> Absolute cancer on the industry these things, in so many legitimate establishments > too because they're not even sold as bootlegs. Not sure why nobody believes me when I > say somebody is making an absolute killing on them, and it's disgusting.
I've seen these machines on sale at some fairly odd venues - county fairs spring to mind. Prices are as high as $5k for vinyl-wrapped (yes, really) 'deluxe' models.
> One interesting thing that did come up recently is a Kyle Hodgetts game running on > the same hardware, makes me wonder who actually worked on the software they're > running.
Fair point, but by the same token Hodgetts has never (to the best of my knowledge) ever developed his own hardware platform. Tweaked others' hardware, sure, but I can't think of anything that's 100% his.
> The general presentation they have never felt very Chinese to me (choice of > fonts etc.) so it could be all the development was outsourced although I imagine the > software side of them is a very different business to these cab sales.
I've seen some x-in-1 boards running Chinese, Korean, and English UI versions side-by-side. Visually, they were virtually indistinguishable with the exception of localisation changes to the text; for all I know, there was either a soft or physical switch to change between the appropriate region.
None of them exactly oozed a feeling of high-quality development having been put into the UI, however - they felt more that they were designed to appeal to the hardcore PC / console gamer crowd who are impressed more by visuals than actual content, or, alternatively, cranked out to be as sparsely-functional as necessary in as many markets as possible.
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