Pandora Box 3 Multi-Game 520-1 PCB

Xian Xi

JammaNationX,
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Please check Moonwalker, Edward Randy and AVP (Usually has slowdown when there's a shit ton of stuff happening).
 

Electric Grave

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Zerminator, take some close up pics, let's try and look at the pixel count, I have a strong feeling these units are not running at the right refresh rate or you have a video camera that makes the footage look blurry as hell.

Take some pics man, I already asked before, get on it, it's your responsibility to fill us in with detail, nah JK but still, du it!
 

kuze

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I'm interested to hear the impressions from the other members that decided to pick this up. It would be great if you guys could post in this thread.

I'll definitely post up my thoughts when mine arrives, but I opted for the cheapest shipping option so it could be a little while til I receive it.
 

Shuri

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the Jammaboard guy is notorious for huge delays and never answering his emails. I think he has health issues because it's always the same pattern: for a couple of weeks the service is stellar and then he drops out of Earth and then he comes back, with an message talking about getting operations and etc..

He used to be great a long time ago, but eh.
 

Zerrminator

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Zerminator, take some close up pics, let's try and look at the pixel count, I have a strong feeling these units are not running at the right refresh rate or you have a video camera that makes the footage look blurry as hell.

Take some pics man, I already asked before, get on it, it's your responsibility to fill us in with detail, nah JK but still, du it!

And I'll grab some photos as well. I've been using my iPhone 5s which sometimes doesn't like to focus properly. The quality and refresh rate once captured and uploaded to youtube REALLY don't do these games justice. I'll take another crack at it tonight and see what else I can do. Maybe setting the manual focus on the iphone will help.

Looks like my adapter from Xian arrived today too :)
 
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FLTCHRR

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Found this waiting for me when I got home today. I've never really had an interest in these, but then again I've never found one this cheap.

pandora3.jpg

I was surprised at how small the things actually is - really nice and portable. I played around for about an hour. Here are my quick impressions:

Tetris Grand Master 2: NO. So slow and clunky and awful and no.
Wonder Boy: The speed and control seemed good, but terrible screen tearing.
3rd Strike: Actually not as bad as I expected, speed feels a bit off and some random flickering in some of the background animations.
Forgotten Worlds: Seems great except for how it's just included to tease you because you can't actually control it.
Moonwalker: Michael disappears every time he gets hit. If I remember correctly, in the actual version he just becomes transparent/invincible for a few frames.
DK Jr: Missing a bunch of sounds, and some tearing during animations.
Turtles in Time: Seemed pretty good.

Overall, I guess it is what it is. I'm still happy I picked it up and I'm sure I'll play it quite a bit. Maybe it will help me figure out which actual boards to buy.
 
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Xian Xi

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Are you guys playing this on a CRT or LCD? Is it the same as the Elf where via CRT you can see like screen tearing but via VGA it's a lot clearer?
 

Zerrminator

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Got my adapter with a CPS2 kick harness breakout. My 4 through 6 kick buttons are now working great. Thanks Xian.

Here's some up close photos.

17215452316_e4d35f51e3_b.jpg


16621210203_faa26199a9_b.jpg


17033982947_fd57c61403_b.jpg


17053864080_1302566c4d_b.jpg


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Moonwalker has some slowdown for sure when there's lots of things happening on screen.

Alien vs Predator seemed to play fine for me but I don't have much experience with this game.

Edward Randy... never knew this game existed. I have no idea if this accurate to the arcade board :)
*I'm playing on a CRT. Have not tested VGA yet.
 
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Tacitus

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It would likely take some modifying the config files on the SD card to disable Tate in yoko for the vert shmups. I'm going to look into it when mine arrives, just got shipping confirmation this morning.

It would and it's not terribly difficult. If I had any time, I'd probably get it done.
 

DNSDies

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I just might pick one of these up...

It's not hardware accurate, but until someone makes a good CPS1 multi-board like Darksoft or that one french guy on the other forum, this seems like a "decent" cheap alternative.
 

Zerrminator

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I've now fully switched over to running this thing full time in my Astro. For me this beats my Mame PC that never looked quite right with the JPAC VGA to CGA conversion resolution weirdness. It has almost all of the games I want to play (aside from some american games like Mortal Kombat & NBA Jam), it looks good, runs well and is so quick and easy switching games. Really finding it hard to fault this thing for the price point.
 

Electric Grave

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Yeah I'm gonna get one, thanks for the reviews and comments, you sold me man.

Now we just gonna have to bug the bejesus out of XX to make us some adapters.
 

FLTCHRR

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I played a bit more this morning and had a much better hit rate in terms of game performance. I was pretty happy with the CPS1 games, as well as Ghosts n Goblins and Ghouls and Ghosts. The picture is great and the menus are easy and responsive. The board is super compact and worked perfectly in each of my cabs.

On the cons side, I wish you could extend the timer or get rid of it all together. It is a bit of a drag that you have to coin up via the actual coin mech - I may wire a button instead. Also, the volume varies drastically from game to game which can be obnoxious unless you have easy access to volume control on your cab.

I agree with Zerrminator, for the price point, I definitely think it's a convenient little board to have around. I am bummed about a few games not working better, but there is enough going for the board to make it worthwhile.


pandora3.jpg
 

Xian Xi

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I picked one up and it came in today. Not bad at all, I need to try it with VGA though as CRT has that tearing. Can anyone confirm that the VGA doesn't have tearing? Also on my PVM the picture is hugging the left side.

But the main thing is the Bubble Bobble plays I would say 96% like the arcade PCB. Other pluses (from glancing) Irem M92 games have proper brightness and aren't plagued with that dim picture on the arcade PCBs.

SF33S, on my Elf this game is so unplayable. On this Pandora, it's WAY better except the audio is a little muffled but the gameplay is pretty damn good. I like the fact that you can hide some games in the list via the button on the side and the fact that you can change the coin+start to just hold start for 5 seconds to exit a game is an improvement over the last model I had.
 

Zerrminator

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It seems you guys got the same board I did, so at least that's positive news to begin with!

I've now wired up my 1P Coin to a dedicated push button.

I'd say the biggest drawback for me right now is the tiny volume control wheel and the varying volume of each game. It does take some patience reaching down to adjust it as you load up different games, which has me thinking about tapping the PCB itself and creating a more user friendly volume control nob that can be mounted remotely away from the board.
 

Electric Grave

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I picked one up and it came in today. Not bad at all, I need to try it with VGA though as CRT has that tearing. Can anyone confirm that the VGA doesn't have tearing? Also on my PVM the picture is hugging the left side.

But the main thing is the Bubble Bobble plays I would say 96% like the arcade PCB. Other pluses (from glancing) Irem M92 games have proper brightness and aren't plagued with that dim picture on the arcade PCBs.

SF33S, on my Elf this game is so unplayable. On this Pandora, it's WAY better except the audio is a little muffled but the gameplay is pretty damn good. I like the fact that you can hide some games in the list via the button on the side and the fact that you can change the coin+start to just hold start for 5 seconds to exit a game is an improvement over the last model I had.
Ah! See! This is what I wanted to know, this tearing that you're talking about, is it like half the screen scrolling off beat? Kinda like when you don't know how to configure MAME proper?
 

Xian Xi

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Ah! See! This is what I wanted to know, this tearing that you're talking about, is it like half the screen scrolling off beat? Kinda like when you don't know how to configure MAME proper?

It's more like as there is motion imagine a sheet of art and as it moves, vertical "wrinkles" appear.

The more I play with this thing, the more I think about overclocking it. It needs either overclocking, more RAM or just better software to emulate the games. If anyone ends up jailbreaking this thing...
 

FLTCHRR

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It's more like as there is motion imagine a sheet of art and as it moves, vertical "wrinkles" appear.

The more I play with this thing, the more I think about overclocking it. It needs either overclocking, more RAM or just better software to emulate the games. If anyone ends up jailbreaking this thing...

Yeah, I would describe them as kind of stripes, although to me the problem seems to vary quite a bit from game to game. In a number of games I don't really notice it at all. Also, when I hooked up to my red tent, the smaller screen made it less noticeable.
 

mjmjr25

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I'd be interested in what you think after a week or so, James. Each of the Pandora's I had at first blush were seemingly pretty decent, then the little bits wrong w/each game just added up and in the end you're just sorta frustrated and don't really dig into any of the games - just "doesn't feel right". I think for a small investment and if you don't like wrestling w/ setting up ROMZ, then this is definitely something you can use to test out a game - see if you like the vibe, but if it's a game you really want to sit down with and dig into - this isn't going to cut it (I don't think).
 

DNSDies

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It's more like as there is motion imagine a sheet of art and as it moves, vertical "wrinkles" appear.

The more I play with this thing, the more I think about overclocking it. It needs either overclocking, more RAM or just better software to emulate the games. If anyone ends up jailbreaking this thing...

Sounds like vsync issues in the emulation software.
The pictures of it in the first post, I can kind of make out A13 on the big chip in the middle, so maybe it's an ARM Processor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_A1X

If this is it, it's based on Cortex A8, and running some flavor of Linux or the Android OS.

Could be easy-ish to hack.
 

FLTCHRR

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Well, I spoke too soon about the board working with all of my cabs. It boots up fine on my atomiswave and loads to the main menu, but for whatever reason it won't recognize any inputs. I'm not sure why this is, but I messed around with it for a long time and got nowhere.

Anyway, I was able to test the VGA using my atomiswave, but only on the menu so I'm not sure if it solves any of the tearing problems. It does seem to fix the alignment problem Xian was taking about. It put the picture right in the middle of the screen and made it a bit wider, and I was able to adjust it to fit the screen. The VGA gives a much softer picture though, so even if it solves the tearing problem, I'm not sure it's worth it. Here is a comparison both taken from the same screen with the video from the jamma edge on the left and using the VGA output on the right:

comparison.jpg

Also, I was able to hook up stereo sound off of the audio jack to my atomiswave. It was definitely an improvement although if I turned the volume up too much it got a bit crunchy. That could be my speakers though.

Another obnoxious thing I noticed is that when you have the board set to exit games by holding down start, you can't add credits in game. This means that you can't play any games with two players or add credits to continue your game when this setting is on. If you try to add credits it adds them to the main menu, but not in game. So back to coin+start I guess.
 

Xian Xi

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Its probably the same picture, just lacking scanlines. Pop on an SLG and maybe it will fix it up.

Ah, that sucks about the holding start deal. I just turned it off when I was done with SF33S so I didn't get a chance to check it.
 
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