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J-PAC ..help?
Question from Richard: Hi Guys. First off, I would like to say your videos are amazing especially for beginners like me. Thank you so much! OK, here goes. Hopefully you can help or give the best advice. I purchased old Sega arcade cabinet (Dynamite Cop) with original CRT working monitor and looking at turning it into a MAME.
What I have:
-Painting is done (currently building control panel from scratch)
-PC ready to go with power supply
-VGA arcade video card 5000k that does 15khz
-Happ buttons hand joysticks (2 joysticks and 12 buttons and 2-player credit buttons)
What I don’t have:
J-PAC or I-PAC because I don’t know which to go with as I was relying on using the existing wires that are bundled up to what looks like a JAMMA J-PAC solution but I can’t tell. This is where I need your help to identify if a J-PAC would be my solution with what I currently have setup in the cabinet. The plug I have in the cabinet looks like a J-PAC connector but something is off. I might need maybe an adapter to it? I even took a pic of the circuit board in which the adapter wire plugs into (in the pins).
Hopefully you can help. Greatly appreciate it! If there is anything else you need as far as pictures please let me know. Thank you again! Richard
Also, just wanted to add that after doing some research it looks like I’ll need a JAMMA harness if I want to go with the J-PAC as what I currently have in my cabinet just wont cut it as it’s meant to go with the original PCB. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Richard,
From the pictures you sent, it looks like your cabinet is not currently wired JAMMA (which is common for Sega arcade cabinets as they tend to use their own harnesses). This means that if you want to use the cabinet’s existing wiring you will need to purchase an I-PAC, KeyWiz or a similar keyboard encoder to hook the current wires up to your computer. You will also need the pinouts for your Dynamite Cop wiring (which is usually in the manual for the game) so you know which wires match up to which locations on the keyboard encoder.
Of course, your other option is to strip out all of the current wiring and rewire the cabinet using a JAMMA harness. The JAMMA harness would allow you to use the J-PAC which is handy because it also contains a built-in video amplifier which is more convenient that buying a video amplifier separately and hooking it up as you would have to do with the I-PAC. Either way it looks like you’ve got some rewiring a head of you since there’s no plug-and-play solution that I know of for your cabinet.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your project.
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