Why do people buy ready-made kits?

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.

PokeEngineer

Wow, I just turned my back for a second and look what happened... That escalated quickly.

markyh444

@pokeengineer did anybody get killed with a trident though?

PokeEngineer

@markyh444 said in Why do people buy ready-made kits?:

@pokeengineer did anybody get killed with a trident though?

@Damonmath apparently, because he got banned.

BillyH

Wow... This thread sure blew up since I read it yesterday.

Now that I have an account here set up since I wanted to ask some stuff, I can weigh in on the original topic and help bring this back on track.

My Pi 'light' kit (Pi3B, 5V2.5A power supply, case and three passive heat sinks in different sizes) hopefully comes in tomorrow or Saturday at the latest, and I'll then spend Sunday setting everything up, together with my brother-in-law, who is more of a tinkerer than I am and hasn't experimented with a Pi yet.

I had serious thoughts about getting a Pi and downloading RetroPie close to a year ago, but the whole tinkering stuff kept me back.

I'm lazy. I want to put in a cartridge or disk and be ready to go, not spend hours looking at code to see what needs fixing. I'm a console gamer for that reason, among others.

I wouldn't buy a preset Pi-RetroPie but I understand the appeal, like I understand the appeal of the SNES Mini or modding a PS1 to play all games, even though I'm not into either of those. It's easy to have something that can immediately do a lot without questions asked.

I'm hoping the eventual experience wih RetroPie will be a positive one for me, with not too much tinkering once everything is set up. Though I do like the thought of making an arcade cabinet once me and my wife live in a bigger place, but that's more handiwork than coding.

jonnykesh

@billyh It will because you will have built it yourself rather than paying some scam-artist $500 for the privilege. And you will have people here willing to help because that's what they do.
This guy just came to have a moan about being ripped off like it was the RetroPie guys that were responsible!

BillyH

@jonnykesh Very true, though I was more talking in general about my fear of having to tinker with the code when things don't work in regards to the original post in this topic from a while ago, not connected to the dude who took over the topic.

I don't even understand why someone would pay that much for a Pi set-up, there are fine laptops cheaper than that and the entire idea behind Pi seems to be DIY. I'm pretty sure that for $500, there are much better ways to get emulation on television. Like buying a controller for my laptop and casting to the television. And after that, going on a holiday with the remaining $400.