Opening Pandora's Box - Are cheap All-in-one Arcade Fight Sticks worth it?
259,304
Published 2021-03-18
All in one arcade sticks are everywhere. Fight sticks, arcade sticks, joypads and joysticks with thousands of built in game ROMS and emulators from Street Fighter to Mortal Kombat. But are they any good? Today we visit such a device, a Pandora arcade stick for two players and Mark and I give it a test drive, a review and a tear down. You'll find these on Amazon or Ebay under names including Kulukula 3003, TAPDRA 3D, ZEHNHASE 3D and MEANSMORE but they are all the same stick.
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●Chapters
0:00 - Intro
2:15 - Unboxing and Contents
7:35 - What is SurfShark?
8:29 - What's inside?
13:22 - Play Testing
19:11 - The Verdict
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#StreetFighter #Joystick #Arcade
All Comments (21)
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These are brilliant for a portable plug and play option requiring no technical knowledge. The Pandora games 3D is probably the pick of the bunch. For me they were the gateway to the rabbit hole and I've since built a couple of arcades with MAME and now Mister FPGA. Love the videos!
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China + Copyright = FATALITY SUPER COMBO FINISH...
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so happy you seem to have teamed up with mark more lately, great episode!
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Thank you for the detailed review. My biggest issue was the input lag rather then the emulation power with my particular copy. VGA seemed to work better than the HDMI. Regardless, I think it has a great potential to build a cabinet around for casual family fun.
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Looking forward to watching this while finishing work! Keep up the great vids
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Great episode. You have reached television level production quality.
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I have had one for a few years now and its amazing just to get out and have a blast on with a few beers, always planned to put it into a bar top case at some point.
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"I see a couple of knobs..." LOL, that was too on-point! ;-)
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“Your turn to recap the whole unit” 🥰
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I got excited when I saw two knobs poking out after you two guys opened the flaps.
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If you're replacing all of the buttons and sticks, using it on a PC, and even replacing the sticker, you're basically just keeping the plastic housing and USB interface.
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I bought a couple, well two, over the years, the quality just varies so much on them, just went back to using Superguns again for arcade stuff.
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Perfect timing on a Friday afternoon after work, wait, it’s a Thursday! 😅
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Congrats on picking up a lovely MiSTer case for £40!
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Lol, the sarcasm in this video is off the charts... I enjoyed that too much; especially the reading of the marketing on the box.
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I could see where it was going from the start, but after you have upgraded the parts, it should be a clever piece of kit for the cave, interesting and I bet it will stop some people being ripped off by this.
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I could almost feel Mark holding back on the innuendoes 😁
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The gamma differences when you showed them side by side with mame, actually comes out in favor of the pandora stick. Arcade monitors are calibrated with a different gamma settings than what you see on your flatscreen, and adding a gamma adjustment is actually a way to get them to look closer to the intended look, not the other way around. Not having an option to disable it would be the only possible bad aspect there, from what I saw in the video, as its certainly not always necessary/beneficial.
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I recently ordered a Pandora enclosure and 2 sets of buttons for a similar build. The buttons come with 2 USB controller boards. Now for the brains, I use a Raspberry Pi 3B running Retropie OS (console emulator OS). and the result for MAME games is very good. As a bonus, the additional USB ports on the Pi can be used to plug in additional controllers for console games. Absolutely brilliant little rig for Xmas gatherings. All told I spent about 100 gbp and would recommend this for those who like DIY.
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Nice video. But, did you try running this through VGA to see if the HDMI conversion was causing the screen tear? For 40 pounds, it is a very tidy unit.
