Pandora Box 3 Multi-Game 520-1 PCB

[raziel2001au]

This is awesome, looking forward with what you can do with this thing, kruuth!

I wouldn't hold my breath though, a couple of people have already looked into it and concluded it would not be worth the effort. I'd post a link to the topic, but it's not on the Neo-Geo forums.

In short, it looks like the menu system can't be altered and they use custom input handling. So in short, you'd have to roll your own menu system and modified emulator to make it customisable.

Having said that: Kruuth, if you wanted to get a dd image of the Micro SD card a bit early to start looking at it, happy to hook you up. Just PM me and it can be done in the name of science!

 

[djjimmyjames]

I love this thing..
Beside a bit of screen tearing I am very happy. I have to wait until JNX gets more adapters to play with all six buttons. It seems a tad bit blurry on my old dynamo Zenith but my 50 inch flat screen makes it look amazing. However the picture I took doesnt really do it justice.

monitor




Big screen

 

[Xian Xi]

I'll be getting more in less than a week, so if anyone needs one just PM me.

 

[mikemann]

I had a version 2 prior and felt it was a mixed bag. The lack of freeplay bugged me the most. But I did think it was a cheap easy way to test out some games before committing to the real thing. I'm curious...can anyone confirm if you can configure these boards to boot directly into one game? No menu....just load one game. I know the Blue Elf boards can. I forget if these can do it.

 

[raziel2001au]

I had a version 2 prior and felt it was a mixed bag. The lack of freeplay bugged me the most. But I did think it was a cheap easy way to test out some games before committing to the real thing. I'm curious...can anyone confirm if you can configure these boards to boot directly into one game? No menu....just load one game. I know the Blue Elf boards can. I forget if these can do it.

No, but you can choose for it not to jump back to the menu when the game is idle, which is a plus. But yes, essentially, if you reboot, you're back at the menu.

 

[pulstar]

I managed to boot directly into one game...I just disabled all but the one I wanted it to boot and it loaded it straight away after the normal boot sequence.

 

[mikemann]

That's cool. I got one of the blue elf 619 boards that came with this NAC I got and I was thinking of having it boot directly to ghost n goblins. I know it will work on that and the free play works (albeit in a weird way). I'm not sure if the pandora does better emulation on cps2 or not? This looks pretty good. I don't see any slowdown and any weird tearing yet. But I'm not that good at it

 

[GohanX]

CPS2 emulation is fantastic on the Pandora. If I could go into the game's great menu I might consider ditching my cps2 multi.

 

[GohanX]

Test menu, not great menu. Oh edit button, I miss thee.

 

[mjmjr25]

CPS2 emulation is fantastic on the Pandora. If I could go into the game's great menu I might consider ditching my cps2 multi.

It's really that good, eh? A lot of people whose opinions I respect are commenting that this isn't your typical multi. Hmmm....

 

[GohanX]

I played a bit with Super SF2 New Challengers, which is the only cps2 game I legit own, and have played a ton of.

On my pvm, it looks damn close to my consolized unit, other than the image shift. The colors aren't quite as good as the real thing. The audio is up there, very good emulation but doesn't quite have the impact of the real sound chip. It's also a bit more bassy, for better or worse.

On the bad side, cps2 games tend to have extreme stereo separation, if you get mono audio from the jamma edge you are only getting one channel, and since you can't get to the test menu you can't change it to mono. The stereo out of the Pandora itself is fine though.

 

[GohanX]

Not all games are emulated as well, however. Donkey Kong, for example, is missing most of the sound effects. TiT has some weird pixelation. Cps1 has slight screen tearing.

 

[Xian Xi]

The picture problems over CGA is probably due to it being native as 640x480 via VGA then scaled to 240p for CGA. Over VGA with SLG, it looks awesome.

 

[cornerstone]

CPS2 games are missing about 5% of the screen off to the left. I've also notice that super turbo has missing sound effects, particularly on the character select screen.

Otherwise, it isn't bad.

 

[djjimmyjames]

You hit what I was trying to say right on the nail. The small issues are well worth the $90 to $120 once you buy the JNX atlas adapter. Its also a cheap way to play games and while they are not all 100% perfect they really do look and play really well.

The picture problems over CGA is probably due to it being native as 640x480 via VGA then scaled to 240p for CGA. Over VGA with SLG, it looks awesome.

 

[raziel2001au]

The picture problems over CGA is probably due to it being native as 640x480 via VGA then scaled to 240p for CGA. Over VGA with SLG, it looks awesome.

Same problem happens over VGA. In fact, it was on VGA that I first noticed part of the left side of the image being missing.

 

[Xian Xi]

Same problem happens over VGA. In fact, it was on VGA that I first noticed part of the left side of the image being missing.

Which version do you have? I had to adjust the picture a bit on mine.

 

[Rijosroberto]

Hello everyone ,
I have a question wich i hope someone can help me find the answer too does anyone know what software or os or linux or what ever it maybe pandoras box 3 is running on ????

 

[GohanX]

Would there be a way to play with the sync of the rgb out to shift the image to center on a 15khz display? There are some Extron boxes that will so this for you, but I'm not sure I want to go that route

 

[kruuth]

yeah so far that's what I'm seeing. However...it's an Allwinner A13 CPU, meaning that the toolchain is pretty well developed. It's a function of getting video out and mapping GPIO over to a keyboard. It's got 256mb of RAM so it could in theory run some of the beefier games.

I wouldn't hold my breath though, a couple of people have already looked into it and concluded it would not be worth the effort. I'd post a link to the topic, but it's not on the Neo-Geo forums.

In short, it looks like the menu system can't be altered and they use custom input handling. So in short, you'd have to roll your own menu system and modified emulator to make it customisable.

Having said that: Kruuth, if you wanted to get a dd image of the Micro SD card a bit early to start looking at it, happy to hook you up. Just PM me and it can be done in the name of science!

 

[raziel2001au]

Which version do you have? I had to adjust the picture a bit on mine.

Not sure about versions, looks the same as the one the OP has. How did you adjust the picture on yours?

I haven't found anything like that in the menu system or anything. My image is cut off on the left in both VGA and CGA. If you know how to adjust it that'd be great!

 

[raziel2001au]

Hello everyone ,
I have a question wich i hope someone can help me find the answer too does anyone know what software or os or linux or what ever it maybe pandoras box 3 is running on ????

It's running BusyBox linux. The emulation is done with FBA. The OS is extremely minimal and you don't actually see a linux boot sequence. Just displays the Pandora's Box 3 loading screen, then plays a video (which you can't skip), then drops you straight to the menu.

 

[Shuri]

I'm almost tempted to get one..

 

[raziel2001au]

I'm almost tempted to get one..

As most people here said, they're well worth their price. It's certainly not perfect, but if you walk in with the right expectations and you don't already own a million-in-one emulator PC in your cab, it's a great way to have a lot of games on the cheap.

 

[kruuth]

Got the board. FWIW it's running Final Burn Alpha, so I gotta look into how it's doing it. It's decompressing a bunch of files and it is using GPIO for input. DogP has done a lot of heavy lifting for this. It has more power than the 138/355/620 boards but without getting GPIO I can't do much with it. Fortunately it's running the Allwinner A13 CPU which is well docume