How to bypass the Contra 5-continue limit on the Pandora Box DX & variants.

If you’ve been playing Contra (the arcade version) on a Pandora Box and are wondering why it suddenly refuses to let you continue, you’re not imagining it and your box isn’t broken.

The arcade version of Contra has a hard limit of 5 continues built into the game. No amount of extra credits will help. Even Free Play doesn’t change this. (GameFAQs)

There’s also no DIP switch for it, and no setting to fix it in the Pandora menus. This is game logic, not a configuration issue.

This is also why it behaves the same across DX, Saga (DX variants), 9800, 26800 and anything else. They’re all just running the arcade ROM under a MAME-based emulator.

So instead of trying to “unlock” more continues, the only reliable approach is to sidestep the problem completely.

What we do is build a save state where the player already has a large number of lives using cheats, then load that on the Pandora. No continues needed.

The important detail here is that Pandora systems are effectively running a fork of MAME, usually closest to MAME 0.78 (the MAME2003 core). Save states are not portable across versions, so if you create one on a different version of MAME it likely will not load at all on the box. This also applies to LIBRETRO versions of MAME 0.78, even these are not compatible with the standalone.

That’s why this is done specifically with MAME 0.78 on a PC.

The process is simple once you know what you’re doing:

Set up MAME 0.78 on your PC and drop your contra.zip into the roms folder. Run it with cheats enabled:

mame -cheat contra

Once the game boots, hit TAB, go into the cheat menu and enable infinite lives.

Now start a game and deliberately die a few times. The life counter in Contra rolls over, so after it hits zero it jumps to 97. That’s the state you want.

At that point, create a save state with Shift + F7.

You’ll end up with a .state file in your MAME folder.

From there:

Copy the save state to your Pandora microSD card
Drop it into /roms/
Rename it to contra.state

Boot Contra on the Pandora, open the in-game menu and load the save state.

You’ll start with a full stack of lives and can just play through the game without ever hitting the continue limit.

We’ve already generated a clean state file if you don’t want to go through the process:

Pandora Box DX – Contra Mame save state – 97 lives 1p & 2p Download

This isn’t a hack to the ROM and it doesn’t change how the game works. You’re just taking advantage of how MAME handles cheats and save states, then reusing that state on the Pandora.

Same approach works for a lot of other arcade games that have built-in limits like this, as long as they behave properly under MAME 0.78.