Modified retropie sold with case, relevant emulators & no games

deepshadow

I know this has been asked many times before but not in this context. Would it be possible to modify Retro Pie (remove emulators that do not allow being sold with hardware) set it up with a ready to go controller but only list a few games that allow distribution. Package that image on sd card ready to be inserted by customer into my new commodore 64 case?
From a retail perspective customers just want to plug and play.
This would be sold in the thousands and i would be happy to support Retro Pie per item sold.
If it is possible what would the list of emulators look like?, i.e if there were only a couple of emulators on the list then i guess it would be a waste of time!

dankcushions

if you removed everything that doesn't have a non-commercial license, then yes it could be sold.

i think it would still be a shitty thing to do, though. whilst the license allows it, it would be the seller getting paid (indirectly or directly) for leaching off the work of this community. it also introduces money and entitlement to retropie. if i'd paid for something, i'd want a certain level of support and quality.

From a retail perspective customers just want to plug and play.

retropie is not ready or suited for these customers.

This would be sold in the thousands and i would be happy to support Retro Pie per item sold.

you would personally support 1000s of users independently? how well do you know the product? how would you stop them asking support via retropie's channels? would you remove retropie's name/web address throughout the code?

@deepshadow said in Modified retropie sold with case, relevant emulators & no games:

If it is possible what would the list of emulators look like?, i.e if there were only a couple of emulators on the list then i guess it would be a waste of time!

i'm definitely not going to help you do this :) as a start, it would not have any SNES emulator.

deepshadow

I've obviously offended you! Sorry, it was just a question that's all!

dankcushions

i'm not offended and i answered your question :)

deepshadow

@dankcushions
Thank you for your answer. i didn't intend to make money off the backs of the dedicated workers of this community. It sounds terrible when you say it like that, i just wanted to give the customer something out of the box, then when they have learnt more about it they could download, from this site, the full version. If it had 5 working emulators with some home brew games - that would be something.
I think i'll just give them a blank sd card. I've read other posts and the replies have been terrible people saying they don't care and are still going to use Retro Pie - i'm not like that, i wanted to put it out there and see what people say.

herb_fargus

@deepshadow even if you removed all the non commercial emulators, all the emulationstation themes are derived from the simple theme in some way which carries a non commercial licence. It also does a disservice to the user as when (not if) their build breaks they're SOL as they don't know how it was set up in the first place, whereas if they set it up themselves they can always start from scratch.

I don't personally have any issue with people selling hardware but when they use retropie as added value to their product and pass on support to this forum, it's a pretty scummy thing to do. Thanks for respecting the licences

deepshadow

@herb_fargus Thank you for your reply, I think, if I were to do it, it would have to be a dedicated OS built just for my system. It sounds way to complicated to do it through Retropie!

markwkidd

If I buy a PC with ubuntu Linux preinatalled, it's not leaching off of the Linux community. Even if I use the ubuntu support forums.

herb_fargus

@markwkidd let's not have this discussion again.

markwkidd

@herb_fargus said in Modified retropie sold with case, relevant emulators & no games:

@markwkidd let's not have this discussion again.

If someone posts here in good faith about copyright and licensing and is getting FUD responses, I'm probably going to try to address the FUD.

It's my personal goal in 2018 not to post the same thing in the same intellectual property thread more than once even if it seems no one understands what I'm saying (as we all have been tempted to do I'm sure). On the other hand, if a new poster comes around in good faith like this one who hasn't seen those prior conversations, then yes, I am going to point out what has been omitted by other posters including hyperbole like I did above if no one else will.