At the bottom, there is an added “PS1 GAME TIME” option which decides how much time a player gets to play a PS1 game for with each coin inserted. Try as I might, I can’t make this option appear on my PB6.
It is currently unknown if there are any other changes to this version of the software at this time.
If you have this on your Pandora’s Box 6, please contact me as I would like to get a backup of your SD card, please!
EDIT: I received an image from someone and it does indeed look like a slightly changed version of the Pandora’s Box 6 software. Looking at the disc image, the partition number matches the old one, however the last modified date of the emulotar file is now October 20th, 2018. A quick glance at it shows that there are a lot of differences in the binary but what they are exactly, I couldn’t say. I’m going to write this image to an SD card and see if it works in my Pandora’s Box 6.
EDIT 2: It appears that the software is locked to the newest hardware revision of the PB6 box. When I wrote the disc image to my SD card, it did exactly what it did when I attempted to use a hacked sd card image – played the PB6 splash screen and went to a black screen. The red light inside the PB6 box started flashing and it never progressed. So it’s my theory that it is checking for something in the hardware and refusing to boot because mine is an older revision.
EDIT 3: There is indeed a new revision of the board and this SD card image is likely locked to newer revisions of the card. The older original board that I have shows the following info:
Original: 3RX_V22b REV 2018.06.30 K5860 – works with first SD card version. New: 3RX_V23 REV 2018.08.15 K5900 – works with this new SD card version.
So why would they do this sort of thing? Perhaps to not allow people to just swap SD cards to get updated features, much like they did with the Pandora’s Box 5 so they can’t use Pandora’s Box 6 SD cards. It’s also very possible that there’s a difference in the hardware that makes the original software somehow unusable.
Until we are able to crack open the box’s encryption, we won’t be able to tell for sure so all of this is conjecture at this point.
EDIT 4: The PS TIME OPTION allows to select from 1 to 10 minutes of time. EDIT 5: Looks like the number goes from 1-60, actually. Maybe it’s just the arcade version that has that range, however.
I just opened up a Discord server for discussion about the Pandora’s Boxes and similar devices that anyone can join. Just started so not much going on yet but if you read this blog, I think it may be helpful for you. I’m hoping that it can be a central place for people to get help if they need it, talk about games they’ve added to their PB6 and talk about what we might like in the future, that sort of thing.
Okay, when we last left off, we found what looked to be our emulator frontend, /usr/emu/emulotar. It appeared to be the program that the Pandora’s Box 6 wanted to keep running at all costs and it looked like some scripting set up the use of the Linux framebuffer for the QT graphical toolkit for embedded Linux. Let’s try to verify our assumptions by taking a look at emulotar with a hexeditor.
Let’s start off by verifying a few of our previous assumptions. We’re going to rip open /usr/emu/emulotar and take a look at what we might find inside. When looking at a file with HxD, we will see the hexidecimal representation of the file on the left and a translation to ASCII on the right. This helps us visually look for strings of text within the file easily. So, let’s open ‘er up.
Lots of ELFs around this time of year.
The very first thing we see when opening up the file is “.ELF”. This is a tell-tale sign that we’re looking at an .ELF file, which is an executable built for ARM processors. This is exactly what we’re expecting to see as the Pandora’s Box is built on the ARM architecture.
I know what you’re probably thinking right now.
“Jay, that’s… not very interesting.”
And you’d be right. However, there actually IS a lot in this file that IS actually interesting. Starting at offset 0x00005C40, we have what appears to be a block of strings. These appear to be commands that the emulator frontend is running which will give us some insight into what’s going on.
A small sample of what we can find here.
Instead of just giving you screenshots, I’m going to list what I find here and explain what they mean/do and take a guess at how things are working. Here are my little notes on what I think I’m looking at and I’ll take a final guess as to what is going on afterwards. This is a little information-dense, so feel free to skip this.
/dev/spidev1.0 – I believe this is a device file for the SPI bus and it’s likely that controls are accessed by reading GPIO pins through the SPI bus. I would have expected a /dev/spidev0.0 rather than a 1.0, but who knows…
/dev/mem – The normal device file that all the RAM is mapped to, normal in Linux land.
/dev/fb0 – The framebuffer device. Also to be expected in Linux.
echo volume – A command that would write “volume” to the screen. Odd.
%d – Usually used as a token for another variable. Impossible to tell what this is here for alone. The 00’s show that this isn’t just a part of the next line as they would be spaces (20) instead but they aren’t.
1 > /tmp/mfile & – This appears to be a fragment of a command. The intent appears to be to write the contents or output of a file into /tmp/mfile. The “&” here tells Linux to do this in the background. It appears that the file being copied to /tmp/mfile is a video file, likely the Pandora’s Box 6 intro video that you see on bootup.
/bin/vp -slave -input file=/tmp/mfile -quiet -volume – This appears to be our video player application. A quick look at vp using our hexeditor shows that it appears to be a version of mplayer, the popular Linux video player. So it looks like vp is mplayer in disguise and is told to play the file found at /tmp/mfile.
/bin/vp -slave -input file=/tmp/mfile -quiet -zoom -x 384 -y 226 -volume – Exactly the same as above except we can see that it appears to be playing at a small resolution. This is likely the command used when the Pandora’s Box 6 is used through a JAMMA connection to a low resolution arcade machine.
/tmp/libboot.so & – This tells Linux to run the file as an executable in the background. This is slightly odd as usually any file that ends in .so is a shared object, similar to Windows DLLs… but in Linux, you can name anything whatever you want so it’s not a hard and fast rule. This appears to be common on the pirate versions of the Pandora’s Box at least.
rb – Unsure. Too small to speculate. See wb below.
/dev/mmcblk0 – This is the device file for the first SD card that Linux finds. This would be where the Pandora’s Box would find the SD card it uses to boot from.
app1, app2, app3, app4, app5, app6, app7, app8 – I believe that – much like the previous boot1, boot2 files we found previously – this is potentially the emulator application set up for different languages/resolutions.
wb – When seeing wb and rb somewhat close together, it is possible that this is a flag for opening files as writable (wb) or read-only (rb). Until we can dig into everything ourselves, this is just a guess.
/tmp/app – Later on, it appears that this is the path to the main emulator executable used by the Pandora’s Box 6. I believe it is a combination of MAME, FBA and PCSX Reloaded in a single executable but this is currently unknown.
We now have what looks like 4 different sets of mplayer executables copied to /tmp/vdt as well as 4 different sets of .so files:
cp /bin/mplayer /tmp/vdt – Copies /bin/mplayer to /tmp/vdt. Also has the following files listed: /tmp/libboot.so, libbootc.so, /tmp/liblogo.so, liblogoc.so. libbootf.so, liblogof.so, libboote.so, liblogoe.so. Very likely that the files that end in c are Chinese, those ending in e are English. Very possible that these are the logos shown on the screen during boot up before the video is played and when a game is launched.
But we also have cp /bin/mplayer1 /tmp/vdt with the following files: libbootc1.so, liblogoc1.so, libbootf1.so, liblogof1.so, libboote1.so, liblogoe1.so
Same cp and files mentioned for numbers 2 and 3 as well. Very likely meant for different resolutions. On closer inspection, the mplayer3 version does not appear to have any files ending in f as the others do. Perhaps this is the one for the JAMMA version?
Much like the repeating blocks of files and commands for 4 different versions of mplayer, we have something similar with libcfg.so files, but also the Pandora’s Box 6 allows players to change the background of the menus by copying a file on the Udisk. If the number scheme holds up, it appears that we’ve figured out what the numbers mean. No number = 1280×720, 1 = 1024×768, 2 = 640×480, 3 = 384×224.
To give you a better idea, I’ve separated them by line, cropped to fit here. You get the idea.
tar -xf /tmp/libcfg.so -C /tmp – This extracts the files from within /tmp/libcfg.so directly into /tmp. Most likely what happens here is that the version of libcfg.so taken from above is copied to /tmp/libcfg.so before being decompressed. So I think this is going to be a set of configuration files for MAME that is setup for the different resolutions.
rm /tmp/libcfg.so – Delete the /tmp/libcfg.so file after decompression.
cp /tmp/config/xmame/nvram/* /tmp/ – Almost 100% certain that these are premade NVRAM files for different games with preselected settings. Likely something like this also with save states for the PlayStation games allowing them to skip all the intros and loading at the start. So this means that they have an archive of NVRAM files dumped into /tmp. This is where we would need to put in a fixed joust.nv so that Joust would be playable.
We appear to have a list of filetypes that this emulator frontend supports showing – bin, cue, img, mdf, pbp, toc and cbn for the PlayStation emulator and zip for MAME/FBA.
/tmp/imagesc.so – Unknown, perhaps Chinese only due to this being the only version of the file mentioned? Haven’t found references to this elsewhere yet.
/tmp/mfile, mkfifo /tmp/mfile – It looks like the /tmp/mfile that is used for playing a video through mplayer is a named pipe. Basically, the video file is piped through /tmp/mfile for mplayer to play it. It’s okay to not know what that means, just think /tmp/mfile = start up video and you’re good.
mkdir /tmp/udisk, mount -a, mdev -s, /dev/sda1, mount -t vfat /dev/sda /tmp/udisk – It looks like we have the emulator frontend setting up the mounting of the udisk, which we expected to find in /etc/fstab but didn’t. What is very interesting about this here is that it doesn’t look like the udisk is mounted as read only, so it’s very possible that maybe we can output some logs or something out to the udisk for analysing.
killall -9 vp – Forcably kill the video player when everything’s mounted and ready?
rm /tmp/libboot.so – Delete /tmp/libboot.so when done with it.
4 calls of mplayer0 playing /tmp/liblogo.so in all four resolutions the PB6 supports… except that the horizontal resolution is 2 pixels wider for… whatever reason. So 1280×722 instead of 1280×720, for instance. Odd that they only use mplayer0 for this and not mplayer1/2/3 as we see elsewhere.
/tmp/udisk/roms_fba, /tmp/udisk/roms_mame, /tmp/udisk/roms_playstation – These are the three different folders that users can drop their ROMs into to get added to the PB6 and their mount points.
killall -9 mplayer0 – Kill the video player when we’re done loading up user roms?
rm /tmp/liblogo.so – Delete the logo when we’re done?
/tmp – Seems to be where most of the work is being done here, the temporary RAM disk.
chmod 777 app – Set the permissions to allow read/write and execute on app. I believe this app program is our actual emulator.
/app -qws 54 54 20, /app -qws 54 52 20, /app -qws 52 54 20, /app -qws 52 52 20, /app -qws 54 54 30, /app -qws 54 52 30 – Pretty sure that this runs our emulator at different resolutions. Likely that qws has to do with the QT toolkit.
rm app – Delete the emulator when we’re done? Why?
/app tankfrce, /app btime, /app 54, /app 52 – I believe this is how the emulator to run for each ROM is selected as it mirrors something I remember seeing in a pirate Pandora’s Box. As far as I remember, while tankfrce (Tank Force) and btime (Burger Time) are legit MAME roms, I believe the emulator looks specifically for these games being called to know to switch to either the FBA or MAME emulators. It’s… an odd way of doing things, that’s for sure.
Just a few more device file names, and some error text after that, nothing special.
/dev/dsp – Likely the device file for audio output.
That’s about all the interesting text we’ve got here, so let’s take a look at everything we’ve got so far and take a guess at how this whole thing is functioning.
It’s getting late though and I’m tired. So I’ll write up a full guess into how the Pandora’s Box 6 boots up and runs, how it does things and when. I’ll also mention a few potential attack vectors for breaking into the box.
Now that we have a general idea of what we’re looking at on the Pandora’s Box 6 file systems, it’s time to start poking around. As this is a Linux-based single board computer, some Linux knowledge is useful. I’ll do my best to explain things as I see them so that those of you who are less technically inclined can follow along and understand a bit about how the box functions.
Start Me Up
Since the Pandora’s Box 6 is built to basically be a simple appliance that turns on and does one thing, we should start our journey into it by taking a look at how it would go through starting up. Generally speaking, a bootloader would be the first thing that would run and would then load up a Linux kernel and mount a file system. Once that is done, control is normally handed off to the Linux kernel and it finishes the boot up process by mounting the other file systems needed, running various daemons (or services in the Windows world) on start up before finally handing control over to the user. Well, in our case, we have a bit of a problem here as there is no obvious Linux kernel anywhere on either the EXT3 or FAT16 file systems.
Educated guess time: I think the various boot1 through boot9 files in the FAT16 file systems are encrypted/compressed archives that likely contain either the Linux kernel itself and additional files needed or it is somehow loaded up from elsewhere. The one thing that we can easily throw out is that the Linux kernel being loaded is from the UDisk as you are very capable of booting up the Pandora’s Box 6 without it and getting a completely empty game list. (This may be something to remember in the future as it might mean that all ROMs are read from the file system and not just those in the three folders meant for users to add games to. Perhaps something we can exploit here?)
Let’s continue onward with the Linux bootup process. Linux has what it calls runlevels. Basically these runlevels are numbered from 0 to 6 and represent different states. Most Linux boxes will set runlevel to 5 which represents network up and running, graphical interface running, everything ready for users. Runlevel 6 is usually the reboot state and Runlevel 0 is when the system is halted and can be safely shutdown. There are scripts that can be run automatically when certain runlevels are hit, so let’s take a look and see if we’ve got something like that happening here.
A Simplified Look at Our EXT3 File System
Just before we start poking around, let’s take a quick tour of our EXT3 file system so you can get an idea of what you’re looking at.
This is a fairly typical file system for most embedded Linux systems here.
Starting from the top, here’s what we’ve got:
/bin – Binaries that are common for the system and available for most to use.
/dev – Files representing all the machine’s devices are stored here. (Linux treats all devices as if they were virtual files which allows for some interesting ways of doing things.)
/etc – Configuration files used by the system, some applications and daemons (services).
/home – This is where your own user files are stored, much like My Documents on Windows but more tightly controlled and secured.
/lib – Where you will normally find Linux kernel modules and libraries (much like Windows DLLs).
/lost+found – A directory where Linux will attempt to place any files it recovers upon checking the system at startup.
/proc – A virtual filesystem that contains information about the running system, no actual files exist here.
/sbin – Binaries that are needed for running the Linux system and maintaining it.
/sys – Similar to /proc, it is a virtual filesystem containing information about the running system.
/tmp – A temporary filesystem that is created in RAM and can be used by processes for temporarily storing data. Disappears when system reboots.
/usr – Contains binaries meant for users to run and use as well as libraries and additional files needed by those binaries.
We will ignore the linuxrc symlink (or shortcut) for the moment.
We’re going to take a quick look at the /etc directory to see what we can find there. Typically, it is where you would find scripts that would run when runlevel hits 5 as well as other information such as filesystems to mount on boot.
As spartan as you’ll almost ever find an /etc directory.
Poking Around Some More
So what do we have here?
/etc/init.d/ – A directory that normally holds scripts to run on startup.
/etc/fstab – A file used by Linux for mounting filesystems.
/etc/hostname – A filename that tells Linux what hostname the machine should use.
/etc/profile – A default profile for all users on the machine.
Okay, so taking a look at profile shows absolutely nothing of interest, just something for setting the default terminal prompt, which we cannot see anyways. The hostname file just tells the machine to set the hostname to “hhh”, nothing too exciting here.
Now fstab is very interesting for us as it is where you would normally find filesystems getting mounted. We would expect to find our udisk listed here among the filesystems and…
…we don’t.
Instead, what we see here are the various virtual filesystems that are needed soon after booting. /proc and /sys are created during boot up and /tmp and /dev are created soon after. Well, that would normally be the case except none of the file systems are marked “auto”, so they need to be mounted manually, likely from a script. The use of tmpfs means “this filesystem exists only in RAM”, essentially. Alrighty, so a swing and a miss. Let’s move on to the init.d directory, where we find a file called rcS that I have good feelings about. Let’s open it up, shall we?
And here’s where we start seeing something.
This small shell script is run on bootup. It tells the machine to set the hostname using the “hhh” value found in /etc/hostname. It then sets the default directories that Linux will use as its PATH variable, searching the directories listed for any executables the user will attempt to type into the console. Nothing unusual about either command here at all. But what do we have here? A command attempting to run /usr/myinit which definitely isn’t something you would find on a normal Linux box. Let’s check that out.
Finally, a little meat to chew on.
Okay, so the first two lines here set up the PATH for Linux to look for executables and the PATH to load libraries (like Windows DLLs) from. Both of these are 100% standard for Linux, so nothing odd there. But the next line… that’s… that’s something new to me. A quick Google search for QWS_DISPLAY shows that it is a variable used by QT for Embedded Linux, which is a graphical toolkit. So it is more than likely that our emulator frontend uses the QT toolkit for all its graphics.
Google is endlessly helpful when it comes to things like this.
After reading that and looking at the line in our /usr/myinit file, we can see now that it is setting a variable to tell a QT application to use the Linux framebuffer device for writing graphics to the screen using the /dev/fb0 device.
Remember when I mentioned how it was odd that /etc/fstab showed filesystems but none of them were flagged as “auto” and therefore wouldn’t be automatically mounted at boot time? Well, the reason for that appears to be that they would rather have this script do it instead. The use of “mount -a” tells Linux to mount all the filesystems listed in /etc/fstab right now, so it is at this point that those virutal file systems are mounted and active. “mdev -s” is responsible for creating all the virtual files for each of your devices in /dev. This is where, for example, the /dev/fb0 framebuffer device will be created.
Finally, we see a while loop that will loop infinitely running what looks like our frontend executable. This is exactly the kind of thing you do when you want a program to always be running because if it terminates at any point, this loop will start it back up again automatically. This is a great stopping point for now.
Summary
So, let’s take a look at what we now know about our Pandora’s Box 6 so far.
The udisk is formatted FAT16 and contains all of our default games and directories for adding more games.
The boot SD card is split into two partitions, a FAT partition that contains what looks like different archives depending on what settings you use and an EXT3 file system that houses the rest of the system.
The emulators used by the Pandora’s Box are MAME 0.106, Final Burn Alpha 0.2.97.36 and an unknown PlayStation emulator (likely PCSX ReARMed, but haven’t found evidence yet).
The emulator frontend appears to load games up on-the-fly.
The emulator frontend appears to use the QT graphical toolkit for embedded Linux devices.
The boot sequence once we are past loading the Linux Kernel is /etc/init.d/rcS -> /usr/myinit -> /usr/emu/emulotar
We learned a bit about how the Linux filesystem looks and what the structure means.
We learned that sometimes, looking up stuff on Google can bring us some knowledge that we would have needed otherwise.
The Linux kernel isn’t on the UDisk as the PB6 can be booted up without it attached just fine.
In the next blog post, we will continue to pull on the thread to see what falls out as we examine the emulator frontend application itself and see what else we can find to help us.
Hope that you’ve learned something from this post. If you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.
This is going to be a series of posts taking a deeper look at how the Pandora’s Box 6 works and investigating what may help us break it open and get past some of the limitations we currently have with it. I don’t know how much time I have to devote to this task and I’m not sure how deep I’ll be able to get into it, but let’s poke around to see what we can find out.
Just so that you are aware, I am no hardcore hacker but I’ll be doing the best that I can while showing you what I’ve found and how, so this may be interesting to some regardless.
Superficial Looks
Before we attempt our deep dive, let’s attempt to get some information about what we’ve got the simplest way possible – just looking at the disk drives and seeing what we can find out. Let’s first take a look at the udisk – the external USB drive that comes with the Pandora’s Box 6 that you will need to copy the games onto and where you will add games of your own.
The UDisk
The udisk is a 16GB external USB drive that is formatted in FAT32 and looks like this:
Root directory of the Pandora’s Box 6 udisk. Pretty straightforward.
There’s not really all that much here for us. The movies and roms directories are where you will be copying the arcade ROMs and their accompanying videos when you receive the download links from 3A (as they will no longer give you preloaded games anymore). The romsp folder is for holding the default PS1 games that come with the unit (and pushed as if they were the original arcade versions). Inside, you’ll find a few games in .bin/.cue form, most of which are actually missing their soundtracks. You’ll find two identical copies of the PlayStation SCPH-1001 BIOS, both under the name bios.bin and scph1001.bin. A folder called mv contains movies that will play in the front end for these games specifically.
The list of PlayStation games included on the UDisk. Nothing too exciting.
Back in the root directory, we’ve got three more subdirectories which the Pandora’s Box 6 uses to check for games the user has added.
roms_fba – ROMs for the Final Burn Alpha emulator, version 0.2.97.36.
roms_mame – ROMs for the MAME emulator, version 0.106.
roms_playstation – ROMs for the currently unknown PlayStation emulator.
You’ll also find files that list what games the FBA and MAME emulators support… which isn’t entirely truthful as far as I can tell. The Final Burn Alpha game list shows all the various console emulators it normally supports as well as the standard arcade games, but so far, I’ve been unable to get any of the console games to load beyond just showing up in the Pandora’s Box 6 menu. There are also README files in both English and Chinese. That’s all that appears on the UDisk, so let’s create an image of the boot SD card and see what we’ve got there.
The Boot SD Card
I’m going to take the disk image I made of the SD card and I’m going to open it up in ISOBuster which is my tool of choice for poking around these backup image files.
First, we see that the SD card consists of two partitions, a partition containing a FAT16 partition and a partition containing a Linux EXT3 file system. This is pretty common for just about any sort of single board computer, like the Raspberry Pi, but unlike the Pi, it looks like the Fat16 partition does not contain the files you would normally expect to see that are required for booting up the board, such as a kernel. Instead, we see 9 files called boot and are numbered from 1 through 9.
Notice something odd here?
Each file appears to contain data that we can’t easily read, perhaps even some encrypted archives. Unfortunately, there are no magic bytes that match these so there’s no easy way to tell what this data is. I’ve got a slightly educated guess after seeing some of the similar partitions on other Pandora’s Box 4 clones. Looking at the file sizes of them, we see a pattern emerge. Boot1, boot4 and boot7 all are the same size. And if we look at the other files, we do see the same pattern (boot2, boot5, boot8 and finally boot3, boot6 and boot9). I am guessing here that these groupings are based upon the three different resolutions that the Pandora’s Box 6 can boot up in, which matches up to what I’ve seen on other clones. It also appears that the Pandora’s Box 6 supports three different languages – English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. So here’s what I think these files are for:
boot1, boot4 and boot7 – likely files supporting booting in 1280×720 in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
boot2, boot5 and boot8 – likely files supporting booting in 1024×768 in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
boot3, boot6 and boot9 – likely files supporting booting in 640×480 in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
When comparing files with the same size, they actually did have a lot of differences between them, so it’s not just 3 copies of the same file, which supports our language theory. If we take a look at the Pandora’s Box 5’s FAT partition, we see just two files present – boot1 and boot2, both of which have the same file size as the 1280×720 boot files. The Pandora’s Box 5 only supports 1280×720, however, and I’m not sure why there are two files here and not just one, but so far, I feel like we’re going down the right path here.
Taking a quick look at our EXT3 partition, we see what looks like a standard but stripped down version of the folder structure you would normally see on the main partition for any embedded Linux system.
Pretty standard set of files on the main Linux file system.
One thing that I would like to point out is the Linux partition’s name which appears to show the UUID partition label as well as where it was mounted to during development, which reveals that the main person responsible for creating these SD card images at 3A is likely named Zhang.
The Pandora’s Box 6 main partition UUID, apparently made by “zhang”.
The mysterious zhang appears again on the Pandora’s Box 5’s main partition name.
Just for funsies, let’s take a look at the same system partition on a Pandora’s Box 4s 1299 game clone and…
Uh… Mr. John Smith?
…and clearly, the bootleggers are taking the piss, so to speak.
In The Next Episode…
Now that we have taken a bird’s eye view of the Pandora’s Box 6 file systems, we’re going to start diving down into it to see what we can discover about how it works, the boot process and what fun scripts we might be able to find. Hope that you’re enjoying this so far and I’m looking to put out the next post within a week.
Hiya. If you’re one of my regular readers, thanks for sticking with me as we explore some really odd territory in gaming. I’m not entirely sure why I find Pandora’s Boxes to be so interesting but I sure do. I guess part of it is seeing how different and odd some of them can be from one another even though they are all birthed from pretty much the same product. The other part is probably more consumer protection more than anything. It’s very easy to feel like you’ve been scammed if you just bought one of these boxes and don’t know much about them, so I’m hoping to help those of you out there get something you’ll be happy with. For now, however, let’s talk about this site.
Commenting on… Well… Comments
First, sorry that I haven’t been around as often. Honestly, I didn’t expect to be generating any traffic whatsoever for what is essentially a niche of a niche of a niche product but I was getting a few more visitors and comments than I had originally anticipated. This lead to a lot of comments awaiting my approval for far too long. I apologize for the long wait. To that end, you shouldn’t need to worry about waiting for your comment to be approved anymore.
All comments are handled by anti-spam that will automatically approve anything it doesn’t deem as spam.
The Forum Is Yours
While it has been great to get people coming to the blog and leaving comments, I feel a bit like they aren’t the best place for long-term discussion, especially when it comes to certain subjects such as hacking or understanding how things work together. I find that while the Facebook group is good for asking a quick question or getting a video out there, having a singular place we can chat and talk is likely a better thing for everyone. Ideally, I’d like to have the kind of content here that I remember I used to see on Jamma Plus before it went down – people discussing their PBs, collaborating together on hacking them and posting information about how they work and helping others to identify their Pandora’s Box clones and such.
On the subject of hacking the Pandora’s Boxes, I’ve run into quite a few roadblocks. I had originally intended on making some blog posts with some of my findings but until I feel that I’ve made any real progress, I don’t really see the point. So instead, I think I will be posting my notes and ideas in the newly created forums. It’s small and modest for now, but I hope to create a real community here that can be a good resource for all. Perhaps we can spin up our own collective community version of the Pandora’s Box 6 USB drive.
First off, this blog now appears to be the number 1 search result in Google when searching for “Pandora’s Box 9”. I’m not sure if I should be proud or scared of that fact.
Secondly, I’m planning on writing up a blog post about all the new and various types of Pandora’s Box form factors you can find out there. Aside from the standard JAMMA and dual arcade stick formats, there are some interesting ones such as bartops and wireless controller types out there that I’d like to cover.
Third, I will be rearranging the blog a bit to make it easier to find any particular posts or information as I’m finding it a bit of a pain in the ass myself for the moment.
If you’ve got other ideas of what you’d like to see here, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I want this place to be a great home for the Pandora’s Box fans out there so please tell me if there’s something you would like to have here.
When you get interested in Chinese bootleg gaming machines, you come to expect the unexpected. You never know when you’ll discover a new idea that the bootleggers have come up with while looking around. But this… this is a bit unique.
I spend some time occasionally looking for more information on the various Pandora’s Box hardware out there and the various clones and seeing if I find any that are local that I might be interested in picking up. To be perfectly honest, I kind of am interested in collecting them at this point because I find them somewhat facinating with all the strange variants out there. It was during one of these random searches online that I found something a bit out of the ordinary.
Adequate Purchase?
Best Buy’s site online isn’t just a listing of what they have in stores or online as you might expect. Anyone that’s attempted to search for something they are interested in have probably noticed that there are also various retailers selling their goods through the “Best Buy Marketplace”, as it is titled. These marketplace 3rd party seller search results appear being just as legitimate as those from Best Buy itself with the only real difference being that “pick up in-store” isn’t an option and the seller is listed.
I was looking through the Best Buy Canada site to see if they were starting to sell the various Arcade1Up 3/4ths size arcade machines when I typed “arcade” into the search box and found this:
…Oh boy.
So, just kind of the generic Pandora’s Box 4S bootleg as you might expect and have probably seen a million times before. Nothing really unique about it at all aside from normally being overpriced. I have to admit that I do enjoy the color scheme a little bit as I’m very partial to blue. I’ve seen this one on other sites and it is made in plastic which is… less than desirable when most of these are made in wood or metal. I highly doubt that Best Buy realizes the illegality of selling this on their site but I’m not about to blow the whistle about it.
It looks like the seller is rather new and likely started up in November 2017. It doesn’t look like it’s going too well as we can see the following:
Not exactly a confidence builder, hmm?
While there are no reviews for the Pandora’s Box being sold here itself, let’s take a look at the seller’s reviews. 23 reviews, I’m sure there’s bound to be some information about why they only have a 3.3 star average. I’m going to cherry-pick a few of the more interesting reviews below.
Most of the reviews seem to complain about headphones.Yes, there are some good reviews here, too.
Of course, there’s always the obligatory “I don’t understand this star rating system” person. Sorry, Lynn, but you’ve failed us all.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, the seller doesn’t give us enough information to say exactly what Pandora’s Box clone is inside the box as they just give us “800 Classical Games” and that doesn’t match up to any PB or clone that I know of directly.
It’s overpriced, especially at its original $300 price tag, you won’t know exactly what you are getting beforehand and it’s housed in a plastic casing. I would not recommend buying this through Best Buy unless you had money to burn and the novelty of buying it through them tickles your fancy… for whatever reason. There are far better options that you should be able to find on Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, Craigslist, AliExpress or… well, just about anywhere. Don’t bother.
Update
Here’s someone’s review of what looks like a unit with the same box as the one being sold above on Best Buy’s Marketplace. Of course, because these are Pandora’s Boxes, the hardware on the inside is very likely entirely different than what is being sold above as even the number of games differs greatly. But for those of you interested in a better look at the box itself, here you go:
So, the Pandora’s Box 9 clone is getting more widely sold and as such, there is more information about it than we had when we previously discovered it a few months ago. For those of you wondering if you should take the plunge on a Pandora’s Box 9, I’ve recreated a table of information that is found on some Chinese AliExpress pages and adding more detail and a better translation.
Feature Set
3A Official Pandora’s Box 5
3A Official Pandora’s Box 6
Clone Pandora’s Box 9
Game Quantity
960 games
1300 games + 3000 custom added
1500 games
3D Game Support
No
YES
No
Game Customization
No
Can add your own games
No
Screen Resolution
1280×720
1280×720 1024×768 640×480
1280×720 1024×768 640×480
Game Pause Funtion
YES, during free play
YES, during coin or free play
YES, during free play
Game Sorting Function
No
YES
No
Autofire Function
No
YES, for games classified as shooting games.
No
Hopefully, this will help anyone looking to decide on which Pandora’s Box to pick up.
We’ve previously noted here on the blog that there were several PlayStation games that didn’t function properly and would crash when run through the Pandora’s Box 6. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it but I kept a log of where crashes seemed to be occuring. It looks like someone else – whose name I’ve forgotten – has figured out the issue as well as a workaround.
Rumble in the Jungle
Looking at the list of games that crashed consistently (linked above), someone appears to have noticed a pattern. It seems like the crashes are apparently caused by games using the controller rumble support. When we look at the list, we see a crash caused by the first jump in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, a crash caused by hitting the first jump in Hydro Thunder… these are both instances where you would expect a rumble in the controller to happen. But because the Pandora’s Box does not support controller rumble whatsoever, it appears to just crash the emulator entirely when a rumble is triggered.
So it looks like the real solution is to enter the game’s settings/options screens and disabling rumble support. Once rumble has been disabled, games no longer crash according to some people in the community. Unfortunately, disabling rumble usually doesn’t get saved so players will have to remember to kill rumble each time they play.
I’m going to be going back to the games in my compatibility list to see if disabling rumble gets them to stop crashing. Once I’ve verified that this fix is legitimate, I’ll go back to my compatibility pages and update the list with my findings.
So, one of the annoyances caused by getting these all-in-one arcade boards is that it often seems like the people making them don’t know enough about the games being added to realize that there are some games that have problems. Perhaps there are duplicates that are unneeded, perhaps there are issues with controller set up that make games unplayable, etc…
I’m creating several lists to help people when they first pick up a Pandora’s Box 6 to very quickly get set up and have as many unique, known working games as possible.
Default Games to Remove
Compatible Added MAME ROMs
Compatible Added FBA ROMs
Compatible Added PlayStation disc images
I’ve only just started working on these lists now so it is a work-in-progress but you can find the start of this over here or by selecting the compatibility lists from the Pandora’s Box 6 menu at the top.
Feel free to leave a comment on that page with some changes you’ve made or games you’d added!
