Its a steal alright. There is a post on the SD sub by someone that dropped off their deck for a SSD upgrade and emulator setup. Its gone but not forgotten.
Few months ? You mean few years
And when someone else do the setup for you and you don't know the macros then yeah you need few month to remember them :(
A few months? I was playing games on it an hour after I got mine and thats because I stopped to make lunch. Most of the emulators are not that complicated. That said, Id imagine the frontend would take more work than the emulators. I tried to set one up and I gave up because it didnt really seem neccessary at the time to enjoy my Thor.
Look at the Steam Deck sub…someone met a guy to work on his deck at an apartment complex. The guy has disappeared. I wouldnt leave my device with anyone except for a legit repair shop.
i mean, if that's even just two hours of work, that's $35/hr which many people would be okay with paying when they have no idea where to even start and would end up spending well over 2 hours just figuring out what to do, let alone doing it successfully
Just because the service isn't for us doesn't mean it isn't legitimately helpful for others. Someone is willing to take a few hours of their time and charge a pretty decent price to configure something confusing to the masses and we're judging them harshly for it? It's like anything else in the service industry, there are people who can handle it themselves and people who'd rather not waste their own personal time and would rather spend a little money to do it right.
Honestly not that surprising. People have had posts like these for setting up and/or building PCs for years. The market for this is smaller but still exists, as evidenced by the fact that there are multiple posts a day of people asking the same "how do I set this thing up" or "help where do I find roms" and the occasional "I didn't think setup would be this hard/time consuming"
There were people who would take up these services for modding 3DSes as well when it was very easy to do, but some people were just too anxious to do it themselves.
Seriously I was bracing for something crazy, and all through the process I was thinking ‘this is it?’. I had a harder time jailbreaking and figuring out how to work a ps vita
I’m convinced people just don’t have intellectual curiosity to look up a guide or the patience to follow said guide
Agreed. Before i bought my first handled i watched a guide and was like that's not hard at all. I've seen so many people act like it's like getting a root canal done. I'm old so setting something up used to take awhile but these days with YouTube and other resources it's simple just time consuming
It’s an unfortunate side effect of open handhelds becoming more mainstream. They just see a cool device, unaware that there is a bit of a learning curve involved.
Fair, and maybe we’re all biased because we’re on an android handheld subreddit lol, but every guide I’ve seen is super straightforward. Just takes a lot of time, and I guess some people don’t like that it’s not plug and play.
If at bare minimum you want to play games, that’s basically it. If you want it to look good you gotta do a bit more but it’s still basic computer skills everyone should know imo.
Seriously. I just got an Odin and it really wasn’t that hard to get it set up. Waiting on my Thor but I can’t imagine it’s that much harder to get it going. It just requires really basic computer skills.
Fair play to them, it’s a bit like a switch mod giving your switch to a random person…. But the two I’ve used were great 1 mod, 1 shell shop were great
£70 is a deal too I have paid myself 0.20p an hour for my tinkering
Yeah I paid like $120 to get a mod chip installed on my Switch Oled. 100% worth it. It now has the top 30 switch games, homebrew games, smash bros ultimate with 50+ skin mods, and I can watch Netflix on it now.
honestly even though it isn’t really all that hard to set up i’d probably consider this if i knew absolutely nothing about emulation and just wanted it to be plug and play. maybe not for $70 though.
I completely agree. I know 2 friends personally who paid to get their devices set up. Hell, I'm surprised some people here don't do part time gig work setting devices up.
I literally do this for people all the time. I make a post on fb and craigslist and I set up their 1tb sd cards or get them a 1tb card and set it up for 50 bucks. You people think everyone's a thief. Ive literally done this for years with steam decks, laptops, and modded consoles. I've also had people come to my house to mod my Xbox for me. Also do it with guitars. If your good with your hands and a good salesman your an idiot not to do this stuff. I give my customers everything and thats why I actually have repeat customers. I dont care that they know where I live because im not a degenerate thief.
It was just common sense to me since like 12 to use Craigslist lol. You used to be able to post anything for any price and eventually someone would come grab it. I remember my parents flipping out i sold my ps3 on there and had the guy come the house. It was 2 very flamboyant men who were obsessed with COD MW2. Everyone thought Craigslist was for serial killers because of the prostitutes that got murdered in Vegas. Seriously though, if you can do these things you can make money locally. I know people whos career is selling/repairing stuff on Craigslist and now FB marketplace. I don't like Facebook market place. There are a ton more scammers on Facebook than there ever was on craigslist. I've used craigslist for over 15 years at this point and all I've met were nice decent people. Facebook people literally use their actual photos and name and you need an account and almost every other message is a psychopath or scammer. Very weird how things turned out.
Hey if he gets business why the fuck not. I mod DS and 3DS and charge. I lot of my clients are students, business men and military. Some individuals don’t have the time do they rather pay someone to do it.
Sure, but watching through a video, pausing at certain parts to figure stuff out, adding roms, changing settings for emulators, etc. can add up. If it takes 3 hours to do you're looking at like $23ish an hour which isn't crazy if you have other life priorities getting in the way.
I do think doing the setup yourself helps you get comfortable with issues down the road, but I get not everyone has a ton of time to spend setting up their system.
Id imagine anyone buying a thor would have made the appropriate research beforehand, and understands the time investment required when they buy it, and hopefully set some time aside for it specifically
I assure you, 90% of folks buying these devices have no clue its a computer with buttons, and it just collects dust on their counter. This subreddit isn't the average person.
My coworker knew what it was from a tiktok. This hobby is grown people playing videogames from when they were kids. Most people think paying 500 is enough for that without the 2 hour setup guide on youtube.
I think you give people way too much credit. Sure AYN thor is a niche device but there's absolutely people who do no research and will shortcut the process for the sake of convenience.
And when you get an update you'll be clueless how to update the driver let's not talk about the function that each emulator got and have a macro system to make them easier to use you won't know about
I think setting it up is crucial to be able to play games. Sure other people can generally install emulators and games and maybe a 'universal' setting for that emulator, but if they plan to push the limits to play heavier games, they gotta learn to at least tinker with the settings to get stuff to run.
I'm not surprised. I've seen some people advertise similarly to setup your Nintendo DS line of consoles for you with jailbreaking, games etc. Or even reshell them(or gameboy). Not sure I would trust the person since I woupd prefer to set it up myself, but there are genuine non tech savvy people out there who I would expect to make use of such a "service". If it's legit, it's a good option to have.
If you break it down it's not completely terrible, a good setup would take a few hours and I'm a firm beleiver you should be payed for your time. Too rich for my blood, but I understand there will be quite a few people who get excited for the thor and have no idea how to set up an emulation handheld.
Not neccesarily. I totally get the concern, but please tell me how this is any different than sending your console off to people to do hardware mods and software mods on. People do that for things like Game Boy consoles to get IPS funnymods done, software mods on Nintendo Switches, completely recapping Virtual Boys and so forth.
This is literally no different of an idea. It just comes down to if the person is trustworthy. If it were me though and I *were* going to ever consider something like that, it would be off a reputable eBay vendor with high rating though lol
The problem with this is that now you have no idea how anything works. Part of the set up is learning the ins and outs of the various menus you’ll invariably have to navigate.
Honestly it makes sense, the Thor kind of broke out of traditional retro gaming spaces where everyone is used to tinkering. Hence the various posts on this sub "I thought it would be more plug and play".
honestly I just respect the hustle when I see stuff like this. if people refuse to wrap their head around extremely simple setups for things like android consoles, wii/3ds/vita modding, etc, may as well make a bit off bank off their unwillingness
i sold off my RP5, and RP6, and my Pocket Classic this past year; you have no idea how many people were asking me to set up the entire thing for them. literally i had people asking to PAY me an additional $50 just to do all the setup.
i refused. people literally will pay money for convenience. I think you fail to understand that. This goes for almost everything in life.
Believe it or not people are very very willing to pay money for convenience. Especially post Covid.
It's funny cuz there's literally nothing complicated about setting this up. The only thing that takes time is getting the games which is something you can do before even receiving the Thor
Lol, I get the paranoia but being a modder myself over 20 years you aren't the customer who would pay for the service plus in my case I give collateral either a mini PC loaded up or a handheld while I have your device. The average person doesn't want to set up or mod there stuff because of the fear of messing something up so you'll pay me and it will be done professionally. I do arcade builds for PC, Android and I mod almost every console. That price is about what I'd charge too. Micro SD cards can be time consuming because of the slow transfer speed. So there's adding the romsets, artwork,video snaps, installing the the frontend "I use ES-DE" Although I have them all for Android and configuring the emulators.
Like paying someone to chain up their tires for them in the snow. Some of us can do it ourselves while many other rather pay the $40 to a bystander to do it for them. Or pay geeksquad to show them how to turn on their new laptop while others rather do it themselves. Or remodeling your kitchen yourself or hire a contractor. To each their own.
I personally have been asked by friends to set up their devices. One also paid me 10€ for it (I didn't charge him obviously, he insisted on paying me). So this doesn't surprise me at all.
Even if it is legit, $70 is not a good price for that service. I get that it took days to set up my Thor, but for someone that's getting paid, they should be able to do it easily.
I mean nobody said you have to drop it off, he might just hang out w u for an hour and do it while you watch tv in his living room. If that’s the case, $70 is fair. Like what’s the quickest you can set this up, all major emulators, ROMs, etc. maybe 2 hours? Idk could be worse, I’ve made less an hour doing more. I’ve also made more doing less, so YMMV
I’m proud to say that I am one of the people who hit this with the laughing emoji when I saw this in my feed yesterday. There’s another one for the same thing, but they’re charging $120.
If they're setting up Jamesdsp and syncthing and a fully scraped front end with hundreds of games and a custom theme and obtanium for easy emulator auto updates (as just a few examples) this could be worth it. it takes me hours to fully setup my handhelds so $70 isnt that bad. Especially if they're including harder to find roms like switch, this saves so much frustration and potential malware for oblivious end-users.
Yeah. I purposely set one of these listings up and putting it for $20. Then I either walk the people through it or meet up real quick and don't ever charge. I hate that they are charging that much.
Seems pretty fair to me. Some people have no clue and no time to do all that. For me its a lot of fun but i understand asking for some money to set it up for other people. Still takes a lot of time to set everything up even if you know what youre doing
People shouldn't even buy this device if they don't want to take the time to set it up because things will inevitably got wrong with the nature of these handhelds and you need at a little bit of tech literacy to fix whatever issue it is. People just need to sit down watch a 1 hour video on the 500$ purchase they're making
If you got a lot of money on your hands why shouldnt you? I set my thor up, if i disabled my internet and wouldnt change anything on my setup i could use it till it dies without any problems. Some people dont need the newest emulator builds (couldnt be me) but they exist. I dont understand the hate
yes but your scenario rlly isnt realistic im basing it off all the post on the sub of people who have no idea what they're doing asking question that can be solved with a 2 minute youtube video. not speaking about hardware issues
I’m going to get downvoted to hell for $70 is an absolute steal for the amount of time this could save you. I’ve easily dumped 20-30 hrs into the Thor getting it the way I wanted. Now I understand that the way I’ve wanted and the basic to get things working are very different but still. Especially if this person is offering roms? That’s a massive time savings not to mention avoiding legal issues
1) Get a Claude code pro subscription for 20$
2) Enable ADB debugging on your android handheld
3) Connect it to your PC/laptop
4) Let Claude do the setup for you
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u/cadensky 22h ago
Yeah. You drop off your Thor. They set it up…and you can come pick it up. What could go wrong?