Miyoo A30 Review – Horizontal Retro Gaming Handheld

The Miyoo A30 is the latest in the immensely popular series of their retro gaming handhelds. Will it live up to the hype of its previous vertical models or fall flat? Let’s find out in our Miyoo A30 review!

Unboxing the Miyoo A30

We start our Miyoo A30 review with a brief unboxing. Inside the hardshell case we have the Miyoo A30 portable retro gaming console, a user guide in English and Chinese, a USB Type-C charge cable and a Type-C to 3.5mm audio cable

Miyoo A30 Overview

Next in our Miyoo A30 review we take a closer look at the classic gaming handheld. The Miyoo A30 is available in four colours; Red and Golden shown here, Black, Black and White, and Grey. They measure around 5.0 x 2.2 x 0.59 inches (12.7 x 5.8 x 1.5 cm) and weigh 186g (0.41 lbs.).

The screen is a 2.8” IPS with a 640×480 resolution that is great for retro gaming. To the left are a D-Pad and a single analogue stick, and to the right are the usual gaming buttons.

On the right side is the power button, and the front has a single micro SD card slot for the OS and games. The top side has shoulder and trigger buttons, and in the middle is a Menu button, USB port for charging, and the volume buttons.

Miyoo A30 Technical Specifications

As part of our Miyoo A30 review let’s take a look at the technical specifications of this portable gaming handheld.

CPU	Allwinner A33, Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor up to 1.2Ghz
GPU	Mali-400 MP2
RAM	512MB
STORAGE	64GB micro SD card
DISPLAY	2.8-inch IPS, 640*480
BATTERY	BATTERY: 2600mAH, charging 5V/1.5A
OS	Linux
WIFI	2.4g
SIZE	5 x 2.2 x 0.59 inches (12.7 x 5.8 x 1.5cm)
WEIGHT	186g

Keeping it all running is a 2600mAh battery which will last you the usual 5 or so hours depending on usage.

Miyoo A30 OS & Menus

Like the Miyoo Mini Plus mobile gaming handheld, the Miyoo A30 runs on Linux with a fairly basic but usable menu system. We will briefly go over the frontend in our Miyoo A30 review.

You have the usual Recent and Favourites shortcuts to games which are always useful. Next we have the native games menu with systems including Arcade, Mega Drive, NeoGeo and WonderSwan.

The RetroArch menu has a wider selection of systems including Pico-8, NeoGeo CD and additional arcade emulators.

Simply select a system, browse the available games, pick one and you are straight into the action. Pressing the menu button while playing will present options depending whether you are using a native emulator or RetroArch. You will have access to features such as save states etc.

You have the Settings menu where you can configure the screen brightness, language and WiFi.

The menu system does the job just fine. It’s fast and easy to use. It’s unlikely Miyoo will update it as there are better custom firmwares such as Onion OS which we hope will be available for it.

Emulation Performance

For most the 8 and 16 bit systems you should have no problems with performance of the emulators. But we did see some slow down in a few Arcade and SNES games that can be usually fixed by increasing the CPU frequency in the settings. We will show some of these systems in our Final Thoughts part of our Miyoo A30 review. But first, let’s take a look at some of the more demanding systems found on the handheld.

GBA

The GBA emulators run very well. We tried a bunch of games and had no issues at all.

PS1

The PS1 emulator overall runs well. We tried our go to games Crash Bandicoot 3 and Gran Turismo and had no issues. You may find the odd one or two games with some issues but nothing major.

Dreamcast

On Dreamcast we see that Crazy Taxi 2 has sound lags which doesn’t give us hope for other games. We also tried Virtua Tennis 2 which was running very slow. Low demanding games will run but it’s quite disappointing for Dreamcast performance even when overclocked.

PSP

Like the Dreamcast, lower demanding games will work great, but even with GTA Vice City Stories we saw less than 30 frames per second which is not ideal. You can add some frame skipping and overclock to help improve things a bit.

Custom Firmware to the rescue!

We delayed our review for a while as the custom firmware Spruce OS was released, and it makes a very noticeable difference in performance. Arcade and SNES games have no issues and N64 and PS1 runs far smoother in the games we tried. As well as the performance increases we see a nice menu layout with a more organised setup including the options available.

In addition to Spruce OS there is also MinUI which recently had its initial release for the A30. It has a more basic frontend than say Spruce, there’s no preview screenshots or box art for example, just plain text menus for fast navigation. The cool thing is if you have other handhelds they may also run off the same install which is useful if you swap handhelds often

It is these custom firmwares that transform a handheld from something that we can’t recommend, to one that we can recommend. It will mean you have to install these custom firmwares yourself though. We have some guides on our Knowledge Base on how to install them

Final Thoughts

Time to sum up our Miyoo A30 review now. The Miyoo A30 is a mix of good and bad for me. As a very portable retro gaming handheld it feels about right. It will fit in your jeans pocket just fine. It’s great if you are travelling and want something quick to access and play on.

The performance for me is the main issue. We saw low performance on Dreamcast and PSP. Compared to say the Anbernic RG35XXSP or any H700 CPU based handheld, which are very similar in price to the A30, we see overall faster performance on those without having to overclock.

So if you plan to stick to the stock firmware I would recommend to consider something like the Anbernic handhelds. They have faster performance on stock firmware for around the same price. If custom firmware is an option for you, the improved user experience and performance you get with them makes the Miyoo A30 definitely one to consider.

Let us know what you think about the A30 in the comments. Do you plan on buying one? 

You can learn more about and buy the Miyoo A30 here.

That wraps up our Miyoo A30 review, we hope you have found it useful. Let us know what you think about the Miyoo A30 in the comments. Do you plan on buying one?