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Pandoras Box. Any way to edit default emulator

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pyJamma

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hello all

Not so much an important issue at all but curiousity get's the best of me and I dont mind the occasional tinker.

I was playing a pandora's box 5 at my mates yesterday and we were playing 2 player Ninja Turtles In Time. Come the neon riders stage, there is a graphic glitch and you can't see your players anymore and you just need to guess where you're fighting until you get through the stage. The following stage works great.

Youtube shows people having the identical issue on Pandora Box 2 all through to the current one. Game Elf and PC emulation does not experience the fault.

My friend done some online searching and asking around and apparently found out that Pandora uses 2 emulators. One is final burn and the other one is mame and apparently each game has a configuration file it uses to choose which emulator each game uses.
He said to me 'what if we edit the file so the game runs on the alternate emulator and see if it has a fault'.

I thought that would be a great idea to test this, but neither of us have any clue on how to do something like this. I believe the SD card has more than 1 partition and would need linux to see one of them. Even so, where to look for this setting and how to go about it is a bit confusing.
Would anyone have any idea if this idea is achievable at least to test it out?

thanks everyone
 
If you want to inspect the contents of the SD card using Windows, download a program named Paragon ExtFS. It allows you to read and write Linux partitions. I use it for RetroPie.
 
thanks for that. Definitely a start and great to know. Saves a lot of time needing to look into a linux OS. Before we tinker further with his game ill see if i can find info or if anyone knows where abouts to try and change this setting or if its possible :)
 
Just an update, but with no luck unfortunately.

I ended up taking the microSD out of the Pandoras box 5s. I put it into an adapter and used Win32 Disk Imager to make a backup just for safe keeping.

After this I installed Paragon EXTFS. When I have the microSD in an adapter (USB or micro to standard SD) and I open up Paragon, it doesnt find the drive

As far as I was aware, PB apparently uses Final Burn and MAME. I just wanted to force the one TMNT2 game to the alternate emulator to see if it fixes the graphics fault. Not really sure what I'm doing or if what I am trying to achieve is even possible.

If anyone has any other ideas, let me know. Thanks
 
it think i read somewhere else that the contents of the sd card are encrypted, but i'm not sure
 
Yeah im not sure man. Ive definitely had no luck trying to read it so maybe you're right.

Random kind of update while im here.

I was having a chat with the guy from this site:
http://mengxipeng1122.github.io/PandoraBoxHacking/

He mentioned this about Pandoras Box:

"the emulators PB is using:
FBA 2.97.08
FBA 2.97.36
FBA 2.97.40
FBA 2.97.42
xmame sdl 0.106"

and regarding Turtles in Time:

"tmht22pe use FBA 2.97.36 in PB"

and also mentioned "game elf only use mame"

My brother has a Game Elf 512 and the game doesn't have this glitch. I asked if there was a way to make Turtles In Time use xmame 0.106 instead of FBA.

He came back and said he has an engineer who can check it out at some point in the future, but was very busy for a while. I asked if there was a way to edit a configuration for this myself, but he said it needs to be completely recompiled by his engineer.

The web link above has like an FAQ but a bit hard to understand:

"how to change default game of Mame player
The directory /usr/sd/roms of the second partition stores all game roms, you can copy your roms to here. The file xmame.game of the first partition stores game roms name, the default content should be 'dino'"

Anyway if i hear anything back in future, ill update here just in case someone finds it interesting haha
 
I also have Pandora Box 4S. The SDCard has two partition, one is read only and the other is encrypted or something as you can't mount it (but you can still see it in DiskUtility software --> i'm using MAC with Paragon ExtFS). There is nothing you can do as the partition is read-only. From what I know is that Pandora Box 3 is not encrypted and you can freely change files on the SD Card. Now i am just wondering if I can use the SD Card from Pandora Box3 on Pandora Box 4S. I dont like emulator on Pandora Box 4S, must be an old version as it has screen tearing and audio issues all over the places
 
There used to be a pretty active Pandora modding thread over at jamma+ before they got pulled offline. There was also a website http://www.openthepandora.ovh/ which was mostly based on the PB3, but had a lot of good info about the data files on the SD card. I messed around with a lot of custom images but haven't done much more than tinker with the work other people have done.
 
If you have the A13 chip based pandora, I did some hacking on it back in the day, everything was documented on jammaplus before it went under. It seems that the guys who were busy with it took it further on other forums. There is now what appears to be "retropan" sd images which run the whole thing on retropie and retro arch and that's a lot more stable. If you have such a pcb you should really try the AUS 3B retropan pandora img. Just Google it :)
 
modology said:
https://www.facebook.com/pb3aracde/photos/rpp.461774780661374/825857640919751/?type=3
Based on that guy facebook, there is 1299 in 1 for PB5S now.

https://mega.nz/#!R8cUwZxA!squ4jv08Wr4zT-kxxrnmDKQcVuCQewx25IOTByXpvXM
user can edit external file to mod gamelist
the external file is the file '/usr/emu/gl' in the 2nd partition
Click to expand...
hi there
i have pb4s

which image an i use - how would i back up the linux image etc
finally how do i know if this would work on pb4s

:) sorry for all the question am newbie
 

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no luck with newer PB as the partition of the linux is encrypted and you wont be able to modify/access it.
 
jus tried one of the images

https://mega.nz/#!R8cUwZxA!squ4jv08Wr4zT-kxxrnmDKQcVuCQewx25IOTByXpvXM
1299.ext.gamelist .img

on pb4s - no luck - the board flashes looking at the memory card. tried this with a 32gb card that may have been the issue not sure

i managed to clone the original with no issue at all - worked with 8gb card.

need to try other images but not sure if am doing this right - am using win32diskimager
 
tried retropan image - displays sows loading then restarts on pb4s+
Then i tied all the other image in this thread nothing boots up - do i need to copy any keys over from the original SD card to make these images work?

win32writer works and Ether for the image - but the image never boots up on the pandora. I have read people have got other images working am just stuck
 
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