![]() It also begins selling many, many variations of these 2 player arcade sticks with different fighting game characters, button numbers and features with the Pandora's Box pre-installed. 3A Game begins creating what it calls the "family version" of it's popular Pandora's Box which forgoes the JAMMA connector and is intended to be used inside of the popular arcade sticks. Plug in power and an HDMI cable and you can experience the same fun as the arcade operators in your own home, complete with coin and pause buttons. (We will go over ways to spot the originals versus the bootlegs in a future blog post.)Īnother major development that happens around this time is the creation of game console boxes, essentially consolized versions of the Pandora's Box that come inside of a 2 player arcade joystick. (My first Pandora's Box was a Pandora's Box 4X bootleg that contained 1299 games.) The bootlegging of the Pandora’s Box became rampant everywhere to the point where almost every Pandora’s Box you’d find was likely to be one of these bootlegs and it became very hard to find the originals from 3A Game. Around this time, we start to see knockoffs of the Pandora’s Box such as the Pandora’s Box 4X and Pandora’s Key 5, both with varying numbers of games, though always more than the originals. Late 2015 saw the release of the Pandora’s Box 4 (orange case, 645 games) followed by the Pandora’s Box 4S (pink, 680 games) in November 2016 and finally the end of the Pandora’s Box 4 series in mid-2017, the Pandora’s Box 4S+ (pink, 815 games). 3A Game released the original Pandora's Box (released in 2013, 310 games) and Pandora's Box 2 (2014, 400 games) without too much fanfare but it seems like the Pandora's Box 3 (2015, blue case, 520 games) was the start of both major success and the rise of clone competitors from other Chinese manufacturers. It's a little tough to piece together the history of 3A Game and Pandora's Box as there is next to no information available out there that I can find on the company and so many of the sites that previously covered them have long since disappeared without much to find in the Wayback Machine. The Pandora's Box and clones are almost all Linux-based machines running upon Allwinner's line of cheap boards using the popular ARM platform. By popping one of these Pandora's Box cartridges into their arcade machines, owners were hoping the hundreds of pirated arcade games to choose from would help them draw in more players and make more money. ![]() Originally released as cartridges compatible with the popular JAMMA standard for arcade circuit boards, Pandora's Box was one of many pirated multi-game boards available for arcade owners. Pandora's Box is a series of multi-game bootleg arcade boards created by 3A Game, a Chinese company that has found a lot of success on the black market with arcade enthusiasts. ![]() In the near future, we're going to tear one down to get an idea of what it consists of and how it functions and hopefully bend it to our will. So, we're going to start this blog off by running through the basics of what a Pandora's Box is, what it does and why you might be interested in such an item.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |