We are indebted to so many people from diverse communities who each contributed their own time to a very specific component that made its way into Chalmers.
For the games themselves, we are of course indebted to the original game artists, designers, and developers. We also made use of many reviews by critics and researchers in our selection and annotation process. In some cases, we are also indebted to dedicated fans who translated games from Japanese to English.
Other than the games, all the software in Chalmers is free or open source, meaning that it is forever available to the public to use and modify. There are too many projects and communities to mention, however we should at least give credit to the biggest parts:
EmulationStation is the graphical user interface. It doesn't actually run the games: it just handles Chalmers's main menu. It's designed to to be used on a TV with game controllers (no keyboard required), show the games list organized by each individual gaming system, maintain a list of favorites, and manage the settings menu.
RetroArch runs the games. Actually, it's more complicated than that: RetroArch is an umbrella project that joins together many game system emulators into one system, using an underlying adaptor system called libretro. Each of these emulators is its own project, backed by its own specialized community:
FCEUNext for the original Nintendo
Snes9x Next for the Super Nintendo
Mupen64plus for the Nintendo 64
mGBA for the Game Boy Advance
PicoDrive for the Master System and Genesis
Genesis Plus GX for the Game Gear
PCSX-Reloaded for the PlayStation
Mednafen for the TurboGrafx-16
Linux is the operating system underneath it all, which is mostly in charge of interfacing with the hardware: the CPU, files, graphics, sound, game controllers, and the network. Linux is by far the beefiest component of Chalmers. The community behind it is enormous, including contributions from dozens of corporations and hundreds of individuals, and comprises many sub-projects. Chalmers does not contain the full Linux, but instead uses the JeOS ("Just Enough" Operating System) approach to grab only what it needs to run retro games, in order to gobble up as few resources as possible, guaranteeing that Chalmers boots quickly and leaves as much room as possible for actual games.
NOOBS is an install system for the Raspberry Pi. We use it when we create a new Chalmers box, but you use when you upgrade your Chalmers over the network. Also, NOOBS is what you get if you "press SHIFT for recovery" as instructed during Chalmers's boot-up.
Kodi is the media center, which is its own big project with an extensive ecosystem of plugins and contributors.
Recalbox bundles all the above together. It makes sure that all the different components are configured cohesively, tested, and generally makes it much easier for us to install, maintain, and upgrade Chalmers. At the end of the day the Chalmers project is just an extension of Recalbox: we took it and added in our curated selection of games, and of course the hardware kit.
And of course, there's the Raspberry Pi, the tiny little "brain" of Chalmers. This wonderful project has gathered around it a terrific community of hardware and software hackers, who together worked hard to make sure that Linux and everything else would run well.