Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. This is the new Pandora's Box Esports Edition. I've talked about Pandora's Boxes on the channel for a while now, and for the most part, they're not very good. However, they are fun in small doses, if the goal is just to scratch the retro itch for a brief moment. It's not the most terrible option. There are concessions you have to be aware of though. Stretched images, screen tearing, and stuff like that. But it is a plug and play option, and it's preloaded with most of the arcade games we loved back in the 80s and the 90s. So what's this new eSports edition offering that we haven't seen in prior Pandora's boxes? That, my friends, is the question we're going to answer on today's episode. But before we do that, we need to replace the existing board in our Pandora's box. Now, these are not all compatible, so you do have to be aware of a couple things. So first, we're going to remove all of the cabling from the existing Pandora's box board. Then we're going to need to remove the two screws at the top, and then that will free up the board so we can slide it off. And like I said, not all of these are going to be compatible. So you need to look at the connectors on the other side of the board to make sure they line up with the whole pattern that you have on your board. So we're going to remove the board and then we're going to grab the new Pandora's box eSports board and you'll see the connectors on the end. They need to line up right with the Pandora's box slots. If they don't or if they have like the four port version, it won't fit. So make sure you're aware of that. Now we can put all the connectors back in, put the ribbon cable on, screw the top screws down, and at this point, we're pretty much ready to fire it up and test it out. Okay, when this thing boots up, you can see your menu system at the top. The first selection is 3D games. You're going to find handhelds and console systems like PSP, Dreamcast, PlayStation, Nintendo 64. Now, these are actually kind of similar to the games I saw on the Pandora's Key 7 3D, which we reviewed a long time ago now. So there's not anything crazy new here. We have seen Pandora's boxes with games like this on it before. Now as far as the arcade titles, that's going to be under 2D games and you're going to find all your fighting games. You can also see things like side-scrolling beat-em-ups, puzzle games. There's really everything here. So there's too many to even list. We'd be here all day. But there's a great selection of games. Now what makes this different isn't necessarily the games, it's this option for net play. So this is something new that we haven't seen before. And why this is interesting is that they're trying to sort of create a plug and play option that would maybe rival something like a fightcade. Now fightcade isn't plug and play, but it is an option to play retro games online. And there's a huge fight game community, but this is trying to serve that as well. Now there's two servers to choose from a low latency and this trial server right here, I'm gonna select the low latency server. Once you select the servers, it's gonna refresh the rooms in the lobby. Now you can see these are supposedly games that are already going or created by someone else. You'll notice the lock icon on the right means it's password protected. If it doesn't have that, it means you should be able to join it. So this one, for instance, has two or four people playing. So I should be able to join this game. I actually haven't had any success joining any of these games that have already been here I going to try to find another room and join it And if this doesn work and it hasn to date I haven been able to find one that I can join But if it doesn work I'm going to phone a friend, I think, and see if I can get... I don't even know what just happened. I didn't even select anything, and it just went black on me. Cool. Okay, I'm having no luck whatsoever joining existing games. I think these are just dummy rooms that are not working. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create my own room. I'm going to contact Tim over at the Pandori team. He actually lives in Japan, believe it or not, so this is going to be a pretty big test. So what I'm going to do is create the room, and you'll see it automatically puts my name Retro Ralph and then sort of the name of the game. I'm going to create a room for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. I'm not going to put a password on it or anything like that, and I just let them know via Skype that that room was created. You'll see it launches RetroArch in the background, and then it will say there's missing assets and all this stuff, but it hasn't impacted to the start of the game, as far as I can tell so far. So I'm going to start playing, and then we should see Tim enter here shortly. Okay, I'm going to pick Hannah, and we're going to do this. You'll notice the screen is stretched. There's no way of sort of shutting that off. So you're automatically going to have this 16.9 stretch. The other thing is, is bilinear filtering is on by default. So that kind of smoothing of the pixels, you can't do anything about that. and those are options you can't change. So as I'm waiting here, we'll see how long it takes Tim to enter. He's telling me on Skype he sees the room, so we should see him enter here in a second. Tim, where are you? Hello, Tim. Come on, buddy. I mean, he is in Japan, so maybe that's why it's taking him so long. I don't really know, but... Come on, dude. I'm holding down the fort for us. Where the hell are you at, man? Tim? There he is. Okay, so he just joined. It looks like he's collecting- he's selecting his character. So this is good so far. Oh, I don't see him. Where is he? Wow, okay, maybe something happened. Okay, so he just joined the game, and I'm getting, like, all this weird audio stuttering all of a sudden, and the game is come to a screeching halt. Oh, man. I mean, it could be distance, but I don't I don't even know. That does suck. It definitely, I can feel the frame rates really low and it's stuttering like crazy. I'm going to actually exit this room, create another room and see if it makes any difference. Okay. This time I had Tim create the room instead. So I'm joining his game. This is King of Fighters 98. This is all happening in real time. So right now it says joining the room and you're gonna get this black nothingness for a while it usually sits here for like 30 seconds or so sometimes longer it tells you there's missing assets which doesn't seem to do anything okay now i'm connected to him that was a lot faster than than before and again if you listen closely i'm gonna turn the music up you can hear there's a lot of audio stuttering when we start playing so as soon as i enter the game you'll see it just stutters like crazy for whatever reason and the frame rate goes to crap Okay, this is brutal. I can't even do this. It's just bad. There's just a bunch of frame skipping. There's lag. There's everything you could imagine that's bad about this. It just sucks. I had such high hopes for this. I'm going to obviously accelerate space and time here. I ordered another board from AliExpress. So I'm going to have two of them on my table here locally, and I'm going to try to do it. And again, I don't know how this is set up. It could still be going from here to China where the servers are and back, in which case maybe there's no point in the test, but I'm going to try it anyway. So I'm going to close this out. Thanks, Tim, for helping me out. And I'm going to try a local test and see what happens. Okay, I've got both boards on the table. I'm going to boot them up real quick. They should boot up pretty much at the same time. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a room on the player one side for Metal Slug 6. And both my players are here in Phoenix, Arizona. So I'm going to create that room really quick. And then I'm going to have player two join that room and see if I have that same behavior that I saw with Tim from the Pandori team. Now, keep in mind, Tim was in Japan. These boards both reside in Phoenix, Arizona. So the game has started on the player one side. It's going to take a second to fire up. I'm going to go search for that game on the player two side. So this is basically simulating two different players in two different places, but here in the United States versus overseas. Okay, so Metal Slug 6 is running on the left. I'm searching for it. I see it showing up on the right hand side. I'm going to select and join that game now and hope for the best. Okay, so now you're seeing both players are part of the game. You're seeing me join on his screen, and it's indicating that I'm joining the game on mine. I'm just putting in credits here. I'm going to fast-track this a little bit and get right to the gameplay so you can see exactly the results I had. So this is me playing it. Two players. I joined at the same time, same location, and tons of slowdown, frame skipping, audio skipping. I mean, everything is just terrible. It's really unfortunate guys, but I'm afraid this just isn't working at its current state. So did the Pandora's Box Esports Edition live up to the expectation of online gaming made easy? Absolutely not. It practically doesn't even work for that. So the main differentiator of this board doesn't even work. Now I don't want to leave this video on a low note. So if you're looking to play games online you're just gonna have to stick to fight cade or maybe even arcade one-up or online netplay with retro arch or something like that because this just isn't gonna work for you and don't hold your breath on China doing some kind of firmware update they just don't do that they'll end up just selling another board where they fix the issue so just steer clear of this one but if you do want a good Pandora's box board I would suggest buying the Pandora's box DX now Now up until, I don't know, just recently, the Pandora Box DX still had a lot of the same issues It still stretched the images out so you didn have the right aspect ratio There was still screen tearing but as I was talking to Tim on the Pandori team he said have you ever loaded Pandori on your DX? And I hadn't done that, and I did it, and I was playing it for hours. It takes the Pandora's box and fixes just about all of the issues that it has. All of a sudden you can play the games in 4x3, no more Vaseline smearing by linear filters. So what we'll do is I'll jump back over to the computer, I'll show you that really quick and then we'll wrap things up. Okay so right now I have a Pandora's box on the right. It's actually the special but I don't know what's special about it. And then the Pandora's box DX on the left with the Pandora tool installed. So I'm going to launch Final Fight on both of them so you can see the difference. So you're going to see on the left it actually forces it into 4-3 aspect ratio which it just did. And you'll notice on the right it's going to actually be a stretched image of the game. So one's going to play it correctly and one's not. So that's just out of the box. You're going to see the big difference in the aspect ratio being correct. So you can see right away, I mean, you can tell a big difference in how it looks, even colors wise and everything. I'm going to just let that kind of go. I don't have a way to play them both at the same time, but you can see it looks far superior on the left. So if you do have a Pandora's Box DX, I would suggest taking a look and checking into the Pandori tool. It'll make everything look so much better and you'll be a lot happier with your Pandora's box. Just, I'll have a link in the description to it and also go follow the guys over at Team Pandori. They're a newer channel and I'm sure they'd appreciate the support. This is Final Fight all blown up and looking awesome. So keep in mind, most of the games that you'll find when you load the Pandori tool, they're all going to look great and play great. So they really did a lot of improvements on it. So it's awesome. So it makes it so much more of enjoyable experience. Alright guys, that about wraps up this video. What did we learn? We learned that the Pandora's Box Esports Edition is a bust. You're not playing online games with that thing, that's for sure, and I would not hold my breath for a firmware update. Probably not going to happen. Hopefully they fix it in future releases, but the good news is there's plenty of other ways to play online games. They have tons of retro games that have made their way to console versions, which have added online gameplay. If you're a fan of Arcade 1-Up, they have connected cabinets now where you can play fighting games against each other, some side-scrolling beat-em-ups like X-Men and stuff like that. You also have RetroArch with NetPlay and Fightcade. So there's plenty of other options. Maybe they're not the easiest options in the world, although the Arcade 1-Up is a plug-and-play option. But obviously they don't have the big catalog of online games in their library quite yet. But yeah, that's where we're at. And I want to say, if you do have a Pandora's Box DX, Definitely go check out Team Pandory. I'll have a link in the description to a video that tells you about the Pandory tool. You can load that on your DX and it will fix a lot of the problems that have plagued Pandora's boxes for years. China never fixes anything. They just keep releasing more and more and more Pandora's boxes. They break something, they fix something else. They fix something else, they break something else. They can't get it right. I mean, whatever. It's naughty anyway, but I'm just saying. Like, could they just say... Well, they don't want to. They want to keep selling you boxes, obviously. Anyways, if you enjoyed the video, give me a thumbs up. Consider subscribing to the channel. Put your comments below. I want to know what you thought. I was so hopeful for this. But it's trash. What can I say? All right, guys, that's it for now. And we will see you on the next one.