Be Excellent To Each Other

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019 ... p200-stick

Looks good! I'll wait till it's £20 though, with more games.

Oh shit, that's cool as piss

Aliens v Predator!

CHAS.

Digital Arcade Via Emulation.

Is that good? It's like, stuff we've been playing in MAME for 15 years* or more, except it costs £200.

*20 years? CPS 1/2 have been in MAME for a long time, and before that there was an emulator just for CPS, the name of which escapes me.

You tight bastard

It's not even the cost that bothers me, it's the paucity of games and the fact that it's another bit of kit cluttering up the place, plus it's just emulation anyway so it's not like we're getting some sort of original hardware experience. Yes it's nice to have proper sticks and buttons I suppose, but I've never really had a problem using a gamepad, and MAME supports my wireless 360 pad just fine.

Assuming this follows the same pattern as all the other retro hardware, it’ll be about a fortnight before someone figures out how to bypass protection and add extra games. Then £200 for a MAME machine with top quality arcade controls looks very appealing.

You’re basically paying for the sticks, sure, but come on, proper Hori fighting sticks are, like, over £100 a piece anyway. And you’re getting two of them here and a bunch of classic games. And Progear...

He’s just tight don’t worry

Thought the 240fps would have won him over to be honest.

I thought it was the lack of wheels

I'll pay £190 if I can get it without any soundtracks.

It does have online leaderboards, so I suppose at least that part is different from the usual emulators. Although that might also be the reason why Capcom have included so few games in this, as I imagine each title would need some custom work doing to it.

FYI a lot of these things already exist - if you google "Pandora's key" or Pandora's box you'll find them on Ebay and on Amazon - however they tend to use a low powered CPU and stuff the system with a crazy amount of games that are basically the same (so they can say they have 1200 games - yes but they have 30+ variants of SF2)

Examples

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisamic-Pandor ... 7265&psc=1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yunt-Classic-A ... ids&sr=1-4

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Waroomss-Pando ... M815P0P3TJ

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07MTHJBQY/ ... 356e6fd336

The fact this is Capcom themselves doing it is good (as they actually own the rights to the games) - and its much more likely they will get the emulation 'right' - and the answer for Hearthy is that he's not really the target audience here - he knows how to setup and run MAME and its weird conflicts and problems and thats fine - however lots of people dont and if you show them this - tell them its the *real* arcade (which is will be) then I think it will find an audience.

And yes - someone will hack it and get other stuff on it although that may just be other Final Burn Alpha titles rather than all of MAME (at least to begin with)

I really like the idea of this but I don't like the price...

I shall keep an eye on it and I've no doubt that my habit of buying things I don't need will make sure I have one of these before too long.

It's always

We have one of those in our office.

CPU-wise I've never noticed it doing anything it shouldn't. And it doesn't have 30+ variants of SF2 - it has 17

(It does have 31 versions of King of Fighters, though!)

They are all totally unique games in their own right....

Ain't no pleasing you.

Final Burn Alpha. The emulator that this is using.

Possibly without permission to do so.

It very much depends on the version

- *All* of them have some audio glitches for some games (but its generally minor)
- Virtually all of them have some screen tearing issues for some games which scroll quickly (Wonderboy is the one I've seen the most problems with)
- Some of them (the 4 and early 5's) added Sega games but they just dont run (if your one has outrun on it check that because that typically plays badly if at all)
- Some higher end games (Mortal Kombat onwards) tend to have some speed / slowdown issues

For most people your back to 'its good enough' - and if you dont notice problems with it then great !

I will try Wonderboy today and report back! No Outrun on our one, but I didn't notice a problem when I played MK, but I'm probably mostly comparing that to the Amiga version.

I've owned three variations so far -

1) Used Pandora's Box 3 - worked pretty well, but sold it on to buy..
2) Pandora's Box 4 - the nicest one I've had; the build quality was good and it had more games (although Mortal Kombat ran poorly), but I've passed that on to my brother to save space and then bought a single-joystick..
3) Pandora's Box 5 - as you mentioned, this has some Sega games on it, but they run horrifically.

I have a 'bootleg' (they are all sorta bootlegs anyway) 5S+ - it has the poor quality SEGA games on there and also a number of straight duplicates (claims 1099 games)

The irony of emulator authors getting salty about emulators being used without licensing is not lost on me, no matter that they are probably legally correct. We all know the emulation scene couldn't meaningfully exist without bootleg ROMs.

I can see where you're coming from, but I'm more on the side of emulator developers here. It's for general good that people can release stuff for free on non-commercial licenses, and especially given that Capcom are charging £200, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to properly license any software they use, or if there is no suitable software they can license they should develop their own emulation solutions (like what Nintendo and Sega have done for microconsoles etc).

I only play the games where I have dumped the ROMs from my own personal collection, so as to be morally unimpeachable.