Miyoo Mini Plus Setup Guide

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus here: https://joeysrh.link/ALI_MMPLUS

Looking for my review of the Miyoo Mini Plus? Click here.

Recommended Accessories

• MicroSD Card: 128GB or 256GB (with the platforms this plays, you would be safe with either of these options)
• MicroSD Card Reader: UGREEN SD Card Reader
• Charger: UGREEN 65W Charger (use the USB-A port for charging)

Initial Setup Guide

Like my previous setup guides, everything will be time stamped, so feel free to jump around to the spots you need. However, if this is a brand new device to you, I’d suggest starting from the beginning as you might miss something.

As you’ve likely guessed from the video title, we’re going to be installed OnionOS as our operating system. If you’re looking to stay with the stock operating system, this guide won’t be for you. So why OnionOS? Well, it’s the best available operating system for the Miyoo Mini Plus right now, has the best community support and is the most feature rich.

Preparation

Now as always, before we start, you need to have a branded SD card and a branded SD card reader. Do not use the stock SD card or reader that it came with, throw that out, and yes, that includes the ROM card. For those that missed my previous videos, they’re unbranded, low quality and prone to failure – both the ROMS and the SD cards.

Unlike the Anbernic devices, the Miyoo has only one slot for an SD card, so I would highly suggest a 128GB SD card as your go to option here and you’ll also need an SD card reader.

Now, the last thing you need is your ROM and BIOS library. If you just want a big list of games and then you can curate them yourself if you’d like, there’s something called the Tiny Best Set that you can find on Google. Read the instructions and grab the version that matches your SD card size and the artwork if you want. The artwork is optional, as OnionOS has built in scraping now, but it saves a ton of time if you have a large library. The folders in the zip are all setup to work with OnionOS already, so you can just drag and drop and off you go when we get to that step. Just in case, here’s a link to what your folder names should be for what OnionOS needs them to be.

Okay, so you have your SD card, SD card reader and your ROMS and BIOS files ready to go. Let’s move on.

Software

As far as software goes, the only thing we need is Rufus. Head to the Rufus website, and download the portable Rufus tool. This is going to help us format our SD card as FAT32 – especially if your card is above 32GB, but just Rufus to avoid issues.

Firmware

Alright, so this is important. Turn on your Miyoo, and head to settings, about and check your firmware version. If yours is not 202303262339 or newer (the numbers are a date), then we need to update your firmware to this version first before we can do anything else. Do not skip this step. If it is that firmware already, you can safely skip to the next section.

While your device is powered off, download the firmware zip from this website (https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D4978471_09235444_837617). Extract the zip.

Make sure that your SD card is formatted as FAT32. If it’s not, follow the below instructions. If it is, you can skip this.

Firmware Upgrade

Connect your SD card to your PC using the SD card reader. Open up Rufus, and make sure the device listed is the SD card that you connected – should match the drive size. Now under boot selection, change it to Non bootable. Change the label to whatever you want, I leave mine as the drive size, so 128GB. Then checking near the bottom, make sure file system is FAT32 or Large FAT32. Click Start – you might get warnings about partitions, data etc., just go ahead and yes to all of them to get started.

Should be quick and it’ll format your SD card as FAT32.

Copy and paste the .img file from the sugarsync.com zip that we extracted onto the root of your MicroSD card. Put the SD card into the powered off Miyoo Mini Plus, and then attach a USB charging cable. Make sure the USB charging cable is not USB C to USB C and whatever charger it’s plugged into is 5V max. In a few seconds, the rocket icon will appear, as it’s upgrading – don’t remove the charging cable. Once you see the charging icon, you’re done and it’s safe to remove the charging cable.

Turn the device on, and head to check your firmware version, just make sure it’s updated to 202303262339 or newer and now we can proceed.

Formatting your SD card

We’re going to do the exact same steps again.

Connect your SD card to the PC using the SD card reader. Now let’s format the card as FAT32.

Open up Rufus, and make sure the device listed is the SD card that you connected – should match the drive size. Now under boot selection, change it to Non bootable. Then checking near the bottom, you can change the volume label to whatever you want, and make sure file system is FAT32. Click start – might get warnings about partitions, data etc., just go ahead and yes to all of them to get started. Should be quick and it’ll format your SD card as FAT32.

One weird thing. You might get a Windows defender popup about a potential issue with the autorun files – don’t worry, it’s a false positive. But we don’t need those files anyway, so head into the SD card drive and delete the autorun files that are there. 

Installing OnionOS

Okay, the SD card is ready, let’s get our operating system files. Head to this Github link and download the latest release. You’ll see it in the latest post, under Assets, it should say Onion-vX.X.X.zip. Download that.

Okay so, grab that zip we just downloaded and move it or cut and paste it to the SD card. Now, extract it here, and make sure you have 7 folders showing at the root of the SD card. .tmp_update, BIOS, Media, miyoo, miyoo354, RetroArch, and Themes. If you don’t see all 7, check your file explorer settings to show hidden files. Delete the zip. Now you can safely eject the SD card.

Pop the SD card into your powered off device, and turn it on. Let it do its thing for a few minutes until the screen pops up with a thank you message and a heart. A to next a few times and we’re at the main screen. Make note of the hotkeys if you want as well – it’s the menu button and any other button to get the combination. 

First Start Up

Since we’re here, on the verified screen, let’s go ahead and choose the emulators we’re going to be using so it can add them and create the folders for them for our Roms. Just go through the list and select what you’ll be using – don’t worry, you can add or remove more later if you want.

Now for the apps, and these are basically extra programs and features to enhance your device. I chose clock, but it’s actually not needed now that the device has it built in, and I’ll show that later. File explorer, FTP server, GameSwitcher, http files server, Onion OTA update, and Random Game are great choices. But don’t feel like they’re necessary, you can add them later and test them all if you want.

When you’re all done choosing emulators and apps, press the start button and it’ll show a summary of all your choices. Press start again and it’ll install them and reboot. 

Adding Roms & BIOS

Okay, let’s finally add our roms and bios files. Turn off the device and pop out the SD card, and connect it back to your PC.

So this is very easy. If you grabbed the Tiny Best Set I showed earlier, all the folders are already named correctly, so as long as you installed the right emulator with package manager, it’ll show on the device. Just copy and paste your rom folders into the Roms directory. Make sure that the folder name is correct, and inside the platform folder, is the files, not more folders. So if I go into the GBA folder, I see my games, not more folders. 

For BIOS, it’s the exact same, copy your BIOS files into the BIOS folder. No subfolders. So, for a Playstation 1 bios, which is required, you would copy that bin file right into the BIOS folder. That’s it. 

Refresh Game List

Once you’ve loaded everything up, safely eject your card and pop it right back into the device. Mine has been pretty good about recognizing everything immediately, but if not, press select in the games tab in the main menu to refresh your roms.

Artwork

Alright, now let’s get some thumbnails. And thank God for Wifi because if not, I’d have to show you how to use the skraper program all over again. Go into any platform, I’ll start with Gameboy. Press the Y button and scroll down to Scraper. Now you’re going to see four options, you can scrape the entire Gameboy list, just this game, configuration or exit. Let’s head to configuration.

If we check the sources, you’ll see three options, just leave them checked, that’s good. I’d suggest this next step, especially if you have a large library, but make a screenscraper.fr account and enter your username and password here. Press the X button to bring up a keyboard. I use the keyboard word loosely here as this is really a test of patience. Even Ghandi would lose his mind with this thing. Let me save you the trouble – if you make a mistake, don’t bother trying to delete the letter, push X to close the keyboard and then B to exit, then come back in and try again until you get it perfectly. I was losing my mind doing this, and seeing it again while editing, I’m getting heavy PTSD.

Once you finally enter your username and password perfectly, push A on back to configuration menu. Now there’s an option here to enable background scraping, and I would highly suggest that. Scraping takes forever, and you’ll want to do other things while it’s going on. Just be aware, it does tax the CPU a bit, so some games will run slower while it’s happening. Head back to the main menu, and scrape all Gameboy roms.

And so when that’s done, you’ll see thumbnails popup on the right side of your gameslist. Repeat this process for each platform you have. 

Themes

You can jump back and forth between different themes installed on the device and find one you like. Great way to customize your device further if you want.

Power Button

The last thing I want to cover is how the power and menu button works. If you tap the power button, it puts the device into sleep mode – which is basically just disabling the buttons and turning off the screen. It does not put it into a low power state, so your battery will drain in this mode. But if you hold the power button, you’ll get a popup that it’s saving your state and shutting down. If you push and hold the power button to turn it back on, you’re right back into your game from that state. So use sleep mode for short periods, and power off for everything else.

For the menu button, if you have gameswitcher installed like we did before, a single press of the menu button saves your state and opens gameswitcher, to easily move around to other games. If you push select on this screen, you can also see your time played in that game at the top. Now, if you hold the menu button instead, it’ll save state and take you back to the menu instead. 

Now just jump into some games and have fun. For normal usage, that’s all you need to do and that was the main point of the guide. Get you up and running and now the world is your oyster.