Game Emulator OS

[wh1t3h34d]

I'm currently working on a raspberry pi project for game emulation with a colleague, which we intend on selling on a small scale.

We are looking around for an OS to use, which has a commercial license. We would love to use RetroPie, and we have been given permission from them to use their setup script, however, RetroPie is a collaboration of several different projects put together. We would need permisson from the individual driver and emulator owners to use it commerically.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, they would be much appreciated.

[ghans]

You need to check each license of each emulator. Many open-source licenses were developed by organisations which usually
have a FAQ page which answers questions related to commercial use of XYZ-licensed software. A quick Google search should help you there.

Of course , this is the sort of thing were you should seek professional legal advice. Most FAQs related to FLOSS licenses come with a disclaimer like "the only
binding guidelines are in the verbatim text of the license , if you don't understand it , get a lawyer to explain it to you".

Another option is to pay someone to rewrite all emulators from scratch under a contract that grants you the copyright on the code.Then you're free to do whatever
you want with it.

ghans

[GTR2Fan]

We would need permisson from the individual driver and emulator owners to use it commerically.

Won't you also need permission from the original games machine manufacturers if you're going commercial? I suspect that some if not most of the machine firmware ROMs will still be subject to copyright restrictions. Legend has it that Sir Alan Sugar put the original Sinclair Spectrum ROMs in the public domain some years ago, but I don't know if the same is true for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, etc.

[DougieLawson]

Legend has it that Sir Alan Sugar put the original Sinclair Spectrum ROMs in the public domain some years ago, but I don't know if the same is true for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, etc.

I'll let my twin brother Cliff know that you consider him legendary.

I think you'll find that when he published those (for Sir Alan) Cliff included some tight rules on the Amstrad owned materials.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/c ... NDSU3MksAJ
Apologies any egregious grammatical errors in that item (I've beaten him senseless about the misuse of "Your" vs "You're").