Why do people buy ready-made kits?

Damonmath

Definitely spoiled. I put myself through school and dug myself out of the trailer parks of NC and into the Condos of San Diego. lol I live at the Beach and do tend to be a snob. I grew up super poor and my therapist says it's ok to be a snob. :p

I just have no interest in more coding. especially if each and every ROM has to have some tweak to the emulator. Or have the overclocking tweaked. Then there is the overheating of the UI video support on NeoGeo. Honestly, My retrofreak can handle everything but the super early stuff, anything past PS1 or N64, or MAME / FBA. It is NeoGeo, MAME and FBA games that I am after. Those are not present on Pandora's JAMMA boards.

Sounds more like this project has major issues and the original creators are AWOL. Good start but not even close to prime time.

My biggest worry for the retailer, and this has nothing to do with being lazy, is that he is offering complete cabinets with monitors and 58,000+ games for $4k. Imagine their surprise when that boot drive crashes over and over again on that machine. Lawsuits people, lawsuits.

It's not that I'm entitled or spoiled or lazy... I purchased an advertised product for well over $500 and received garbage.

mediamogul

@damonmath said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

Sounds more like this project has major issues and the original creators are AWOL.

You're exaggerating the situation greatly and the creators are right here at any time to help with problems as they arise. That said, tens of thousands of people have downloaded RetroPie for free, set everything up in a few hours and have little to no issues. You unfortunately got taken by a scam artist who didn't know what he was doing and left you in a bad position. It has nothing to do with the RetroPie project.

Guys like the one who got you are a dime a dozen and are just trying to make a quick buck off the back of hardworking programmers. You should really consider yourself lucky that you got your money back and take it as a lesson learned. You've made your position clear to the contrary, but if you ever decide to set your system up correctly from the ground up, this community is always willing to help.

Damonmath

No doubt about the community. I'm not knocking you guys. And I agree that I got lucky. Sadly though I have more than enough skill to setup from scratch, but that wasn't the point. The point is that retailers should not be selling arcades using ES as their setup. That's the scam part. It's not a retail product or the creators would be profiting from it. From what I've read this was never intended for commercial application. Yet here I am complaining about a commercial application.

I purchased an actual hand built JAMMA setup out of Canada from Retro Active Arcades as well and expect it's delivery in Feb. This cost well over 3k and is guaranteed to not have bad/repeat/foreign ROM or UI issues. This is a full blown arcade pedestal as opposed to a project box or full stand up arcade (w/monitor).

When playing retro games one should be more concerned about the CRT it's being played on or the lag from inputs, as opposed to whether the boot drive will hold up for one more round.

Get what I'm saying? If you are going to sell a product, it needs to be fully vetted first and not just a kit with a bunch of free ROMs thrown in. The analogy I used was imagine buying a pre-built model airplane. But then receiving a model airplane shell with too many parts to count or manage and no instruction manual. A customer should never be asked by the retailer to pull an SD Card and flash drive and then allow a remote connection to their personal computer so he can tinker with the chips... and then blame you when he can't fix it.

That was my experience. Super awesome box, terrible internal software.

BTW - if any of you on here have a clean (no dupes, no foreign language, no broken ROMs) working RetroPie setup with Comic book theme and videos galore... hit me up. That's what I am looking for. A working clean crash free version of ES, along with the means to play the games (joystick box for 2 players).

markwkidd

@mediamogul said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

Sounds more like this project has major issues and the original creators are AWOL.

I think Damonmouth is referring to the arcade kit as 'this project', not RetroPie :)

dankcushions

@damonmath said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

BTW - if any of you on here have a clean (no dupes, no foreign language, no broken ROMs) working RetroPie setup with Comic book theme and videos galore... hit me up. That's what I am looking for. A working clean crash free version of ES, along with the means to play the games (joystick box for 2 players).

in case it's not already clear, any kind of pre-loaded paid-for device is nothing to do with us and in fact almost certainly breaking various retropie and retropie adjacent licenses: https://retropie.org.uk/about/legal/

that also means you can't ask for one here.

your pandora's box works relatively great because it limits itself to <5% of what retropie does, breaks the final burn alpha license (the emulator underneath, which cannot be sold), and comes preloaded with pirated software.

a project (say, retropie) that doesn't break these laws can't curate the end-user experience like that, with all the developers in the world.

mediamogul

@damonmath said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

BTW - if any of you on here have a clean (no dupes, no foreign language, no broken ROMs) working RetroPie setup with Comic book theme and videos galore... hit me up.

Requesting pirated material is explicitly not allowed here. You need to read the forum rules.

Damonmath

Yes, I am referring to arcade kits, not RetroPie.

And that's what I figured about the legality of all of this. The retailer I purchased from is breaking the law.

Below is what I experienced and why I'm soured on all of this.

Imagine getting a beautiful graphical box with 2 joysticks, 8 buttons each and a trackball (w/leds). You fire it up and wait 15 minutes for all the Roms to load (no exaggeration), the screen is black and the ROMs are listed by .zip filename centered with no preview, no logo, not even a date. Some ROMs are labeled "[BIOS - Super Mario], or ct_hd2_plus, and neither of those ROMs will launch. You see a black screen then back to the list, or you get this lovely screen of death with what looks like a water bong/joystick. Finally I find that ROM that I've been waiting to play since I was 8... Indian Jones and Temple of Doom on MAME. But there are 4 sets to choose from. So I pick the first one and CRASH. Can't reboot from the terminal (screen is literally frozen at this point), so I am forced to flip the switch (which has now corrupted something in the boot drive) to shut down. I then fire it back up and wait another 15 minutes just to try Set 2 of 4 of the same game. This time it fires up, but upon exit, CRASH again! This went on with just about every game I launched until the boot drive said NO MAS! and died.

As a UX Designer I was beyond pissed at this setup. Not a single minute of joy ever occurred in the 6 days I owned this box. Loved to look at it, but have fire in my heart with each flip of the switch.

quicksilver

@damonmath It sucks you had to find out the hard way how shady some of these retailers can be. I spent about 30 minutes setting up my raspberry pi following the instructions off the wiki page. It has worked flawlessly except for the parts that I have messed up myself (I like to tinker too much sometimes). I have no computer background but I am a quick study. The irony is that you probably wasted more time trying to get a system that worked out of the box than if you had set it up yourself. I hope your next set up is less of a headache for you.

Damonmath

@quicksilver Thank you!

Yes indeed, I wasted a weekend trying to get someone else's kit to work properly, which it never did. My personal project is my RetroFreak console. Grabbing ROMs and loading up that little GEM is the full extent I'm willing to go to play video games. These are video games guys, video games!!! lol

As for tinkering, I did replace all the joysticks and buttons on my Pandora's box and purchased a 17" CRT monitor with VGA so the lag would dissipate. I have an electrical engineering background as well as graphic design. I sold my house in August and am currently living in a one bedroom by the beach. I sold all my wood working tools to my X-wife in the divorce (yes, sold ;) ). So I have no tools to build a great setup. I was hoping my Pandora's box was deep enough for a larger 2100-1 jamma board, but it's too shallow. The attractiveness of a 19,000+ ROM setup sounded too good to be true and indeed was.

I am happy I stumbled up this exact thread. Forum rules aside... sorry for breaking the rules moderators, you have proven what I figured after the 80th crash of the system, that this is a hobbyist kit and not an actual arcade setup. Reminds me of all the flash video games I made in my youth (I'm 43). You can only do so much with the technology at hand, and any real video games are written in something else anyways. I spent a lot of time making UI controls in flash that are obsolete today. Nothing retro about flash lol

I'll let this be my last entry as I no longer own a RetroPie and don't want to sour anyone else with my experience. You guys have a great community here and I appreciate not being attacked for not exactly shouting to the rooftops over ES and RetroPie.

See in the arcades!
Damon

dankcushions

@damonmath

Reminds me of all the flash video games I made in my youth (I'm 43). You can only do so much with the technology at hand, and any real video games are written in something else anyways.

rediculous. (older) games are written mostly in C/asm, both of which you’ll find throughout the emulators in retropie.

retropie is completely capable of being everything you want if you set it up to be so. you’re not going to, that’s fine, but it’s nothing to do with technology.

a flash developer? perfect.

jonnykesh

@damonmath

I'll let this be my last entry as I no longer own a RetroPie and don't want to sour anyone else with my experience. You guys have a great community here and I appreciate not being attacked for not exactly shouting to the rooftops over ES and RetroPie.

You never owned a "RetroPie" There is no such thing. You bought a shitty setup from a scammer and came here to moan about it.
Why? I really don't know. Especially since you expressed zero interest in fixing it yourself. Why should you? You paid a shit-load of cash for it.

mediamogul

@damonmath said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

My personal project is my RetroFreak console. Grabbing ROMs and loading up that little GEM is the full extent I'm willing to go to play video games.

Transferring ROMs to a microSD card does not a project make. Wanting something more limited that doesn't require any effort on your part is one thing, but calling it a "personal project" is dressing it up a bit don't you think?

Damonmath

You guys are calling this pile of code a "project" yet it breaks 24/7. How is that interesting or even fun? It's not.

I'm a gamer not a game player builder. You guys are getting bent over my opinion.Hilarious.

I'm not a flash developer. I happen to know the following:

AS 1,2, 3
JavaScript
HTML 5
CSS 3
Objective C
Java
C#
C++

But like I've been saying over and over again.I have no interest in resurrecting ROMS using an emulator that needs to be baby sat.

RetroFreak got it right. ES and RetroPie are still a work in progress. That's fair.

jonnykesh

@damonmath You are so full of it. It does not break if it it set up properly.
You are actually criticising software that some idiot messed up then sold to you at a massive cost.
You are the joke in this scenario.

mediamogul

@damonmath said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

You guys are getting bent over my opinion.Hilarious.

We're getting "bent" over your attitude. You're obviously just here to antagonize, as you continue to trash the work of this project, while making incredibly flawed assumptions as to the source of your problems. Not to mention the fact that you don't even have a RetroPie system anymore. Why don't we just agree to disagree and end the discussion here before it continues to spiral and someone gets killed with a trident.

cafarellidigital

@damonmath you claim to have knowledge in a variety of languages, yet you couldn't get retropie to work. The first time I built retropie (when the Raspberry Pi B was brand new), I didn't know any code and got it up and running in a week. That was way before all of the significant advancements that have been made in making it easier to setup Retropie. There's tons of documentation on here and other sites, and plenty of people willing to help you (just as they helped me).

So either you're a lying troll, or you're an inept maniac.

Damonmath

Well so much for a great community.

Guys - are you reading inept? I have no interest in learning this buggy setup. I'm interested in finished products like RetroFreak, not DIY. Why is that so hard to understand?

The guy that sold me my setup was inept obviously. But how would I know that without a little research on places like I don't know... HERE!!!

Glad to know a$$holes still exist online.

jonnykesh

@damonmath You really are something special... Go moan to your therapist and leave us to it.
Goodbye and good riddance.

dankcushions

always be suspicious of people who type out their CV unprompted...

...and flash developers.

jonnykesh

@dankcushions Hahahaha! When someone has to try and prove how smart and clued-in they are, you know you're gonna have a bad time.
I was following this thread for a while any totally unsure what this guy actually wanted. He made it pretty clear in his first post he did not want to fix it or start from scratch.
You gave the best answer: 1. Get a refund, 2. Nothing, because you don't want to.