Regarding commercial "retroarch boxes"

General
#1

This crap has to stop !!!

If it was me, I would sue their asses for selling my open source code with very clear lisence agreements that they completely ignored and hid behind stupid nonsense like “the contractor told us it is legal” :sweat:
This kind of nonsense will not fly in court, they will lose their pants with a smart fair judge and they know it.
If you ask me, Daniel De Matteis deserves 50% or more of their profits, that they already did to this day.

I call to all people who respect the hard work and countless hours of developing Retroarch to STOP buying Hyperkin, Retro-Bit, Retro Freak, products and completely boycott products of this sort.

2 Likes
#2

Would you believe it too that Cyber Gadget threatened to take legal action against me if I did not remove all articles pertaining to them and Retro Freak too?

The mere gall of these people who are skating on such thin ice already, when honestly I was even giving them the opportunity to resolve this in an amicable fashion. They should be glad I was even willing to give them the time since November 2017 to resolve this. Unfortunately, my generosity was thrown yet again in my face.

What these guys don’t realize is that Snes9x has over 50+ copyrighted authors behind it. Imagine if all of these got together to launch some kind of class-action lawsuit against any abusers. This is the stupidity and folly of this stuff. We don’t even want it to go there, we’d rather we resolve this in an amicable fashion, yet it seems some just don’t know when to call it quits and would rather rely on threatening and nonsensical language.

It is really quite disgusting at times what kind of crap you go through with this project.

#3

I’ve never bought a Retro-Bit or Hyperkin product one sheer lack of quality alone. I can’t believe that these garbage boxes have weeded their way into respected territory within the Retro community. These companies send free review units to so called “purist” game collectors on You Tube who are more about collecting than playing like Gamester81, John Hancock, Metal Jesus Rocks, and DreamcastGuy, so they can give their “review” of these garbage boxes. They all keep the audio down and don’t show alot of footage. They smooth over poor quality by saying that things are “solid” and “great for casuals”. These boxes should have never gained any traction or respect but it seems like the little guys are just as willing to be bought with a free garbage product. Now that’s cheap advertising! Meanwhile Digital Foundry, My Life In Gaming, and Stop, Drop, and Retro will never see a free review unit because Hyperkin and Retro-Bit know that they will be brutally honest. I’m glad that Eurogamer not only wrote that article, but they also called out Hyperkin in the beginning of their SNES NT video. My hat is off to Eurogamer for taking a stand against this commercial greed!

#5

The big problem isn’t so much selling RetroArch, it’s selling the non-commercial-licensed cores. Re: GPLv3, they typically also do not release their source code and do not allow people to replace the bundled RetroArch executable with their own version, which violates the “anti-Tivo-ization” clause of GPLv3.

IANAL

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#7

We have contacted both FSF and EFF several times and both have told us we’re on our own (and to try contacting the other one). Those organizations don’t appear to really do anything, in our experience. They just accept donations from people and talk at conventions.

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#9

That sounds about right. Probably pick and choose things they want to defend with the odd good cause thrown in if at all…