samsonlonghair wrote:Granted, I was looking at the consumer end, not the production end. I'm not sure how much they're actually manufacturing though. The orange pi lite is already manufactured. The USB port, the DVD-ROM drive, and the internal cabling look like ready made parts to me. I guess they're just manufacturing the plastic shell... which isn't the most terribly attractive case I have ever seen. So, what value are they bringing to the market?
Value is again in (presumably) plug and play - some of which is kinda offset by the need to go "acquire" BIOS ROMs. Or, similarly, the amount of effort that it looked like was needed for DOS games. So, to me, it's more in theory. However, going off of that, sure, the hardware itself doesn't quite warrant the price tag...but an integrated system that actually does what they seem to be shooting for wouldn't be a bad value (at $100-125ish) for someone who just wants a prepackaged solution. I mean, we've had people here that just wanted to pay for a RetroPi setup.
At this point, it's all in preproduction, so there's still the potential for the kinks to get worked out and a relatively hassle-free product come to market. It seems to me like that's not really going to be the case, but who knows.
marurun wrote:That's one advantage I perceive in RetroPi. It's a tiny little unit that barely takes up space. I know I don't have 1: room for a big PC of any vintage hanging around that isn't my daily use PC, and definitely no room by the TV, or 2: the spare change to build a little microPC just for emulation.
A potential option (albeit not necessarily a great one) is stick PCs (or whatever other term they use), which are as small or smaller and based around Atom processors. They tend to be fairly cheap, relative to micro PCs (though low end models there aren't bad either). Part of the suggestions here, I think, were things that have optical drives, as alternatives to the Seedi setup.