Why do people buy ready-made kits?

chubsta

Just a little conversation really, having got my first Pi just over a week ago and spending a fair bit of time getting everything up and running I wonder why so many people seem to go for the easy option and buy everything 'ready-made' with roms, joypad etc?

I bought a Pi and a memory card, read a lot and have an awesome system thanks to the devs and people here.

For me, although i love my retro games, this last week i have spent all my time messing with different configurations, themes, settings etc, only starting a game to see what it looks like. This is what i call fun, and i love understanding what i am doing and how everything works, there is nothing better than solving a problem, even if you have to ask for help. I knew nothing about the Pi but by following the Wiki and a couple of simple questions here everything is great (although i do now how to code various languages, albeit not Linux, so am not a newbie to computers)

But so many people miss out on that experience, they just buy a pack and plug it in and play, and if something goes wrong they don't really know what to do because they havent seen the steps in setting everything up. And where is the fun in just plugging something in?

I am not trying to show off or slag anyone off who has taken a different route to mine, just wondering why people went the route they did - purchase a full package or build your own from scratch - and if they wish they had done it differently. i know time is a big thing for a lot of people but i cant think of much better than learning new stuff (particularly after a hard day fitting new garden fence panels in the pouring rain like today) and with the Pi i cant wait to either get stuck into new project or start working on my own custom theme.

So, what route did you take, why, and what would you have done differently with hindsight?

mattrixk

@chubsta: I think you've pretty much answered your own question. People buy premade packs because it's easier. Just as there are lots of people that like to get into the guts of something to figure out how it works, there are many more that are just happy that it does, without caring how. It's why there are fewer car mechanics than car drivers. I can change a tire and keep my oil filled up, but I can't name the different parts of my engine, let alone fix it if something goes wrong.

When I was growing up I was content to put a cartridge in the MegaDrive and start playing, but I had friends that would tinker in old PCs for hours just to get games to work. At times it seemed they enjoyed that even more than playing the games. I never really understood that as a kid (the fact that I didn't actually have a PC probably didn't help matters). Now however, I spend more time tweaking my RetroPie setup than playing games on it.

Lots of people love tweaking and tinkering (I'm now one of them thanks to the RPi), but there are lots that don't. For those people, they are trading the knowledge of how something works for the convenience of someone else doing it for them. For some that is an even trade.

NB: Just to be clear, I bought the individual pieces and put it all together myself.

LS650

I bought an "all in 1" kit because I'd rather just pay an extra $10 or $20 than deal with the possible hassle of missing pieces, slow delivery, etc.

I paid a few dollars more, and got everything all nice and easy. Sometimes it's better to avoid a hassle than to save a few bucks.

FlyingTomahawk

@LS650

I don't think that he means "a kit" with all the adaptors and plugs. He probably meant a RPi with already pre-setup systems, roms and configuration so that you can plug and play.

mattrixk

@FlyingTomahawk That's what I guessed he was meaning too.

Gosenbach

I got all the bits and pieces from work for free and built the case out of my kid's legos.. love tinkering :) i can totally understand people wanting a "retro console" off the shelf tho. That it why there is the nes classic, atari flashback, and jakk games.

mattrixk

@Gosenbach I have something similar to this:

alt text at home, but it sucks, so I'm considering cannibalising it for a new case. It may work, it may not. If I break it, it's no great loss.

LS650

@FlyingTomahawk I think you're right - my mistake!

PetroRie

I got the RPi3 and installed RetroPie myself. I'm a real DIY guy, so buying a ready-made kit is a no-no for me. Beside what can go wrong? Even if you mess something up during the installation you just start over again. However, you can find so many tutorials on YouTube on how to install and configure RetroPie. I'm an IT guy so installing and configuring things is my job lol.

I already knew about the Raspberry but I never went looking into it. I wanted one of those Android handheld console's to play retro games. I almost bought one for 180USD but before I bought it I found an article about retrogaming on the Raspberry Pi. I bought the Pi with a 2.5AMP powersupply, 64GB SD card for like 60EUR. All I can say is I'm glad I bought the Pi, I'm having so much fun on it I prefer it over the PS4.

I think people buy ready-made kits because they're not tech-savvy or they don't know that they can install it themselves. I have seen ads on Facebook of companies who just made a custom case and sell it as a kit with the Pi preloaded with games. And people do like it. They believe that it's the product of the company while in reality it isn't, it's just a RPi3 in a custom made case pre-loaded with roms. In my opinion that kinda sucks, I mean yeah a custom case can look badass, but selling RetroPie with preloaded roms and passing everything out as its yours???

Like I said before not everyone is tech-savvy. You've seen topics in here of people who came and asked for rom sites, while it takes you literally just a couple seconds to find them via Google. Sometimes you'll see topics from people who couldn't get the roms to run because the files have a different file extension for an example a 7z extension, or a zip file with multiple rom files (usually from romsets). It's nothing to be ashamed for in my opinion. Every person is special and talented in some kind of way.

On YouTube I've seen many people hating RetroPie. Calling it laggy, buggy, mentioning input lag etc. But these are the kind of people who couldn't follow the easy installation steps and they end up blaming it on the system itself while in fact computers do whatever we command them.

MadRikXIV

Some people buy ready made kits, the same reason some buy ready made PCs, they don't know how to do it, not aware they can do it.

Many no doubt see the FaceAche and internet ads and think, ooohh, its advertised, look at what these people make, they aren't steaing anyone elses work it must be legit...

Me, I put mine together as I link to tinker and fiddle, once I work out how to get a GPIO pin to respond as an escape key, I'll be happy, as well as looking to re wire my control ports as I have no faith in my soldering.

Busy compiling and tidying up the Roms, and looking at shaders, scan lines, fiddling with the wifi, getting it alll to run from the USB stick, I enjoyed the building and poking and googling.

Strange thing is, I built one in a Mega Drive, then saw a Famicom available, so want to do another, ordered parts, hoping to win a FAmicom so I can start on it, so far, I may of spent about 20 minutes testing out some games, the tinkering and building is the fun part with the 'Look what I did'.

Once the Famicom is built, I may look at the pi zero options, enough good guides, I want a portable one as well, if my soldering skills can cope.

PetroRie

@MadRikXIV Bro, don't forget to post pics of your projects in the Projects and Themes section.

If your soldering skills are good you just can use the RPi3 and desolder the USB and the RJ45 ports and wire them. The RPi3 should be flat as a Pi 0.

BuZz

RetroPie has become a lot easier to set-up and use over the last couple of years. Installation/setup has been simplified, documentation improved, whilst retaining the ability to customise.

That said, In some respects I'm not happy in what RetroPie has become.

I never wanted to make RetroPie some ready to use off the shelf thing for people to purchase - and when I see all the sales of RetroPie and roms, it is quite demotivating.

The popularity of RetroPie has brought with it all the trouble. I understand how Kodi feel with people selling "Fully Loaded" Kodi boxes.

If RetroPie ever gets a lawsuit due to all the illegal 3rd party sellers, don't expect me to fight it.

chubsta

@BuZz

I know i am new here, but my opinion on 'ready-made' stuff in general, not just in the case of Retropie, is that you never value something so much if you have it handed to you on a plate.

Fair enough, most of us aren't going to go out and build our houses, cars and washing machines from parts, but in the case of hobbyist stuff such as this you should have to work at least a little at it and i get a real kick of talking to my other half about the progress and showing off what i can say is my work - i may not have built the Pi or written the software but it is like a chef not growing and harvesting his ingredients - you take a load of bits and make something beautiful out of it.

Understanding the effort it takes to make a fully optimised system also helps understand and appreciate the hard-work that has been done before you to design and write the software, and in my view it is important people do this and realise that a hell of a lot of people have worked very very hard so i can play old games, be it starting with Nicola Salmoria deciding to build mame, or the webmasters here so i have somewhere to ask my inane newbie questions!

I salute you all!

PetroRie

@BuZz Thats why I never wanted RetroPie to become populair, don't get me wrong on this one lol but what I meant to say is once something gets hyped up there is always something that will destroy it. Suddenly Retro gaming is sooooooo cool. I really hate it.

I've seen a couple Facebook ads of people selling an entire kit with "pre-installed" games, I really believe they're a danger towards this project. I don't know if reporting them will do anything, they still will sell it.

In my opinion the sellers shouldn't include games. If you cannot figure out how to download roms you really shouldn't use RetroPie. It would be very fair of the sellers if they donated a small percentage of the money they made to the RetroPie project because the money they're making is because of the FREE software they got. I think that never happens, people can be so freaking greedy. Those people really don't care about moral an values they only care about $$$ the more the better.

timabc

Married, children, job, commitments beyond tinkering on a computer. Time is fleeting, so kit makes sense.

Damonmath

I actually play video games as opposed to building systems to play video games. I already own a clone Pandora's Box 5S and love it. My Pandora's Box arcade setup plays all the games well, no lag and even has built in shaders and smoothers. It has both VGA and HDMI out. I replaced all the buttons and joysticks with Sanwa competition accessories (silent joysticks and pressure sensitive buttons). It has never crashed nor shown any signs of breaking. Although the Roms are knock offs and there are no title animation sequences, I do have video previews that run without overheating the system. This cost me $99 total and has 999 games (JAMMA board).

I bought a pre-built RetroPie system online ($500) from a guy who builds them out (brand new from scratch). I know nothing about RetroPie or emulationstation or Pi. I was excited at the prospect of 19,000+ games. What I did not expect was a half built and broken system. From day one the SD Micro chip was coded incorrectly and you have to manually type emulationstation at the terminal prompt in order to start ES. I thought this was odd and had the actual developer walk me through how to open the arcade, locate the underside of a tiny (Pi) computer board to locate an SD Micro card that I had to remove with pliers, load into my MAC and change a line of code on the boot drive. This corrected my boot up... but ... N64 doesn't work at all and there is no screen data (images, video, marquees, descriptions). Exiting a game is at your own risk as it can crash the whole system or leave the screen black for long periods of time.

I started digging into what the heck it was I had just dropped 500 bones on... I found Stephen's Scraper and ES themes. I tried Comic book, it didn't take... not even the font. So I tried scraping using Stephen's. My system is on 4.3.8 so I figured I was good to go. At first Neo Geo wasn't showing up (my favorite roms)... oh yeah those were coded wrong and can only be viewed while having the video accelerator turned off. So I turn it off... now the other videos look like garbage and the system is crashing under the heat. So I turn the accelerator back on and live with no video in my favorite emulator.

Sigh...

So I go back to trying to clean up Roms as there are so many broken, duplicate and foreign language Roms that just don't need to be there. I get about half-way through using the file manager and a keyboard to try to delete Roms. So far so good. I have every folder all nice and clean except for MAME and FBA (which are huge). Then disaster. For no known reason (even the Dev is stumped), it all came crashing down and I now have a permanent boost:: error within Roms/atari2600.

I turned to the guy who I bought the system from. He is (still broken as I am typing) being super helpful and attentive, but nothing and I mean nothing is working to fix it. I do not own a PC, so he can't remote into it from there. I own a MAC Book Pro but it's old and has only 53g of available space so I can't even download a new boot file to re-image the drive (118 gigs required). He has been working remotely to try and fix both the boot drive and flash drive to no avail. I offered to pay him to simply clean up all Roms, finish the build, add the scraped data (including video) , change the theme to comic book (carbon now) and then lock me out in kiosk mode so I can save me from myself.

He didn't answer my offer. I really really want to love this setup. I put together the external arcade artwork and love how it looks physically. But as an arcade system it is the worst I have ever attempted to play.

HELP!! It's only been a few days since I've owned it, it's already been broken more than working, and has never worked as advertised from day one. I'm trying to be patient, but I did drop a good bit of money on this system and so far it is an over priced paper weight.

Advice?

ps. For context, I am a UX Designer and a Web Developer. I am in no way interested in steps on how to fix this myself. I have cash and expect a working product. My hobbies are spent in other areas and for me video gaming is a past time in the art of gaming not game building.

dankcushions

@damonmath
step 1: get a refund

there's no step 2, because of:

ps. For context, I am a UX Designer and a Web Developer. I am in no way interested in steps on how to fix this myself. I have cash and expect a working product. My hobbies are spent in other areas and for me video gaming is a past time in the art of gaming not game building.

markwkidd

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

I actually play video games as opposed to building systems to play video games. I already own a clone Pandora's Box 5S and love it. My Pandora's Box arcade setup plays all the games well, no lag and even has built in shaders and smoothers. It has both VGA and HDMI out. I replaced all the buttons and joysticks with Sanwa competition accessories (silent joysticks and pressure sensitive buttons). It has never crashed nor shown any signs of breaking. Although the Roms are knock offs and there are no title animation sequences, I do have video previews that run without overheating the system. This cost me $99 total and has 999 games (JAMMA board).

I bought a pre-built RetroPie system online ($500) from a guy who builds them out (brand new from scratch). I know nothing about RetroPie or emulationstation or Pi. I was excited at the prospect of 19,000+ games. What I did not expect was a half built and broken system. From day one the SD Micro chip was coded incorrectly and you have to manually type emulationstation at the terminal prompt in order to start ES. I thought this was odd and had the actual developer walk me through how to open the arcade, locate the underside of a tiny (Pi) computer board to locate an SD Micro card that I had to remove with pliers, load into my MAC and change a line of code on the boot drive. This corrected my boot up... but ... N64 doesn't work at all and there is no screen data (images, video, marquees, descriptions). Exiting a game is at your own risk as it can crash the whole system or leave the screen black for long periods of time.
...
HELP!! It's only been a few days since I've owned it, it's already been broken more than working, and has never worked as advertised from day one. I'm trying to be patient, but I did drop a good bit of money on this system and so far it is an over priced paper weight.

Advice?

ps. For context, I am a UX Designer and a Web Developer. I am in no way interested in steps on how to fix this myself. I have cash and expect a working product. My hobbies are spent in other areas and for me video gaming is a past time in the art of gaming not game building.

I'd ask for a refund
There might very well be a niche for folks willing to set up someone else's RetroPie for them... in fact I bet there is a market. But AFAIK no one has set themselves up to provide this service. Leading to...
In terms of philosophy and values, neither the RetroPie devs or this community are friendly to commercialization of RetroPie. In consequence, RetroPie is not what you want if you want to avoid making the setup and tinkering part of your hobby portfolio.

Folks here like it to be a tinkerer's software stack and a tinkerer's support forum. This is different from, for example, Kodi or the community of Pandora's Box users where commercialization/turnkey hardware is taken as a given. Not only will you find that there is not an easy solution to your problem, you're probably about to find out that the user community here is going to discourage you from even attempting what you're asking.

(That's not how I feel, but that's the way it is.)

mediamogul

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

I am in no way interested in steps on how to fix this myself. I have cash and expect a working product.

The RetroPie project and the Raspberry Pi in general are both geared toward hobbyists and therefore are always going to require a certain amount of setup and maintenance on the part of the user. Expecting anything else is just unreasonable. If your interest in solving the issues inherent to owning a RetroPie setup ever change, we're here to help, but keep in mind you'll need to start over with a fresh image from the RetroPie site for us to assist you.

herb_fargus

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

I am in no way interested in steps on how to fix this myself

Therein lies your source of disappointment. There is no gratification in throwing money at things hoping for a solution. Especially when the things you are throwing money at are free. It will inevitably break again and you'll be disappointed yet again. Only way this will work is if you learn to set it up from scratch yourself.