RetroEngine Sigma (?) - Crowdfunding campaing.

Dochartaigh

@mediamogul
And they're using a spray-painted Sega Genesis 4-Port USB Hub as the housing (MSRP $19.99)... lol

mediamogul

It's similar, but is a different casing. It looks like it's made of much cheaper plastic too.

ETAPRIME

EDIT looks like its running the H3 Allwinner Cpu same as a few of the Orange Pi boards

I'm willing to bet it runs a custom board based on the Amlogic s805 maybe s905
I heard something about the cores not being per-installed so they will probably get away with selling this thing.
It really sucks for the devs who made emulation station and all the core devs.

mrbwa1

The USB ports on the side give it away... It's an Orange Pi Lite board:

http://www.orangepi.org/orangepilite/

ETAPRIME

@mrbwa1 I was just looking over the specs they added, and yes its running the allwinner H3 cpu.

herb_fargus

My thoughts on the matter.

https://m.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/5gtttn/comment/davz6sz

There will always be another greedy scumbag. If I had no ethics or morals I would be a wealthy man.

Happens every year and really kills my motivation for the project.

mrbwa1

@herb_fargus It never ceases to amaze me that majority people have no motivation to tinker with things these days. My coding skills may be lacking, so I can't contribute to the project as much as I would like, but I try to spend some time to at least help folks on the forums when I have some spare time.

This strikes me as highly unethical because they are raising money on the pretense that they are building a project, but it just appears to be an off-the-shelf board running off-the-shelf software. I don't fault Nintendo for the NES Classic. It's their IP and they did an in-house design and software (Haven't tried one, but wonder if it's up to the level of the emus in Retropie).

Frankly, it's not hard to put a Pi in a case and copy the image to an SD card. Even wheen you need help, there is the forums and folks put together some pretty good videos on their own time just to help out.

The only good that could come out of this is more support on the Orange Pi boards, but I suspect that this team isn't really developers, so it'll probably be a broken system hoping for a community to prop it up (yet alienating the community where most of the IP is being tajken from to sell the product).

XVO

I'm thinking about to start an indygogo myself.
The package contains a rpi 3, an alibaba style snes controller, a alibaba phone charger an a link to this site.
For just a spectecular price of 65 bucks :p....

On topic.
The reason I hate the indygogo platform is that most projects are cancelled or stolen from other projects.

psyke83

@BuZz,

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but it seems that this device is running on a version of RetroPie, though it's not clear precisely what came preinstalled on the device, as it seemed to require a lengthy install process. It seems to be an Orange Pi and it might use a modified RetroPie-Setup script that builds all packages from source.

You can see it in action here (but ultimately fails to work):

PokeEngineer

@psyke83

Yeah, it is a Orange Pi that runs a custom flavor of RetroPie called RetrOrangePi. It even states on the RetrOrangePi website not to include the custom image in a commercial product... The people maintaining the RetroEngine Sigma had the time to make it pretty, but they didn't have the time to look into the legality of the project. What the heck...

psyke83

The site does say to support the original Retropie/Libretro devs, which is good, but what concerns me is that there's no source available. RetroPie-Setup's base license (applicable to scripts alone) is GPL, so not providing source to their fork is probably a violation.

BuZz

jonnykesh

@buzz Is it wrong that I am enjoying this? Read some of the comments https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retroengine-sigma-mini-video-game-console-cool#/comments

BuZz

@jonnykesh I feel a little bad for the backers, as they were lied to. But it's a real shame that projects like this get so much publicity and money. I'm not at all surprised it turned out like this.

twd

@buzz but there showing retropie as a thum nail in the campaign...... There backers were either Nieve or stupid

BuZz

@twd unfortunately people believe what they read. It got lots of press. They didn't ever say they were using RetroPie. In fact I think they denied it.

I hope people can get refunds and that the creators don't get to retire on all their illicit money.

psyke83

@buzz said in RetroEngine Sigma (?) - Crowdfunding campaing.:

@twd unfortunately people believe what they read. It got lots of press. They didn't ever say they were using RetroPie. In fact I think they denied it.

I hope people can get refunds and that the creators don't get to retire on all their illicit money.

You're right - they tried to deny it. Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/5gtttn/whats_remulations_thoughts_on_the_retroengine/dbggwmm/

twd

Bloody beatniks

PokeEngineer

I edited this comment out

BuZz

@psyke83 regarding the source - I agree. They may be annoyed by the RetroEngine Sigma "ripping off their work" - but they are confused. It's not just "their work" since they are just a fork of RetroPie which of course respects the licences of all the 3rd software we include. It's lots of peoples work, and the licences need to be respected.

Although the RetroOrange Pi website mention RetroPie when downloading, it's not actually that clear that they are a fork of RetroPie on the site in general. But in any case, they should provide the source - it's not up to them to decide if they want to share the source or not. Also I believe some of their changes are also not published - last time I looked the sources they provided were not enough to build all the binaries they include.