OpenBOR (Open Beats of Rage) is a free engine dedicated to 2D beat'em up and run'n gun games. It descends directly from Beats of Rage, a Streets of Rage tribute released in 2003 by the Dutch studio Senile Team, which borrowed its sprites from SNK fighting games. Faced with the title's success, its authors opened the source code: OpenBOR was born in 2004, became a general-purpose engine, was ported to countless platforms and has been maintained by the community ever since.
OpenBOR is therefore not played with console roms but with modules: complete games built from scratch by amateur authors, each shipped as a single .pak file containing the levels, sprites, music and scripts. The scene is huge and covers tributes (Streets of Rage, Final Fight, Double Dragon, Golden Axe) as well as original creations and adaptations of cartoons and comics.
Like the arcade beat'em ups it draws from, OpenBOR is at its best with several players on the same screen — do plug in a second controller.
| Project | OpenBOR (Open Beats of Rage) |
| Authors | Senile Team (Beats of Rage), then the OpenBOR community |
| First release | 2004 |
| Game type | 2D beat'em up and run'n gun |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenBOR | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
A single emulator is offered, the standalone OpenBOR program, available on every board. Recalbox generates its configuration at every launch: fullscreen, filtering and controller mapping are derived from your settings, so there is nothing to configure inside the engine itself.
Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled.
Put your modules in:
/recalbox/share/roms/openbor/
Supported extension: .pak
Each game fits in a single .pak file, which must be neither extracted nor given another extension. The file name is the one shown in the interface:
/recalbox/share/roms/openbor/
├── Streets of Rage 2X.pak
└── Final Fight LNS.pak
A
.pakmodule is built for a given generation of the engine. A very old game, or on the contrary one designed for a newer OpenBOR than the one bundled with Recalbox, may refuse to start or show a black screen: look for another edition of the module in that case.