I'm semi-famous. Does anyone want to buy a raspberry pi running RetroArch with my name written on it? /s
ok.
Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
81–90 of 121 posts
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#82These are just Alibaba emulators with ROMs preloaded right? How is he expecting not to get sued by every game dev and manufacturer from the last 30 years?
For the same reason Prada or Gucci doesn't go after every illegal vendor selling fake merchandise on the street corner, even if you go after them and win what are you going to take? There's very little profit involved in these endeavors and most people are wise enough to be able to detect cheap junk and not buy it. Soulja Boy isn't getting rich off of this, but Nintendo might take notice if this blows up too much.
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even to the extent of Kanye where he actually designs his own fashion line/shoes. There is no way he does that himself, just like all the other wannabe fashion/perfume/merchandising brands. They just use their fame to tack on another revenue stream.
Actually Kanye is quite into fashion and apparel, instead of just making assumptions about someone's capabilities because they're famous, use that energy to learn about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West#Fashion
Just because someone is famous, doesn't mean they are especially good at a job. Michael Jordan is a much better basketball player then a baseball player.
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#84Ha! I have one of these that i built into a portable arcade machine. Some of the hardware has Xbox references on the pcbs, though i suspect the just didn't bother to remove from the source, though it could be surplus from earlier versions.
The games are hilarious and completely ripped off, some the Japanese only market versions, others weird mash-ups (like 8-bit Mario but with looney tunes characters).
Mine most certainly does not output 4k (what would a 4k gb-color emulator exactly look like? Gigantic, crisp pixels?)
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#85So has anyone tried the Chinese pirate console that he's apparently rebranding? It looks like it's this one [1], $89 on Amazon. Emulates PS1, GBC, SNES and more, with 843 games, including classics like Super Mario Bros. I'd absolutely love to have something like this in my living room, but I think I'd prefer a somewhat less suspect, more hacker-friendly system where one could easily add new games. But I also don't kn…
I have one. The best part is the "case" it's huge compared to the hardware inside, do it's super light.
It's like an Arduino inside a shoebox.
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#86The article handily links to the Alibaba store: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/3850034 I suspect what happened is that someone approached him with the idea of putting his brand on it, and he was flattered; otherwise it's basically the Amazon drop shipping business.
What makes you think he isn’t just interested in video games, discovered emulators and liked the product and saw that it wasn’t being marketed to his audience? Are you familiar with the ways musicians, particularly in hip hop, diversify their business portfolios by selling product lines? Are you familiar with Fenty, Beats by Dre, etc?
Yes, but those ranges have a high level of personal involvement and brand coherency, and are generally better quality. This is a lot more of a cheap opportunistic item.
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#87Well I mean this seems entirely reasonable to me - I’m not sure but I suspect he isn’t an engineer, and even if he is, why waste time and money on designing something that has already been designed and built? I’m also surprised that so many people in the comments are against this, especially given how often I’ve seen people on HN arguing we should be getting rid of IP law.
HN is not a monolith.
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#88The article handily links to the Alibaba store: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/3850034 I suspect what happened is that someone approached him with the idea of putting his brand on it, and he was flattered; otherwise it's basically the Amazon drop shipping business.
What makes you think he isn’t just interested in video games, discovered emulators and liked the product and saw that it wasn’t being marketed to his audience? Are you familiar with the ways musicians, particularly in hip hop, diversify their business portfolios by selling product lines? Are you familiar with Fenty, Beats by Dre, etc?
The difference is that those products are actually new things created for those brands, and are (relatively) high quality. This is a cheap emulator box being drop shipped from Aliexpress that already existed before Soulja Boi slapped his name on it. (Not to mention that it's almost certainly violating copyright laws with all the roms bundled with it).
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a video [0] of him with it on, yeah, nothing like the Apple watch. Also on the topic of cheap Chinese watches I would read the section of this article on the smartwatch [1] and note this was published 2 years ago. That whole article is interesting but the smartwatch and their contact who said it only cost them $6 to make (note they bought the watches for just under $10 each): > If the factory sold the watches…
The insane part is, if you are an American company trying to release a smart watch, you won't be able to get your cost of goods down that low. I worked on the Microsoft Band team, the RAM inside the Band cost almost the same as these watches cost to make all up! Annoyingly enough, when we asked MediaTek if we could buy use their chipset, they would only sell it to us with their OS running on top. IIRC I think they we…
> Annoyingly enough, when we asked MediaTek if we could buy use their chipset, they would only sell it to us with their OS running on top.
I hit the same thing with Freescale too. I think it's that they don't want to deal with support calls for unsupported software.
It was surreal hearing their rep tell us that the chip was specifically designed for only FreeRTOS, Linux, & WinCE and physically could not run anything else. Like, we just want to run our in house RTOS; we're quite used to having to write our own BSP.
Re: Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even to the extent of Kanye where he actually designs his own fashion line/shoes. There is no way he does that himself, just like all the other wannabe fashion/perfume/merchandising brands. They just use their fame to tack on another revenue stream.
Kanye interned at Fendi about 12 years ago - he's definitely pretty involved in fashion beyond just lending his name
> Kanye interned at Fendi about 12 years ago
I guess that makes him an expert.
He's in politics too. Amazing man of many talents.