Pandora Box 3 Multi-Game 520-1 PCB

raziel2001au said:

Glad that was useful. The only other thing that's worth pointing out is that you'll need an audio amp capable of driving 8 ohm speakers as the J-Pac does not have any audio processing capabilities. It provides two screw terminals for you to connect audio to, but you need to push the output from the pi through an amp of some sort. I'm still looking for a good option that I can power via jamma connector since most audio amps need high amperage, and the RPi3 has pretty high power requirements as well (~2.5amps).

Also, still trying to figure out how to make the emulation station menu look correct at weird resolutions like 1920x240. But it all works, in my opinion, far better than the PB3 does.

If you want to emulate the MK games, do note that the sound seems to screw up on MK3/UMK3 after a few rounds. Which is annoying, not sure if there's a way to fix that... Considering that MK2 is based on the same hardware, I think the same might happen there, but I've not run into this in the limited amount of time I've messed with MK2. Also note that the MK games output more than 240 lines so running it with 1:1 pixel accuracy isn't possible as far as I'm aware. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

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I got one of the raspberry pi3 Jamma adapters, has built in video and audio amp, comes preconfigured with daphne, final burn alpha, and 2-3 versions of mame. I been using it for cps1,2,3 etc and have been really enjoying it. A guy on Klov sells them and gives great support for it. The SD card has the Roms setup on a Windows compatible file folder so you can just plug it in your PC to add Roms, although the pi3 has built in wifi so I'm sure you could telnet etc into it and make the changes you need. I'm not as savvy with nix based systems so I just plug a keyboard up to it directly and make the changes in mame like I would on my PC.

I... am in love. Where on earth did you get it?

Is there a thread on klov you can share?

lolifoxgirl said:

I... am in love. Where on earth did you get it?

Is there a thread on klov you can share?

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http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=363338
User name is Dee2er, real nice guy and he continues to update his product which is nice, latest version has dip switches to put buttons 1-6 on the Jamma harness using ground pins like the Pandora does. Old version had a kick harness.
I experience no screen tearing and runs perfect in 15khz. You can setup different SD cards too for vertical or horizontal modes of you want. Super small form factor, nice menu alphabetized all games on one screen no matter which emulator it uses for easy sorting. Takes less then a minute to boot up and can back out of games by holding button 3 and pressing start.

Does the ui work in vertical mode? Thanks for the detailed post on this.

lolifoxgirl said:

Does the ui work in vertical mode? Thanks for the detailed post on this.

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Yes it does, just need a different SD card setup for that reason. You can just spin the game in video settings and save it for that emulator and rom, like the way you can set a game for free play in mame. You would have to do it for each game but can be done. This has been a non issue for me as I didn't want 1000 games to sift through. I just add a few at a time and when I get bored add some more. I love using this over my cps1 boards as everytime I plug one in I'm waiting for something to die on those.

lolifoxgirl said:

I... am in love. Where on earth did you get it?

Is there a thread on klov you can share?

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Do you have an arcade cab?

Westcb said:

got one of the raspberry pi3 Jamma adapters, has built in video and audio amp, comes preconfigured with daphne, final burn alpha, and 2-3 versions of mame. I been using it for cps1,2,3 etc and have been really enjoying it. A guy on Klov sells them and gives great support for it. The SD card has the Roms setup on a Windows compatible file folder so you can just plug it in your PC to add Roms, although the pi3 has built in wifi so I'm sure you could telnet etc into it and make the changes you need. I'm not as savvy with nix based systems so I just plug a keyboard up to it directly and make the changes in mame like I would on my PC.

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Actually its easier than that. When you're connected to Wifi, you can just share into it via a standard Windows network path. The default is \\retropie\

DecepticonZero said:

Do you have an arcade cab?

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Loli has a few, actually.

Crabz > Cabz

That Pi setup is pretty great. May need to look into that myself. Thanks for sharing Westcb!

Wow. What a cool bit of kit. I am intrigued - gonna ping him on KLOV and ask a few ???'s

mjmjr25 said:

Wow. What a cool bit of kit. I am intrigued - gonna ping him on KLOV and ask a few ???'s

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Would you mind sharing the questions and answers here?

Westcb said:

I got one of the raspberry pi3 Jamma adapters, has built in video and audio amp, comes preconfigured with daphne, final burn alpha, and 2-3 versions of mame. I been using it for cps1,2,3 etc and have been really enjoying it. A guy on Klov sells them and gives great support for it. The SD card has the Roms setup on a Windows compatible file folder so you can just plug it in your PC to add Roms, although the pi3 has built in wifi so I'm sure you could telnet etc into it and make the changes you need. I'm not as savvy with nix based systems so I just plug a keyboard up to it directly and make the changes in mame like I would on my PC.

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Put a passive heatsink on the ARM processor, those Pi3 processors get really hot on a full load (something like 97-101* C) from someone's test on EEVBlog using an Infrared gun iirc.

http://www.amazon.com/Enokay-Coolin...2&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=copper+heatsink&psc=1

^ those will do the trick.

Pasky said:

Put a passive heatsink on the ARM processor, those Pi3 processors get really hot on a full load (something like 97-101* C) from someone's test on EEVBlog using an Infrared gun iirc.

http://www.amazon.com/Enokay-Coolin...2&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=copper+heatsink&psc=1

^ those will do the trick.

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Like this...

My pi3 came with them I just didn't have them on in the pic, although out the box I don't think they usually do so real good advice.

Ya, that's aluminum not quite as good as copper but does the job. It's actually a higher profile so more heat dissipation so probably better than the copper ones I linked.

munchiaz said:

Would you mind sharing the questions and answers here?

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The questions were pretty geared to me and my lack of technical knowledge, but here's what may be helpful for everyone.

You can supply your own Pi (and deduct that cost off your build; $50 AUS I think it was)
This is plug and play - the ONLY thing the end user has to do is put the roms in the already installed folders.
It is about 1 week from the time you order til the time it ships (1 week build time)

I heard these are super picky about roms. Did the creator mention which romsets work or what format they need to be in?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki

If you click on the systems in that wiki, it will tell you about specific emulators and required romsets.

lolifoxgirl said:

I heard these are super picky about roms. Did the creator mention which romsets work or what format they need to be in?

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Every rom I downloaded so far from one of those emu sites worked for me but there was some trial and error testing, example one rom would not work on mame4all, but it would work on another version loaded. Every cps1 and 2 game and neo had worked for me so far, as well as like turtles and time etc but I heard there was a large number that would not. I had an older full set of mame Roms in 7z format and those didn't seem to be named correctly. You can setup your audio for pass through or you can have it go through the onboard amp that had a pot on it. On some of the emulators you can go in and set volume level too in case one is obnoxiously loud compared to another etc. if you like to tweak settings a lot you can get a wireless keyboard and hook that up so you can use the keyboard outside of the cab if you want to play around, save states etc. and that's does not require a installing any drivers. For the price it's great and compared to other mame setups this is one of the easier ones to get going for sure. Loading Roms is all you have to do, but you will also need to go into the settings of the emulators and move some buttons around. Out the box throwing grenades was button 1 instead of 3 on final burn. Once you square stuff like that away it's a breeze. Also never power the unit off unless your at the game select screen as if it's writing to the SD card and loses power it will/can corrupt it. At the game select screen you are never writing to the card so it's a known safe place to kill power.

Westcb and others, there should probably be a separate thread for this device.

It's already page 38 and will be a pain to find in the future.

lolifoxgirl said:

I heard these are super picky about roms. Did the creator mention which romsets work or what format they need to be in?

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In short, everything on the PB3 and PB4 works. So that should give you a rough idea... In terms of rom-sets, if you're using RetroPie, it runs FBA v0.2.97.38 (lr-fba-next) and pretty much everything I've tried works. In terms of Mame, the 2003 version works best, which is based on Mame 0.78. It also has the 2010 version, which is based on 0.139, but it does run a lot slower. For example, Mortal Kombat II, 3 and UMK3 runs full speed on 2003, but is unplayable on 2010. Having said that, they're only playable till the sound screws up, at which point you pretty much have to restart the emulator. I'm currently trying to see if there's a good way to fix that, but nothing I've tried has fixed it.

Having said that, I no longer use RetroPie. I've switched to Lakka, which is RetroArch's official linux distribution which is also runnable on the Pi (http://www.lakka.tv). The advantages is super-fast booting, after the first boot, it boots within a few seconds into RetroArch without the typical Linux boot-sequence. Drawbacks include no support for Wifi, so it's a pain to set up as you pretty much have to SSH into it over wired ethernet, also, there's no Nice UI, it literally drops you into the full RetroArch UI on boot. It does however solve one really big problem I had. I ended up concluding that if you're going to run at like 1920x240, there's nothing you can do to make EmulationStation's menus look correct. Whereas with Lakka, you can choose to use the rGUI menu driver, which renders at low-resolution, then scales it to match the viewport you've specified, so it looks 320x240 even when rendering at 1920x240.

I'm considering to write a modified version of rGUI that is more like a kiosk game selection screen with features like separate horizontal and vertical configurations etc. But that's a large undertaking, not sure it would be worth my time.

mjmjr25 said:

The questions were pretty geared to me and my lack of technical knowledge, but here's what may be helpful for everyone.

You can supply your own Pi (and deduct that cost off your build; $50 AUS I think it was)
This is plug and play - the ONLY thing the end user has to do is put the roms in the already installed folders.
It is about 1 week from the time you order til the time it ships (1 week build time)

Click to expand...

Did I read group buy in there?

DuffCon said:

Thanks for the response; I'm thinking about just getting one to try. I know that there is a blurry filter with non-CPS games (a result of scaling all games to the CPS resolution) but most of the time the CPS games are what I play anyway. I figure the worst that could happen is I end up selling the PB4 for a small loss...

I'll post up if I get one

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raziel2001au said:

I have also been trying to get an answer to this question. I don't have a k7000, but have similar issues with the PB3 not filling my CRT properly horizontally - don't have this issue with any original Jamma boards. Since they fixed the cut-off on CPS-based titles I'm hoping it means they also fixed the horizontal output size to be wider than the older Pandora's Box's, but I dunno, no one seems to know the answer.

I guess the number of people owning both the PB4 and an older one is quite low, so it might be hard to get someone to check.

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Azathoth said:

The screen size issue isn't fixed on the PB4 either.

One of my cabs has a 19' VGA monitor in it. I tried playing a couple games on the PB4 through VGA last night and the filter applied to the few I tried made them absolutely unplayable. As mentioned before the filter applied to the VGA port is much different than that applied through the JAMMA harness. If I absolutely had to play it on that particular cab I'd run it through the CGA-to-VGA adapter I've got connected just to avoid those visuals.

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Quick update, I did pickup the PB4.

Confirmed K7000 Monitor still exists.

CPS 1 & 2 left side cutoff is resolved

The other issue with the filter applied to games not in the CPS1/2 resolution doesn't seem so bad on a CRT vs VGA as reported by Azathoth. Given the choice between scaled and fuzzy, overall I think the fuzzy is a better of the two. While the fuzzy does make some games (baseball stars 2) look slightly worse for me, a lot of other games such as Konami Beat-em ups (sunset riders, TMNT) look better. The scaled blocky graphics looked horrible.

Also the additional titles added to the PB4 makes this better for me, obviously in a perfect world, this would emulate resolution better but for $80 it's liveable.

Xian Xi said:

I can make those no problem.

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Xian, I've been trolling this post for too long. Couldn't get to inbox you. I had a quick question. You seem like the guy to go to. I have a sega jamma cabinet that was used for a neo geo single slot? Would I be able to stick in a Pandora's box using one of your converters? Id be cool with not be able to play 5+ button games. I just want tmnt and Simpsons and xmen.

Any help would be sweet. Thanks everyone!

lolifoxgirl said:

I heard these are super picky about roms. Did the creator mention which romsets work or what format they need to be in?

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I can't comment on the solution above as I'm not using this guy's solution or his custom OS, I am using Lakka at the moment and that works well. On RetroArch which Lakka runs, the mame2003 and FBA SVN cores work best. For Mame2003 you can get the romset from the internet archive. With FBA you should be okay as it supports the newer versions.