Nowadays, all you have to do to get your antitrust lawsuits conveniently forgotten is agree to lock down your company’s OS and share your data with the US government, like Google.

Most of these are difficult to mess with, because, like you discovered, there’s some kind of internal database of ROMs. Worse, this doesn’t appear to have a JAMMA harness so the board can only be replaced with a similar one.

I would see if someone from TeamPandory can identify your board for getting a custom firmware on there. I’ve seen a lot of this type of board in which the bottom-of-the-barrel-quality micro SD card suddenly dies, then you lose the encryption key and the board is just garbage.

At the very least, backup the micro SD card to an image. I use GNOME Disk Manager that’s built into Linux Mint. Programs like balenaEtcher can do it on Windows but like Windows, they have telemetry (spy on you).

Edit: As others noted, the “S812” is relevant, the board seems to be based on Allwinner H3 like other “Pandora’s Box” (the name is more appropriate than it should be). You could do something like this or rewire the controls into “zero-delay encoders” to turn them into USB controllers to connect to any Pi or PC.

…which is fine, until the ninjers start calling in death threats on your Garfield phone.

Where I am in the US, for more than 10 years, cashiers have been scanning IDs for age verification of tobacco and alcohol. So even if you pay cash, your identity is tied to those purchases.