My first Supergun and it's so small

My Pandora's Box 3 540 in 1 version arrived today so it was a good chance to see if the Super Gun the local guy built actually worked.



It did work but the plonker didn't add and audio to the 21 pin RGB cable! Instead he wired it to a f-ing loud speaker inside the joystick. It actually sounds really nice but I want stereo and proper bass so I'm going to have to rewire that myself. Also, the 6th button on the stick seems to be always on according to the Pandora's Box OS screen. Can't use heavy kick in Capcom fighters May need to look in to that. The stick is cool though since the credits and player start are mapped to the select and start buttons.

The baby Supergun. Seems to work just fine. Need to think about a case for it though.


The set up in full. I'll be encasing all the cables soon.


The holes are for the speaker.


Some shots from the RGB image via the Framemeister. They were taken with the phone so they look a bit crap.

 

Thanks for sharing this Yakumo, timely since I'm going to be building a supergun within the next few months. So I'm guessing the Pandora's Box just has tons of arcade games pre-loaded? And about how much did all of that cost for you?

I think it's a great, little, but effective setup you have there Yakumo!

 

Thanks. The Supergun cost 11, 000 yen while the Pandora's Box 3 cost 16,000 yen. It does have a built in audio amp and VGA out on it too. I'll be doing a video review of it soon. The box it comes in is classic. No way would you think it was an illegal rom board full of games.

 

Wow, that's a pretty heavy markup - the Pandora's box is 150-170RMB in China. Say 2800-3200 JPY. Of course, anyone importing it has to take the risk of customs impounding it, since it's a huge teeming mass of copyright violations

 

I was going to say "get that damn thing off the bubble wrap on carpet". Then noticed it had stand offs

How tall is the unit? Might be able to fit it into a 3.5" enclosure or a mini-ITX case.

 

that's awesome! i got a neo geo cab in my garage that I would love to install a pandora box in.. gotta look into that

 

Hmm, it is a big Mark up but compared to other multi board solutions available in Japan it's not that bad. I wish they had included a headphone jack or some sort of audio out on the Pandora though.

Yeah, it has stand offs on it a mini ITX case would be good. I'm thinking of having the Pandora 3 cart sit inside the case with the Supergun board.

You should do it. Out of the 540 games I'd say about 300 are fully playable without issues. Some of the CP3 games have tinny frame rate issues but only ever so slightly. They're still fully playable but the purist may not be happy.

 

I don't have very much experience with arcade stuff, but would I be able to add more buttons to the control layout on my cab and just wire them in? I don't know if the cabinet I have has enough buttons for certain fighting games.

Did you test marvel vs capcom? does that game work well? Also, are there any shooting games, like point blank or something?

 

Marvel Vs Capcom works like a dream Marvel Vs Street Fighter is also on there.
There are many vertical and horizontal shooters on the Pandora's Box 3 however playing a vertical shooter on a wide screen TV looks so odd no point blank though since that requires a gun. There are many Konami titles though such as both TMNT games, Sunset Riders, the Simpson and so on.

Adding more buttons to your cab isn't a problem. You'll just need to wire up the Jamma connector. The Pandora's Box 3 comes with a pin layout sheet so you know which wire should connect to which pin.

 

Other than this being kinda convenient, what advantages does this have over a mini PC running emulators? It appears cheap for what it offers, and I'm somewhat interested in this but there's a lot of mixed signals on it.

 

For the intended target market (basically, Chinese arcade operators) the main thing is that it has a JAMMA connector and you can plug it directly into an existing cabinet and turn it into a multi-game machine at low cost.
The one I have is quite old, and supports far fewer games (about 200, I think) - but they seem to have been chosen with some care and all the ones I tried ran pretty well. Internally, it's just a single-board computer running Linux and some emulators. The CPU is (or at least was) a Rockchip RK3066 dual-core ARM chip - interestingly, I couldn't find any trace of Android in the blob of the SD card, just a base Linux system, but I guess if running the emulators is all you are going to do there is no need of it.

So yeah, it's convenient - but using a PC would give you a lot more flexibility.

 

Would you say, in terms of cost, a mini-itx PC for supergun would be better? I don't have a whole lot of space, and it would have to be somewhat consoled

 

It depends on what your lcoal price is - at Chinese prices, it's a lot cheaper than a Mini-ATX system is, but by the time it gets imported it might have a substantial markup on it. For me, at the equivalent of US $25, buying one to play with was a no-brainer. Apparently some of the earlier versions didn't have the VGA output and would only drive arcade monitors, so that might be worth verifying before you buy one if you plan to run it with an LCD.

 

Roughly it'd be around $100 to import the PB3, and not sure what I'd need to power it and for input. I could possibly price it all up if I knew those two things. Only reason why the PC is somewhat an option to me is I already have a pretty expensive joystick.

@Yakumo how does Money Puzzle Exchanger run on it?

 

The version I got came with a JAMMA harness with various power supply adaptor cables, but no PSU. The required voltages are +12V, +5V and -5V - basically a standard JAMMA PSU. It's designed to interface directly with switches, and the wires have 1/4" spade terminal receptacles on the end. I was told that if you had a pre-wired JAMMA cab, you could simply plug it straight in, and that looks about right to me, because from what I can remember about JAMMA all the signals are in the right place.

 

Yakumo if I remember well James from the jammanation x site sells a jamma adapter to convert the button layout of the pandora to cp2 kickharnes.

 

Would a ATX PC PSU work on the harness?

 

Cheers for that, I'll give him a try.

The Supergun now has a nice if not a little generic home. It might be a bog standard Mini ITX case but it does the job.


The service and test switches are located under what should be the CD drive flap


It was a bit of a tight squeeze hight wise but the supergun just managed to fit in with 3mm to spare. If I took off the spacer legs it would have a full centimetre but I needed to secure the supergun to the case plus couldn't have it resting on that bare metal.


The next step is to sort out the back panel. I hope to get around to doing that next weekend.

 

Probably - there are two potential issues I can think of - the first is that there is no load on the 3.3V line, which it's possible the PSU won't like - the second is that -5V was made optional on later ATX supplies and might not be present - although the box I have doesn't seem to be actually using it anyway, so this wouldn't have any impact. Judging from the wiring colors on Yakumo's power supply, that only has two outputs (presumably +5 and +12) and that seems to be working fine.

 

When I look at something like a Pandora's box unit, to me it makes plenty of sense when it come to putting it in a cabinet but I can honestly say I fail to see the point in having one of these when you intend to connect it to a tv and play it that way since small pc's with xbox 360 arcade sticks will do the exact same thing.

Plus I am just one of those people who tend to enjoy having original hardware for these arcade games these days and am not too much a fan of too much emulation. Sure I will play a game that either I can not affordably buy or even find but not stuff that's easy to get.

I also feel kinda bad for that vf4 stick having to be sacrificed for this project.