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?
I hella wanna learn how to make something like this myself. Don’t think it would be too hard to figure out construction and wiring things up, but the cost of parts makes it difficult to try for my broke ass. That and I don’t have room for the full standing cabinent I would want. 🤣
LOL…Yeah space is a serious issue. If you mean woodworking (this one is all metal, though), yeah it’s definitely achievable. There’s plenty of guides out there to wire all things together, and you could order most parts (like joystics, buttons, speakers, the screen) from something like Aliexpress or similar…Or you could just order the whole thing already assembled too! But then you have my problem of dealing with the weird software.
Anyway, at the heart of any of these you only need a small raspberry CPU and you already have plenty of power to move all the classics.
Hate to say, but you’d be better off with a retropi. That runs all the same games you describe, just need to find USB stick controllers that you like.
Most of these are difficult to mess with, because, like you discovered, there’s some kind of internal database of ROMs. Worse, this doesn’t appear to have a JAMMA harness so the board can only be replaced with a similar one.
I would see if someone from TeamPandory can identify your board for getting a custom firmware on there. I’ve seen a lot of this type of board in which the bottom-of-the-barrel-quality micro SD card suddenly dies, then you lose the encryption key and the board is just garbage.
At the very least, backup the micro SD card to an image. I use GNOME Disk Manager that’s built into Linux Mint. Programs like balenaEtcher can do it on Windows but like Windows, they have telemetry (spy on you).
Edit: As others noted, the “S812” is relevant, the board seems to be based on Allwinner H3 like other “Pandora’s Box” (the name is more appropriate than it should be). You could do something like this or rewire the controls into “zero-delay encoders” to turn them into USB controllers to connect to any Pi or PC.
Yup! I did backup the SD. But the database looks very much to be running from the mainboard storage. Thanks a lot for all the information, this was really useful! Time to have some good read.
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.
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!
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
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?
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).
