3-sided table.

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aod
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3-sided table.

Post by aod » Tue Jun 11, 2019 4:22 pm

Apologies if this has already been covered, but I'm not sure what I could search for. I did search for 3 sided. At any rate, I have just purchased a 3-sided table that comes with a Jamma 1162-in-1 in it. Because of this, it can play cocktail style games and flip screen but it also has the horizontal game configuration. The two sides of the table for vertical games have a joystick, 3 buttons, and a trackball. On the horizontal gaming side, there are 2 joysticks and 6 buttons per joystick. There is also a single trackball on that side. I would like to keep the functionality of the cocktail table and the horizontal side using the Arpicade. Is there a general configuration for doing this where you might hold a button down to swap between vertical and horizontal mode, like these 1162-in-1 boards do? Also, I would like to explore the option of potentially being able to play 4 players on it if possible. Is there a configuration that would give all of these things? I'm ready to pull the trigger on a setup, as long as it can do at least the swapping between vertical and horizontal games.

Thank you!

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by dee2eR » Wed Jun 12, 2019 9:50 am

There's no default 3 sided mode for the software. It could be done with a little bit of changes to the launcher scripts though. All you really need to do is adjust the logic so horizontal games play horizontally and vertical play vertical (rather than rotate to suit the mounting). If there's interest I could add it in a later ARpiCADE release I guess.

For some emulators there's probably a way to add a rotate button but probably not for all emulators. It's not something I've thought to look at.

Without an easy 3 sided mode to use you could also setup 2 SD cards, one setup horizontal, one vertical, and just power down and swap the SD card if you want to change orientation. This would assume the player 1 and 2 wiring is doubled up for the extra controls and not wired separately.

4 player stuff is easy enough with the 4 player adaptor. You would need the 3 and 4 player wiring to be in Konami or NBAJam style (Konami style supports more buttons with the RaspberryJAMMA 4 player adaptor).

If your trackball is USB it should work with Pi too. If not there's kits available to USB-ify arcade trackballs that work great, I have an Opti-Wiz but others are also supposed to work.

One gotcha with some PC based cocktail cabs is they can be wired in stereo MVS style rather than mono JAMMA style. If this is the case with your cab that would also need to be addressed to use a RaspberryJAMMA (or other JAMMA board).

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by aod » Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:41 pm

Thanks for the info! I'm very new to all of this. I believe the connector is probably this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Cabinet-Wiring-H ... B07BT7GR4X

Here is a picture of the connector in the cabinet:
https://imgur.com/a/PAaAfLi

Do you think this will work without any or few modifications? Thanks so much!

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by dee2eR » Thu Jun 13, 2019 2:09 am

It all looks like it should be fine. Easiest way to tell if it's wired in stereo or mono is are there 1 or 2 speakers? (2 speakers isn't necessarily stereo but one speaker will definitely be mono). The difference between JAMMA (mono audio) and MVS (stereo) isn't obvious looking at the card edge connector end of the wiring harness, they look the same. Assuming it's a 6 button variation of JAMMA like the link you posted you will be fine. If the cab is wired stereo it can be adjusted pretty easily at the speaker end of the wiring (this thread came up recently about cabs with stereo speakers: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1181 - my last post there has some possible solutions included.)

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by aod » Thu Jun 13, 2019 1:46 pm

I forgot to look how the audio output is wired up. There are two speakers in the cabinet, one a smaller speaker and one a larger speaker. It could be doing mono output and the two speakers are just there to kind of handle midrange and another for highs. At any rate, the audio is going to an amplifier via two RCA cables and then out to the speakers. I would imagine in this instance, changing it to mono would be easier than doing it at the speaker side. I'm definitely going to purchase this adapter and give it a go! My final question would be, do you believe this setup will work with the 4 player adapter or would modifications likely need to be done for that?

Thank you and I'm looking forward to working on this! :mrgreen:

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by dee2eR » Thu Jun 13, 2019 2:30 pm

Actually with a stereo amp in the cab I'd recommend bypassing the mono audio all together and taking the audio out of the RaspberryJAMMAs DAC directly into the cabs RCA inputs. A 3.5mm plug to stereo RCA cable should be all you need. The dedicated amp in the cab is probably more powerful than the little amp on the RaspberryJAMMA too.

If your current wiring is duplicated at the JAMMA edge to handle all the inputs (I think it is) then the regular 2 player board should be plug and play (assuming the cab has a normal arcade power supply with 5v and 12v and not some odd setup). I've seen 3 sided cabs wired up in a few different ways so I can't be that sure but it looks like your cab is wired like this in the photo you posted. (The power wiring looks normal at the JAMMA end too.) So I think currently you have duplicated player 1 and 2 wiring rather than 4 sets of unique inputs wired up.

To use the four player adaptor, assuming I'm right about your current setup... Bare minimum you will need to wire players 3 and 4 up to Konami style 4 player harness'. If you order the board directly through me I can supply the pins and housings you will need. I believe High Score Saves also offers pre built 3 and 4 player wiring if DIY is not your thing or you prefer not to modify the original wiring of the cab.

If DIY is your thing you want either a crimping tool in the right size for the little pins (best), or a soldering iron (not ideal but will work), or wrong size crimper (or even worse pliers) and more patience than I have. Trace back the wires you want to be player 3 and 4 to the JAMMA harness and cut them off without cutting the ones you want to remain player 1 and 2, you will not need to worry about the GND wires if you don't cut them so leave them alone unless you want them on the 3 and 4 player connector for some reason. Strip the ends a little, attach pin, repeat with next wire, etc. Eventually put the now pinned wires into the housings following the Konami 4 player wiring conventions (if you need 6 button support Konami never used it but it's also available on some pins they didn't use for buttons). It's fiddly and not fun if you have to lean into a cocktail cab to do it but shouldn't be too hard to do otherwise.

It's late here, I hope I'm making sense...

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by aod » Thu Jun 13, 2019 3:17 pm

It makes sense but I do believe these are separate inputs. The reason why I say that is because on either side of the cocktail table (vertical format) there are 2 joysticks, 3 buttons, and a trackball on each side along with the player 1 and player 2 buttons on each side. On the 3rd side (horizontal format) there are two joysticks, 6 buttons per joystick (12 buttons total), a single trackball, and player 1 along with player 2 buttons.

When it is in vertical mode, the buttons/joysticks/trackball on the horizontal side do nothing and vice versa, so those controllers seem to only be active when the system is running in the proper mode for them.

If you are curious, it is basically this cabinet but with the addition of a single trackball on the horizontal 3rd side of the table:
https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Commerc ... B07MTLV1DC

I've went ahead and ordered the raspberry jamma along with a pi from highscoresaves so we'll see how it all goes together. If I have to do anything funky to get it to work, I'll do a write-up of sorts and post it to the forum.

Thanks!

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by aod » Wed Jun 19, 2019 5:33 am

I purchased the Raspberry Jamma from Highscoresaves along with a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ from them. I've put ArPiCade 3.84.7 on a 64GB SD and connected everything up. I also put a few roms on just to test. Here are the issues I'm having:

1) The Pi is throttling quite often during gameplay. It makes gaming pretty much impossible. I have not overclocked it at all. I do not know if it is a heat or power issue. Is there a way to see what could be causing it? There is the lightning bolt coming up on the screen when it is throttling. Are heatsyncs required? There is a fan in the cabinet and I did have the rear cabinet door open while testing as well. I read something about a 1A fuse but that you have been putting bigger fuses on newer boards. I'm not sure how to tell what size fuse is used. If it is a power issue, could I just plug USB power into the Pi or is that not advised in this configuration?

2) Sound. I'm getting the "air raid siren" as some people have called it. I hear some of what sounds like might be game sounds but it is very faint and garbled. The connection from the Jamma 1162-in-1 is a standard 3.5mm plug that goes into two RCA cables and those are plugged in as inputs into an amp in the cabinet. I've tried disconnecting the 3.5mm cable that goes from the Raspberry Jamma to the VGA plug and plugged the amp into the Raspberry Jamma, I've also tried plugging the amp directly into the Raspberry Pi both with the 3.5mm cable from the Raspberry Jamma to the VGA plug connected and disconnected. There is no difference in any of these configurations. Any ideas? Do I need to configure something to tell it to use line out?

Things that work:
Joysticks, buttons, player buttons, coin button, setup button. The controls are as you expected, the player 1 on one side of cabinet is linked with player 1 on the other side and same with both player 2.

Sorry for all the noob questions, thanks so much for all your help!

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by dee2eR » Wed Jun 19, 2019 8:08 am

Problem number 1 is easy to fix, you just need to turn up your power supply 5v a bit. Read it at the JAMMA edge with the system running when you do so. The Pi3B+ likes about 5.1 to 5.2v, you shouldn't need to go higher. The lightning bolt is just the Pis low power indicator, you shouldn't see it with the power adjusted, the Pi also will stop throttling.

For number 2 try turning the volume knob on the RaspberryJAMMA all the way down. You want to plug your 3.5mm cable that ends in RCAs at the cabs amp into the output of the DAC (the black plastic bit). The 3.5mm to 3.5mm that originally connected the DAC to the RaspberryJAMMA audio input can be removed entirely. You do not want to connect the audio input of the RaspberryJAMMA to your cabs amp, that is connecting the inputs of 2 amps together. If that doesn't rid you of the siren sound I'm a bit confused but you could also try removing the 12v input of the JAMMA harness (unless it's needed by other parts of the cab, on the RJ board it is only using 12v for the audio amp section).

I hope that helps.

EDIT:
don't use a RPi power supply at the same time as JAMMA, power supplies rarely get along together well. And as your board is new the fuse should be a 2A and will be fine.

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Re: 3-sided table.

Post by aod » Thu Jun 20, 2019 11:57 am

You sir, are a genius. At the edge, it was dead nuts 5V. I brought it up to right around 5.2V (analog meter, 12V scale, couldn't find my digital one). The only time I've seen the lightening bolt now is sometimes during the attraction screen. Sound from the DAC is working great as well.

Now, for the final (?) pieces to the puzzle:

1) There is a lot of bad image retention and flickering. The monitor in the system is a 26" LCD. I don't have any more information than that. I'm sure it doesn't have the best of specs. High scores from Paperboy for example would stay in the background (like burn-in) for a considerable amount of time. I figured it might be a filter of sorts to give it that old CRT feel but after powering everything off and powering it back on, there was still some image retention of the high scores. Could this be a result of maybe the system running interlaced? I haven't dug around in config.txt yet, but does it seem like I may need to force the system into progressive instead of interlaced? I'm baffled as I've never seen an LCD have image retention like this and in such a short amount of time. Even the attraction screen after Pac-Man eats dots on the screen, there is a faint dot left on the screen. Moving through games on the game menu there is image retention when the game names scroll.

2) I installed 4 ROMs for various testing purposes and I put them in the MAME ROM directories based on the compatibility list. Mortal Kombat: Runs great, lots of screen flicker though. Paperboy: Runs great, lots of image retention of high scores. Super Street Fighter II: Champion Edition: shows that it is loading, goes to a black screen with a pointer in the upper-left corner for a brief moment, then takes me back to the attraction menu. Marble Madness: shows that it is loading, goes to a black screen for a moment, then takes me back to the attraction menu. For the two that aren't running is it perhaps I'm missing something else that needs to be installed other than the ROM? Should I maybe just try them in different emulators and see if they'll work?

3) This is the harness used for the trackballs in the cabinet: https://www.arcadomaniashop.com/GAME-EL ... LL-HARNESS There are actually 3 total trackballs (one on each vertical playing side, and one single trackball on the horizontal playing side). You had mentioned the opti-wiz. I see they are saying the opti-wiz 3 is a no solder solution. I'm guessing it would just be a matter of getting the male end of that connector and just crimping wires onto the connector of the opti-wiz in the correct locations for player 1/2 X,Y,Z plus 5v and ground? From there you just run USB from the opti-wiz to the pi. Does that all seem correct?

Thanks for a great product! I can tell lots of tinkering is on the horizon to get this working perfectly, but I'm up for it. It will definitely be rewarding once finished!

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