Hi guys!

So, my gf has gotten me a birthday gift…a Chinese-made coin arcade! The build quality of this thing is pretty good. The joysticks and buttons look really solid and able to take plenty of abuse (she insists she chose an extra for japanese-made ones), the screen looks to be very good quality, and the speakers sound…meh, but can go pretty loud. This thing is heavy! Maybe 15-20Kg.

Anyway, onto the games! This thing seems to have embedded a bunch of emulators. It has a bazillion of MegaDrive/Famicom/SuperFamicom/GameBoy/GameBoy Advance games, which, given the form factor…I couldn’t care any less for. I don’t want to play a Gameboy game in an arcade screen with joysticks! It gets a bit more complicated, as it also has some games for PS1, PSP and Dreamcast. So this thing can move 3D decently! But the ones anyone would care, the good ole arcades, including Neo Geo and CPS1/CPS2 and the old ones (in a mame folder) seem to be all there.

Now…the issues. This is a Chinese system. She paid an extra to get it in “English”. But…It’s more Chinglish. What irks me the most is, the names of the games. They seem to be originally in Chinese, and then AI-translated to English. So…for example, Captain Commando is “Famous General”, Warriors of Fate is here “Shagokushill”…and so on.

There’s quite a lot of mistranslations like this (more than half, by my guesstimation), making the search useless. What’s worst, I can’t quite dinamically edit the ROM set. There’s a microSD card with the ROMs, pictures and videos for the game list screen. But, the game DB is in some internal memory I can’t quite locate. Adding games to the folders does nothing, and removing them doesn’t make them disappear from the list, they just fail to load anymore when you click them. There’s a method to individually remove games I don’t want from the list, but involves tapping/confirming through 3 menus. For each individual entry. In a 3,000 items list.

So…I’m wondering. Is anyone familiar with this motherboard? Can I modify the software it’s running? I’d love to be to add maybe Sega Model 1/2 cores, play things like Virtua Fighter! But not sure how hard/messy it would be.

Here you can see the main board. It has a VGA pinout to the white ribbon cable that goes to the monitor. There’s a GPIO port partially used by the wiring for the two players joysticks. And finally, a little detail about the chip labeling.

Not sure if A9 refers to any specific ARM CPU. I have a guess that this is a heavily modified Android. I took the microSD card out and the typical /android/data, /android/obb and /LOST.DIR folders in it, but they were empty. All the games were in a /games folder, with subfolders for each core.

So…Any ideas if I can modify this to add cores/edit the games list easily? I can add a USB stick and it reads the games…but it’s painfully slow to load from USB for some reason, about 30-40sec to boot a few MBs game. And the games list is super messy.

I’d be also open to consider replacing the motherboard for something…more flexible, if it wasn’t extremely complicated/expensive.

What do you guys think? Any advice?

  • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Agh…Seems I reached some limit to upload pics? Let me see…here’s the A9 close-up picture I was mentioning:

    Any idea on what this CPU is? Or the motherboard…Not sure how much or how easily can I tamper with it.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      That “BY-S812-004” is interesting. I googled that and got similar hits for “S812” boards used as emulators of Japanese arcade games. I see lots of references to “Pandora’s Box” and “JAMMA”, whatever they are

      My educated opinion (after 2 minutes of Doing My Own Research) is you may have a Chinese knockoff of a Japanese knockoff of an arcade system. Reading up on the S812 arcade boards might yield some more information… Or might be a dead end!

      Good luck!

      • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Thanks a lot, this is really useful! So there seems to be a whole series of arcade boards called PandoraBox and similar, available on all sorts of places. This page made a rather comprehensive list of the most famous ones. Mine seems to be a variation, as I can’t exactly locate the same board design, but definitely they have one named S812-004. Although they list it with 1080p output (mine seems to be 720p), and seems to store everything in the SD, while mine seems to have an internal memory somewhere.

        https://electroarcade.com.au/pandoras-box-versions-buying-guide-what-to-look-for

    • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      The CPU is likely under the fan. Have you tried asking AI? It is often good at digging up these details. Have you tried to just drop some roms in one of the rom directories and seeing if it recognizes them upon a reboot?

      • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Yup…tried that. If I drop them on the SD card, no dice. It has an internal database in some other storage (it boots without the SD, too, it lists the games just like before, but when you tap to start a game, then it won’t load and fail silently). If you put a similar folder structure on a USB stick and hook it to the USB port, it does load the games onto the list (in a rather confusing manner).