Pandora Box E-Sports Edition - Play Retro Games ONLINE Easily?

RetroRalph·video·13m 35s·analyzed·Apr 5, 2022

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.020

TL;DR

Pandora's Box E-Sports netplay feature fails testing; local and international multiplayer unplayable due to lag and stuttering.

Summary

RetroRalph reviews the Pandora's Box E-Sports Edition, a plug-and-play retro arcade cabinet with online netplay functionality. The review tests the netplay feature with both international (Japan) and local (Arizona) connections, finding the online multiplayer severely broken with excessive lag, frame skipping, and audio stuttering. The host recommends alternative solutions like Fightcade, Arcade1Up online features, or RetroArch NetPlay, and highlights the Team Pandori custom firmware as a superior solution for standard Pandora's Box units.

Key Claims

The Pandora's Box E-Sports Edition's main differentiator (netplay functionality) does not work at current state
high confidence · Direct testing with both international (Japan) and local (Phoenix, Arizona) connections showing severe performance issues
Chinese manufacturers do not issue firmware updates; they release new hardware revisions instead to fix issues
medium confidence · Presenter states 'China never fixes anything. They just keep releasing more and more Pandora's boxes' and 'don't hold your breath on China doing some kind of firmware update'
Team Pandori's custom Pandori firmware/tool fixes most standard Pandora's Box issues (aspect ratio, bilinear filtering, screen tearing)
high confidence · Direct side-by-side comparison of standard Pandora's Box vs. Pandori-loaded version showing corrected 4:3 aspect ratio and improved visual quality
Arcade1Up now offers connected cabinets with online multiplayer for fighting games and side-scrolling beat-em-ups like X-Men
medium confidence · Mentioned as existing alternative for online retro gaming alongside RetroArch NetPlay and Fightcade
Standard Pandora's Box units suffer from stretched images, screen tearing, and bilinear filtering applied by default with no user control
high confidence · Demonstrated in visual comparison and acknowledged as standard limitations throughout review

Notable Quotes

“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.”
Jon (RetroRalph)@ 2:20 — Sets expectations for the netplay feature and frames the competitive positioning against established solutions like Fightcade
“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 dropping and it's stuttering like crazy.”
Jon (RetroRalph)@ 5:28 — Describes real-time performance degradation during international netplay test with Japan-based player
“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.”
Jon (RetroRalph)@ 6:42 — Direct emotional reaction to netplay failure during King of Fighters 98 test, summarizing the core problem
“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.”
Jon (RetroRalph)@ 9:12 — Explicit statement of product failure relative to stated purpose
“China never fixes anything. They just keep releasing more and more Pandora's boxes. They break something, they fix something else. They fix something else, they break something else.”
Jon (RetroRalph)@ 13:04 — Criticism of manufacturer's business model and quality control approach
“If you do have a Pandora's Box with Pandori, 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.”

Entities

RetroRalphpersonTimpersonTeam PandoriorganizationPandora's Box E-Sports EditionproductPandoriproductFightcadeproductArcade1UpcompanyRetroArchproductAliExpresscompany

Signals

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community_signal: Team Pandori emerging as grassroots solution provider filling gap left by manufacturer support failures
medium · RetroRalph explicitly directs viewers to Team Pandori, recommends their channel, and emphasizes their custom tool as definitive fix for Pandora's Box issues; positions them as consumer advocate
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market_signal: Chinese hardware manufacturers prioritize new product releases over firmware updates/support; business model based on selling new revisions rather than fixing existing products
medium · RetroRalph states 'China never fixes anything. They just keep releasing more and more Pandora's boxes' and predicts no firmware update will arrive to fix E-Sports netplay issues
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product_strategy: Arcade1Up positioning connected cabinet feature as competitive online gaming option alongside traditional solutions like Fightcade and RetroArch
medium · RetroRalph cites Arcade1Up's plug-and-play online multiplayer for fighting games and beat-em-ups as viable alternative, though acknowledges limited game library compared to other solutions
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product_concern: Pandora's Box E-Sports Edition netplay feature non-functional; severe lag, frame skipping, and audio stuttering in both international (Japan-Phoenix) and local (Phoenix-Phoenix) testing
high · Multiple failed multiplayer sessions with detailed performance breakdown: King of Fighters 98 and Metal Slug 6 tests both exhibited unplayable performance despite testing conditions varying (international vs. local, different games)
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technology_signal: Third-party custom firmware (Pandori tool) becoming primary solution for addressing legacy Pandora's Box hardware limitations

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.041

0:00

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.

2:52

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.

8:52

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.