Opening Pandora's Box - Are cheap All-in-one Arcade Fight Sticks worth it?
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- Опубликовано: 12 июл 2024
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All in one arcade sticks are everywhere. Fight sticks, arcade sticks, joypads and joysticks with thousands of built in game ROMS and emulators from Street Fighter to Mortal Kombat. But are they any good? Today we visit such a device, a Pandora arcade stick for two players and Mark and I give it a test drive, a review and a tear down. You'll find these on Amazon or Ebay under names including Kulukula 3003, TAPDRA 3D, ZEHNHASE 3D and MEANSMORE but they are all the same stick.
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●Chapters
0:00 - Intro
2:15 - Unboxing and Contents
7:35 - What is SurfShark?
8:29 - What's inside?
13:22 - Play Testing
19:11 - The Verdict
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#StreetFighter #Joystick #Arcade 
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China + Copyright = FATALITY SUPER COMBO FINISH...
+ babality 🤣
These are brilliant for a portable plug and play option requiring no technical knowledge. The Pandora games 3D is probably the pick of the bunch. For me they were the gateway to the rabbit hole and I've since built a couple of arcades with MAME and now Mister FPGA. Love the videos!
You're right these are brilliant 👏 My favourite games are Elevator action and Time Pilot 84 .
so happy you seem to have teamed up with mark more lately, great episode!
Thank you for the detailed review. My biggest issue was the input lag rather then the emulation power with my particular copy. VGA seemed to work better than the HDMI. Regardless, I think it has a great potential to build a cabinet around for casual family fun.
I bought a couple, well two, over the years, the quality just varies so much on them, just went back to using Superguns again for arcade stuff.
Agreed, for a proper arcade experience a SuperGun set up is still the way to go - love my MVS's.
Too, many, comma’s ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
@@GoWstingray Grammar and punctuation Nazis unite!
Considering purchasing just for the case are they still £40 Squid ?
Looks like its about £100 on Ali Express if you want to wait about a month to get one
Looking forward to watching this while finishing work! Keep up the great vids
Great episode. You have reached television level production quality.
Except for all the glitches.
I have had one for a few years now and its amazing just to get out and have a blast on with a few beers, always planned to put it into a bar top case at some point.
If you're replacing all of the buttons and sticks, using it on a PC, and even replacing the sticker, you're basically just keeping the plastic housing and USB interface.
It's nice how it's pre drilled and everything though, and ends up cheaper than a stick with the parts included often. But really youd probably be better off getting two sticks and something else to run arcade games in a setup...
I recently ordered a Pandora enclosure and 2 sets of buttons for a similar build. The buttons come with 2 USB controller boards. Now for the brains, I use a Raspberry Pi 3B running Retropie OS (console emulator OS). and the result for MAME games is very good. As a bonus, the additional USB ports on the Pi can be used to plug in additional controllers for console games. Absolutely brilliant little rig for Xmas gatherings. All told I spent about 100 gbp and would recommend this for those who like DIY.
“Your turn to recap the whole unit” 🥰
I got excited when I saw two knobs poking out after you two guys opened the flaps.
"I see a couple of knobs..." LOL, that was too on-point! ;-)
I used to have a Big Knob.
Thanks for doing this. I was recently looking at these.
Depending on your capabilities and what you might have lying around the house it can make a lot more sense to make your own arcade machine. That way you can control what kind of quality you are getting and possibly save some money. Things like older smartphones or PC's can be great bases for an emulation machine. Otherwise many of these all in one machines can be easily upgraded with better sticks, buttons and the like. There are also quite a few different versions of the Pandora box units with different capabilities (the Pandora Box 3D is currently the best version as far as I know). The Wicked Gamer and Collector does a lot of reviews and comparisons for people wanting to know more.
The way I would suggest most people to go is to get something like an arcade style joystick and connect it to an old smartphone (a 2 year old smartphone is generally much more powerful than the SOC's in these kits) with a USB C to HDMI solution allowing it all to go into a TV. From that point it's just a matter of loading up your own emulators and ROM files.
If you find the right pandora box 3D board with a button on it, you can mod it to run emuelec. A lot of these Pandora’s are based on older pandora 6 models... I like using the amlogic s912 base chipsets.
I could see where it was going from the start, but after you have upgraded the parts, it should be a clever piece of kit for the cave, interesting and I bet it will stop some people being ripped off by this.
Awesome video. Always nice to see Mark
Congrats on picking up a lovely MiSTer case for £40!
The gamma differences when you showed them side by side with mame, actually comes out in favor of the pandora stick. Arcade monitors are calibrated with a different gamma settings than what you see on your flatscreen, and adding a gamma adjustment is actually a way to get them to look closer to the intended look, not the other way around. Not having an option to disable it would be the only possible bad aspect there, from what I saw in the video, as its certainly not always necessary/beneficial.
What a relief, I was dreading you guys gushing over that cheapo thing, should never have doubted you. I do prefer the shiny red ends on your knobs though!
I got the 4s+ a few years back for £120, it's pretty insane how the prices are going down yet the hardware is being updated vastly. Playing any 3D fighter was a pipedream on the 4s+. If the 11 is anything like previous hardware, it probably uses a Dual Shock 3 controller board and in my experience does indeed work through usb with a PS3 but you'd have to stick to games in which remapping the buttons is an easy feat. When it came in the mail, a friend of mine and I played on the actual unit itself for about 10 minutes before we chucked it on MAME on the PC. You can indeed hook the sd card up to linux and change some of the roms but it's a whole other faff of its own. I've seen some pretty cool Pi mods for it online.
I bought an Atari Fight Stick for mame and LOVE it. This is the single player model in 70s-style wood grain which, in addition to the usual joystick and 8-button layout, also includes a track ball, a weighted spinner, AND side-mounted pinball buttons. It is very well made, with high quality controls and enormous functionality. The original price was $200, which seemed pricey at first sight, but actually is pretty fair considering the quality, functionality and appearance. I actually paid $80 for an "open box" (but unused) from MicroCenter. They had several at the time, and now I wished I had ordered more. Sadly, it is no longer manufactured and I cannot find them anywhere now. In comparison, I also have a couple of Atgames fight sticks (basic joy/8-button design). They are decent quality, but they are basically "Camaros" compared to the Atari's "Corvette".
Perfect timing on a Friday afternoon after work, wait, it’s a Thursday! 😅
Just to be clear, the game at 14:39 is Street Fighter III: Third Strike and not one of the Street Fighter Alpha games. Carry on :)
I spotted that as well, I was kinda impressed it was running it TBH if it is indeed full speed, a hacked SNK MVSX Home Arcade apparently struggles with SF3.
Looks very interesting. Lots of possibilities for that small outlay. 👍
I could almost feel Mark holding back on the innuendoes 😁
Almost... a few leaked out especially towards the end 😆
You make a great and funny show together ... I really enjoyed it ... please keep doing that
Thanks Ali!
Lol, the sarcasm in this video is off the charts... I enjoyed that too much; especially the reading of the marketing on the box.
A great video Neil as ever, really good quality one too. I'm not sure your friend wanted you to peel that sticker off though. Keep safe and all the best.
Excited for the DIY upgrade, Put rolling wheels on the bottom of the stand and set the projector on it. less permanent.
I have the Pandora’s. Box 9 and I really like the picture qualities on these.
Nice video. But, did you try running this through VGA to see if the HDMI conversion was causing the screen tear? For 40 pounds, it is a very tidy unit.
Hey hey! Good to see Mark and Neil handling those big red knobs in the Cave.
RMC&MFS, ultimate combo!!
At least one that I bought a few years ago didn’t even have the option to turn off the crappy smoothing. But they are great for taking to a party, for people of a certain age like me. What I definitely wouldn’t want is an arcade cabinet built around a Pandora’s box, which seems to be appearing a lot on eBay.
Given the range of games nowadays, it’s definitely “Jack of all trades, master of none” - investing more money/components in it seems counterintuitive though.
Great box to use for a pi arcade machine. I was looking at trying to get the single joystick case only (got no mates) and build a pi arcade machine into it.
That SBC is almost certainly a completely standard off-the-shelf part. I'm impressed with the number of GPIOs, too (looks like the arcade stick is only using about half of them). It'll be running a hacked-together Linux with an equally hacked-together, old and buggy version of MAME, because they always are, but it would probably be really easy to install a proper Linux distro on it with a more recent MAME. Booting from SD card makes them really easy to hack. If these boxes are common enough there may even be some community support for that.
The H2+/H3 SoC is supported by mainline Linux since there are other SBCs using it (I actually have an Orange Pi Zero that has exactly the same Soc as the Pandora box in the video), but I believe you would need to adapt some things to the characteristics of the board (the type and speed of RAM, GPIO, etc.). I don't know about any community efforts to support these boards but it could be possible and there are already distros like Armbian that support Allwinner based boards.
@@JORGETECHJorge Thought you may like to know that Lakka support the Allwinner H SOC series with their RetroArch emulation software.
Pandora 3D series run on Android + RetroArch. Older Pandora Boxes run on Linux + MAME + FBA (due to IGS PGM emulation is not as good as FBA back then).
The so-called "Retroid handheld console" also runs on Pandora 3D board, but there are versions that runs AOSP (rather than crappy Pandora customized Android) due to so many players requested that.
For 40 quid, thats an excellent project box. I would use some cheap daemonbite encoders to make it lagless with quality stick and buttons, and perhaps drill some side holes for pinball buttons as well.
Been meaning to do a pinball mod on my Xbox 360 arcade controller, but never gotten around to it.
Where could I get this for £40? Looks quite good for my kids.
I can see a couple of Knobs... enjoyed the video, looking at getting one of these for the kids :D
I trash-picked a 14'' Acer plastic job with a broken screen and some damaged connectors in January. It boots nicely, if noisily, if I clip on 19V to the legs of the power connector. There should be ample room in one of those "Pandora" fight sticks for it, a hd and a less whiny cooling solution. It sports a 6200U and 4GB soldered DDR3 (and a free socket), more than enough for the games I enjoy. It's something to do at least till I get that shot. :)
"My knob was bagged... I removed it; pulled it right off."
That did it for me a classic!!!
It'll be just like Triggers broom
Do wonder you tried plugging a keyboard (or mouse) into one of the A ports and see if you could get into something more than the up front UI.
If it was running Linux it may well be possible to jump to a terminal using alt and the function keys.
Great review!!! ...I was about to purchase this trash, but you made me change my mind !!!
Woooooo he said the sanwaaaaah thing
That answered a long-standing mystery for me. I never knew until that moment what was being said in the intro promo on every RMC video.
I always heard Sanwar-arcade.....
I kept hearing "SunWire Arcade" thinking it's some lonely still-lasting British button brand
Thank you for the video. I decided to check it out after watching an ad. These scumbags were selling for $249.99.
These clones have definitely improved, but it's such a shame about the lack of V-Sync, and ugh, those filters!! They're fun as an option sometimes, but please, just give us a integer/linear scale.
Still: you could do a lot worse for £40, especially with that housing. Could easily fit a fully decked out Raspberry Pi 3B/4 in there and probably even add some USB ports for X/D-Input controllers, and have a "portable" arcade setup... minus the screen!
I love ur cave...what are behind the camera?🤔
When you plugged the arcade stick into your PC, was it registered as a XInput device or a DirectInput device?
Great vid!
You know it's going to be a special video when Mark shows up. :D
Haha! Cheers Jim!
Mark is certainly special
I'm excited as Neil said he's looking to bring Mark in as a permanent fixture to the channel. Always enjoyable videos
@@RMCRetro special needs ahaha
Is Mark Penfold to Neil's Dangermouse?
Lol I am just started looking at parts to build my own arcade using a raspberry pi. And I see these pandora boxes all around 😄😂 finally I get to hear about it
Wicked gamer has a lot of pandora reviews. Mostly a mixed bag. If there's a system that you want to emulate beyond 16 bit you mileage may vary.
Great video again guys... have you got a link to this unit...????
Put in sanwa parts, 2 brooks fighting boards and pi4 retropie in the center, that would make it a decent setup.
Nice work!
2:25 wasn’t expecting the GoodTimesWithScar music
Ive seen people change the internals with an RPI 4 booting to Emuelec and running Arcade and Dreamcast. The cheapest Ive seen these go is £90 on ebay.
I nearly bought when I was living in Australia. Jaycar started carrying an older model Pandora's Box
Got to feel that Mark's lockdown hair flick is a flex to Neil.
lol
:flicks hair:
I have this same one. I mounted it into a bare pole position cabinet. I tried this on my 4k TV, and on a monitor. I found it looks better on a monitor than the TV. The monitor is connected via the serial port as I bought a factory second that never had the HDMI soldered to the board. I was going to fix it, but I found the display was better with the serial cable anyway. I can't say if its the monitor vs TV or the cables that make the difference.
When the unboxing music ran I expected them to jump into super fast build mode ;)
Haha, me too :)
Very cool I want this it has all the kof game's I'm already playing on mame with my little hori mini f. Stick and android pad.. This would be a massive upgrade and in a few years I could add a micro pc andrino or something in it and use it for everything
Great Video, Would be good if it had a rollerball in the middle for paddle games.
This is what I did, I took the board out and using a case (pandora’s case) I drilled it under a desk very hidden from plain sight the used a usb hub and with velcro attached the hub to the edge of the desk. Also using the audio out I added a pair of usb speakers. As controllers I’m using custom made arcade fight sticke I made with usb zero delay encoders work like charm on this thing at the end just go to settings and remap the buttons of the zero delay encoder boards. I used the spare case, buttons and original sticks to connect it to a raspberry pi using other zero delay encoder boards to have a portable one.
Great buy, they’re awesome!
Am I the only one that immediately thought about building my own arcade cabinet around one of these with flat screen monitor to basically make my own modern HD arcade?
Hi thanks for the video very informative. Is it possible do you know to get a replacement fan for one of these (I own the exact model Pandora 11s) as my fan is very loud at startup but calms down after a while. The fan measurement is 1 1/2 inches x 1 1/2 inches and has a 2 pin connector and is exactly as shown in your video. Can you help please?
He says "that one was 200 pounds" and I'm dumbfounded how heavy that must have been.
That's nothing my car was 40,000 pounds new, yet over some years I'll bet it's half that. Weird.
Would be better value investing the cash in Debenhams shares....
Haha. Only America will understand this joke I guess. 🤣
😂😂😂
But, aren't those sticks and buttons situated for left-handies? Not sure about arcade machines, but on me ol' Commodore I would definitely use the stick with the right hand and the button with the left.
i bought similar product (probably same with different art design) and working fine (except few games) and i am using old 32" CRT TV instead of lcd
This quickly turned into an innuendo special, perhaps 'Carry on Arcade stick'
Not arf!
Can never have enough knob gags!
There is an option in MAME to set the game speed to match the monitor refresh rate. This fixes the screen tear with vsync off and judder with vsync on, but it does mean games with low 50s refresh rates like R-Type and Mortal Kombat run a fair bit too fast. Overall though it's the best of the three options. You could also triple buffer but that adds lag.
We got a couple of knobs. We sure do :)
I want a retro game system (box or console) that is reliable and has all the Marvel arcade games of the 90s! Which one would be best??
Shame it doesn't have my favorite game Tom Cruise Axe.
Alex Baldwin Top Donald Trumps is coming to the online Shop soon
Which guns did you use to play operation wolf? Any link to purchase?
Found so many identical units online for 150+ saying anything under £100 is a cheap knock off even though they seem to have the same cables down to the 2 spare buttons , don’t know anything about them but for £40 it’s definitely worth a punt, do you have a link for this product?
Buy it for the knackered "Engrish" on the box!
That's one of the Pandora's Box "copies" - It's using an older board and lower quality sticks than the actual ones. The Pandora's Box DX is the latest "official" (still obviously dodgy!) box and board and it doesn't suffer from the same screen tearing I'm seeing in the video above.
Do you guys have an update? I am interested in the Pandora's Box or is it better to build one yourself using a PS4 or something?
I've also thought about getting one of these and replacing the factory board inside with a Raspberry Pi
I’m doing that now actually 😅
So nice of jhon remero to join today
Nice one guys, why not put a Mister in it , that would be sweet!
Nice episode
i had this on in the background and for a min i thought that joe Wilkinson was in the cave. Dude sounds remarkably like him
I'll totally take that compliment!
Somebody found the Pandara's Box Jungle...
If you wonder why Jungle.... finding the best one is a challenge.
The board you are having is running I quess the H3 Quad Core chip ?
if so that is one of the chips they used in the beginning.. I hate those and MK runs like 💩
Great Review 👌
Thinks its more the poop Pandora software than the H3 Quad SOC tbf lol
Can you recommend a good plug n play to the TV that has everything from arcade to like ps3 era?
They been watching EEVblog: Don't turn it on, take it apart!
YOU BEAUTY! RIPPER!
You two are really good at this. And getting better all the time.
Thanks Jim
When it comes to these arcade consoles, there are just a couple of companies making them as “original”, for whatever that means with a blatant piracy device, while there are countless companies and sellers who are copying them, and often they’ll just slap the software intended for a completely different board on the SD card and call it a day. Given the specs Mark saw advertised a different CPU, it’s entirely likely that’s the case, here, so nothing is optimised for the CPU it actually has. The company I work for (I won’t be naming names here) has sold two different models of this kind of arcade stick, over the past three years. The first was clearly bodged together. Emulation was terrible, bordering on unplayable, on anything that ran on, of all things, a Z80 processor, possibly the simplest processor to emulate. It just wasn’t optimised, and it ran like garbage. The second model, emulation is as near to flawless as you can expect of emulation. It’s no FPGA experience, to be sure, but everything looks sharp, there’s no noticeable screen-tearing, and the audio has no real latency. I’m sure people who’ve spent their whole lives on original cabinets could tell the difference, but for the average punter, it more than passes muster.
Basically, “Pandora” boxes are hit and miss. You never know what you’re going to get until you open it up.
My question is how do they work as just controllers? I would like to get a 2 person arcade stick for me and my girlfriend, but only a quality one.
Can you name for me one original company ?! I want to buy one
Thank you in advance
Great product. But what about after support and repair? Fine when everything works but when it breaks you want assurance it can be repaired easily.
Ah yes, Pandoras Box certainly hasnt aged well with time. I mean when they first pop'd up they may actually have been worth the £200+ that some still try to sell them for. The hardware has been continually re-released with more games but hasnt done much in the technical department so other emulations like Raspberry Pi has cought up & surpassed it many times over. I myself finally got my hands on a "console" version of the Pandora Saga 2700 (clone) for about £50 & is quite happy with it. Takes less space comes with psu & some off dual playstation like controllers. The idea was that now that i have the psu & joysticks i can alway upgrade by simply buying a new stand alone board for £20-30 (usually comes in both jamma & "home console" versions). Even though the first 500 games is basicly just SF & King Fighter verison games there is still a huge selection of other games in there. I must admit i prefer the "non optimized" nostalgia look at 1024x768. If you are as old as me & played the 8bit games then a bit of screen tearring isnt going to bother you. Of and dont forget about import taxes & penalties. I got lucky with mine, but it could easily have been another £35 if the import staff in Denmark wasnt so lenient at the moment. Today you can certainly get a lot more for £50. The only reason i got one was because after a decade of starring at the sticks online, they finally got down to a price point that i was willing to pay "just for kicks".
If it can't run Mortal Kombat, I'm out. Not spending a nickel on a machine that won't FINISH HIM.
It runs mortal kombat
guy was just poor ignore the op
it run's it very well
Cost more than a nickel to finish these days mate
:D - what about reformatting (or replacing) the SD card (with a larger and better one) and installing MAME onto it? Would this fix/improve the colours and 'tearing' issue(s)? Could it then become a basic Windows (or other operating system) powered emulator, or would the hardware not be powerful enough for doing this? Just a thought!
Probably would get rid of the screen tearing - need to flash the SD to boot like etcher or something. Linux Lakka may work?, It does for similar orange Pi units like the Super Retrocade mini consoles.
hello I have the same type inside, does the break work for you? me it activates but it deactivates only by the A button of the first player, is it normal? I think they plugged it in any way, in the io configuration test, the pause button only indicates that it presses the "corner" button at the same time, I don't understand.
Cool looking thing. Does it saves your scores? Does anybody know? If yes, am interested 🤔
Is there a newer updated version of this or something similar with better graphics, etc?..
ESD protection, Neil and Mark!