Month: February 2019

Pandora’s Box 6 Community Collection Released

zerojayLeave a comment

Hi.

Yeah. I figured that title would catch some eyes. Our little effort to bring together a full MAME and FBA ROM set and test out everything has finally come to a close. This site and the community has come a long way since starting up in September. While looking for information, I realized that my own site and our Discord have become some of the best places to find just about anything the English speaking Pandora’s Box community knows. We’re starting to get a bit of recognition out there which is fun.

Thank Yous and Acknowledgements

  • The Main Community Collection Team – for all the hours of testing, gathering data, updating spreadsheets, trying and discovering new things, making suggestions and not just being motivational but enjoying the massive amount of work: airlicious, EvilChris, Matty, mcdmofr, Niel, Norby, Pandoraboxman, robbeno69, Satoshi_Matrix, ZOCKOTRON
  • The hackers behind OpenPB4, Retropan and more – for trying to bring the best experience possible to people with these underpowered and underserved Chinese bootleg arcade consoles: myzar, zanac, and Sebastian404.
  • Everyone hanging out at the Dream Never Ends Pandora’s Box Discord.

How Can I Find The Community Collection?

Come and join the Dream Never Ends Discord and come to the #community-collection channel.

How Do I Set This Up?

The Community Collection consists of three sets of files:

  • PB6 Community Collection – MAME ROMs.zip
  • PB6 Community Collection – FBA ROMs.zip
  • PB6 Community Collection – Movies.zip

For the preview videos, there’s nothing very special that needs to be done. You can extract the zip anywhere and copy all the *.avi files directly into the Movies folder on your USB drive. When Windows asks, choose to replace the original videos as the ones included not just replace the original 1300 game previews but also give you previews for all the added MAME and FBA ROMs too.

You can do the same thing with the FBA and MAME ROMs, extract them anywhere you wish and then directly copying the game ROM zips into the roms_fba and roms_mame folders. However, you will very quickly discover that the Pandora’s Box 6 orders the games in the order they were written to the USB disk which you’ll notice isn’t very orderly at all.

How Do I Alphabetize my FBA and MAME ROMs?

The only way to do this properly is to write the files in the order that you want them shown in the Pandora’s Box 6 menu. You can do that with an application called CopyInOrder.

Makin’ orderly copies to my USB disk.

The only catch with doing this is that the Pandora’s Box will not alphabetize added games along with all the games that are already included by default. What it will do is order them alphabetically like this:

  • Original 1300 games from # -> Z
  • Final Burn Alpha games from # -> Z
  • MAME games from # -> Z
  • PlayStation games from # -> Z

Also, this is going alphabetical through filename, so it is possible that games in the game list look out of order but it’s really because the file name is different from the game name.

Once all your games are written to the disk with CopyInOrder, properly unmount and eject your USB disk and pop it into your Pandora’s Box 6 and have a good time.

Well… Now What?

Well, you could…

Pandora’s Box 6 – Updated Compatibility and Setup Page

zerojayLeave a comment

Hi, I just wanted to let everyone know here that the old page listing compatible games has been essentially replaced. As part of the Community Collection project, we’ve been using a spreadsheet to keep track of what games are or are not working, what kinds of problems we’ve been running into, that sort of thing. I decided to merge it with the compatibility page that I was hosting here and added all the info that used to be hosted here directly to another sheet in our Community Collection spreadsheet. All the info you need in one place.

MAME 0.106 ROM compatibility, FBA 0.2.97.36 ROM compatibility and general cleanup instructions for the default 1300 games are all now in one place!

Pandora’s Box 6 – Community Collection Update

zerojay4 Comments

Hi. You may have seen the post about our Community Collection. So, here is an update on our current progress.

MAME 0.106 ROM Set Progress
Final Burn Alpha 0.2.97.36 ROM Set Progress
Replacement Preview Video for Default PB6 Games
MAME and FBA Added ROMs Preview Videos

So we feel we’re basically done with the ROM sets themselves but I’m leaving them at 99% just in case we find a few more things here and there. In terms of the preview videos, we have almost all the replacements we need for the default 1300 games and most of what we need for the MAME and FBA added games. I’m almost certain most of the work will be renaming videos to match the ROM names for the most part.

If you are interested in helping out or attempting to launch subprojects or just want to hang out with other Pandora’s Box enthusiasts, feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.gg/ZM2b2zd

Pandora’s Box 6 – NEO*GEO BIOS Tricks

zerojay1 Comment

One of the complaints that we’ve been hearing and making about the Pandora’s Box 6 is that there is no way to make changes to the BIOS options to do things like change region, change from arcade to home versions or turning on blood in some of your favorite games. Well, we’ve found a way. Together with EvilChris1979FR – one of our Community Collection collaborators – we’ve figured out a way to give you what you’re looking for. It’s not perfect, but it works.

The Setup

Setting this up is extremely simple and we’ve done the hard work for you.

  1. Download our copy of the neogeo.zip BIOS.
  2. Copy neogeo.zip to your USB stick’s roms, roms_fba and roms_mame folders. If your operating system asks to replace, say yes.

And now we’re ready to go.

How to Use

So what we’ve basically done is replaced the standard NEO*GEO BIOS file with the quite well known Unibios. With the Unibios active, you’ll notice your 1P Start button now brings up the Unibios in-game menu.

The UniBIOS in-game menu in all its glory.

If you wish to use cheats or screw around with dipswitches, you can do so here.

Some of this stuff is useful if you want to help train yourself in the game.

For making bigger changes such as region settings and disabling the in-game menu, you will need to choose “Soft Reboot System” from the in-game menu. Once you have done that and you see the Unibios splash screen, you can hold down the B+C+D buttons on your Pandora’s Box to get to a series of menus and tests you can run. Holding down A+B+C instead will get you to the Universe BIOS menu:

Pick your poison.

Here, you can decide to change your region and game type:

Selecting between arcade and home console versions.

Once you are done, you will need to disable the in-game BIOS menu to allow you to play the game properly, otherwise every Start button press will get intercepted by the Unibios and not allow you to play. You can do this by entering the General BIOS Settings:

And checking the Disable In Game Menu box.

Make it so.

You can now exit the Unibios menu by pressing the C button to reboot your game and you’ll find your options and cheats will be in effect until you quit the game

A Reminder

Just like everything else on the Pandora’s Box 6, there is no saving of the Unibios changes you’ve made, so if you want to switch softdips to get blood in Metal Slug, you’ll need to set that up each time you play. Yes, it’s an annoyance but it’s better than not having the option to do this at all, right?