Opening Pandora's Box - Are cheap All-in-one Arcade Fight Sticks worth it?

All in one arcade sticks are everywhere. Fight sticks, arcade sticks, joypads and joysticks with thousands of built in game ROMS and emulators from Street Fighter to Mortal Kombat. But are they any good? Today we visit such a device, a Pandora arcade stick for two players and Mark and I give it a test drive, a review and a tear down. You'll find these on Amazon or Ebay under names including Kulukula 3003, TAPDRA 3D, ZEHNHASE 3D and MEANSMORE but they are all the same stick.

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●Chapters
0:00 - Intro
2:15 - Unboxing and Contents
7:35 - What is SurfShark?
8:29 - What's inside?
13:22 - Play Testing
19:11 - The Verdict

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#StreetFighter #Joystick #Arcade

[jeremyc]

These are brilliant for a portable plug and play option requiring no technical knowledge. The Pandora games 3D is probably the pick of the bunch. For me they were the gateway to the rabbit hole and I've since built a couple of arcades with MAME and now Mister FPGA. Love the videos!

[Larry]

I bought a couple, well two, over the years, the quality just varies so much on them, just went back to using Superguns again for arcade stuff.

[Dr.Dp]

China + Copyright = FATALITY SUPER COMBO FINISH...

[jameslewis]

Depending on your capabilities and what you might have lying around the house it can make a lot more sense to make your own arcade machine. That way you can control what kind of quality you are getting and possibly save some money. Things like older smartphones or PC's can be great bases for an emulation machine. Otherwise many of these all in one machines can be easily upgraded with better sticks, buttons and the like. There are also quite a few different versions of the Pandora box units with different capabilities (the Pandora Box 3D is currently the best version as far as I know). The Wicked Gamer and Collector does a lot of reviews and comparisons for people wanting to know more.

The way I would suggest most people to go is to get something like an arcade style joystick and connect it to an old smartphone (a 2 year old smartphone is generally much more powerful than the SOC's in these kits) with a USB C to HDMI solution allowing it all to go into a TV. From that point it's just a matter of loading up your own emulators and ROM files.

[dangerotterisrea]

I have had one for a few years now and its amazing just to get out and have a blast on with a few beers, always planned to put it into a bar top case at some point.

[WalrusFPGA]

The gamma differences when you showed them side by side with mame, actually comes out in favor of the pandora stick. Arcade monitors are calibrated with a different gamma settings than what you see on your flatscreen, and adding a gamma adjustment is actually a way to get them to look closer to the intended look, not the other way around. Not having an option to disable it would be the only possible bad aspect there, from what I saw in the video, as its certainly not always necessary/beneficial.

[stianhusemoen]

so happy you seem to have teamed up with mark more lately, great episode!

[channelreviews]

Thank you for the detailed review. My biggest issue was the input lag rather then the emulation power with my particular copy. VGA seemed to work better than the HDMI. Regardless, I think it has a great potential to build a cabinet around for casual family fun.

[Not-Great-at-Gaming]

If you're replacing all of the buttons and sticks, using it on a PC, and even replacing the sticker, you're basically just keeping the plastic housing and USB interface.

[arnaudguillon]

I recently ordered a Pandora enclosure and 2 sets of buttons for a similar build. The buttons come with 2 USB controller boards. Now for the brains, I use a Raspberry Pi 3B running Retropie OS (console emulator OS). and the result for MAME games is very good. As a bonus, the additional USB ports on the Pi can be used to plug in additional controllers for console games. Absolutely brilliant little rig for Xmas gatherings. All told I spent about 100 gbp and would recommend this for those who like DIY.

[sjftech]

Just to be clear, the game at 14:39 is Street Fighter III: Third Strike and not one of the Street Fighter Alpha games. Carry on :)

[KLUTCHdot]

I got excited when I saw two knobs poking out after you two guys opened the flaps.

[danielsmullen]

Great episode. You have reached television level production quality.

[PistolPeteYT]

Most in depth review I have found on these devices. Thank you!

[Captain-Cosmo]

I bought an Atari Fight Stick for mame and LOVE it. This is the single player model in 70s-style wood grain which, in addition to the usual joystick and 8-button layout, also includes a track ball, a weighted spinner, AND side-mounted pinball buttons. It is very well made, with high quality controls and enormous functionality. The original price was $200, which seemed pricey at first sight, but actually is pretty fair considering the quality, functionality and appearance. I actually paid $80 for an "open box" (but unused) from MicroCenter. They had several at the time, and now I wished I had ordered more. Sadly, it is no longer manufactured and I cannot find them anywhere now. In comparison, I also have a couple of Atgames fight sticks (basic joy/8-button design). They are decent quality, but they are basically "Camaros" compared to the Atari's "Corvette".

[WalrusFPGA]

For 40 quid, thats an excellent project box. I would use some cheap daemonbite encoders to make it lagless with quality stick and buttons, and perhaps drill some side holes for pinball buttons as well.

[colinsdiecastcustoms]

I could see where it was going from the start, but after you have upgraded the parts, it should be a clever piece of kit for the cave, interesting and I bet it will stop some people being ripped off by this.

[googleboughtmee]

Congrats on picking up a lovely MiSTer case for £40!

[hjalfi]

That SBC is almost certainly a completely standard off-the-shelf part. I'm impressed with the number of GPIOs, too (looks like the arcade stick is only using about half of them). It'll be running a hacked-together Linux with an equally hacked-together, old and buggy version of MAME, because they always are, but it would probably be really easy to install a proper Linux distro on it with a more recent MAME. Booting from SD card makes them really easy to hack. If these boxes are common enough there may even be some community support for that.

[wolffactor]

If you find the right pandora box 3D board with a button on it, you can mod it to run emuelec. A lot of these Pandora’s are based on older pandora 6 models... I like using the amlogic s912 base chipsets.