does have a game search (and favorites list), though. I might eventually try Spruce or one of the other custom OS options, but I'll admit I kinda love the Mario theme BTN offers.
Overall: This is finally something that I think can take the place of the Powkiddy Q90, a candy bar that's reasonably comfortable to play on that can fit into pretty much any pocket, but is cheap enough you don't mind if something happens to it. It plays more systems and fixes a bunch of flaws the older system had (it plays SNES perfectly, it upscales GBA properly, and can even manage some N64 and DS). And even buying a fresh SD card to load separately, you can’t argue with the price. ($30 on AliExpress)
It came with a case, a charging cable, and a USB-C-to-headset dongle. (It doesn’t have a headset jack.) I think I may have gotten a slightly defective power button—it doesn’t depress. I can press on it to turn the system on or off, but I’m not sure what it’s actually registering, and that’s somewhat unnerving. It’s reasonably comfortable to hold, and I think I actually find it more comfortable than the Miyoo Mini+ because the horizontal layout means there’s less need to wrap your fingers awkwardly around it.
I lost track that I had ordered this without an SD card, so I tried swapping in the SD card from my Miyoo Mini+, only to discover that one had started to go bad. So I’m going to need to flash fresh SD cards for both of them, irritatingly. Ah, well, at least that means I can put my Ideal Roms List on from the get-go.
There was a lot of complaining that the stock OS had badly optimized emulators and features, so in turn there’s a grand selection of alternate operating systems, and I decided to go ahead with the “Better Than Nothing” update to stock. It keeps the standard Miyoo menu (with “Native Menu” access to Retroarch) but also has standalone Retroarch cores where the hotkeys take you straight to the Retroarch menu. I’ll admit that I find Function + X annoying as a way to get to the menu when a single-tap would be a perfectly fine option, but most people seem to prefer hotkeys. The Function button (at the top of the device) isn’t terribly well-located, but again, it’s manageable, and there isn’t a lot of real estate to work with on this thing.
My first tests indicated that SNES runs beautifully and cheats work. Of all the lower-end systems I tried, only Lynx didn’t run properly. (I’m betting it’s missing the bios file and I could drop that in.) Pico-8, doesn't work either, and I suspect that's also a missing bios somewhere. N64 ran decently and NDS ran pretty well (though the screen is very small for it), which says they’ve done a good job of optimizing the system settings. It’s easily on par with the RG35XX-H in terms of performance, just smaller.
My biggest complaint about BTN is that it doesn’t let you hide unused icons in the games system list, so there’s an overwhelming list of systems and half of them are empty. It does have a game search (and favorites list), though. I might eventually try Spruce or one of the other custom OS options, but I'll admit I kinda love the Mario theme BTN offers.
Overall: This is finally something that I think can take the place of the Powkiddy Q90, a candy bar that's reasonably comfortable to play on that can fit into pretty much any pocket, but is cheap enough you don't mind if something happens to it. It plays more systems and fixes a bunch of flaws the older system had (it plays SNES perfectly, it upscales GBA properly, and can even manage some N64 and DS). And even buying a fresh SD card to load separately, you can’t argue with the price. ($30 on AliExpress)
