4player adapter help

[gt7766c]

I’m having trouble getting my 4player adapter to work. Any help is appreciated.

It’s in an NBA Jam. First question is do I have the harnesses hooked up correctly and everything else in the attached photo or do the harnesses go the other way around?

I went into the ARpiCADE menu by hitting f4 and selected switch to 4-player mode but that didn’t work.

Atari games like Gauntlet or Konami games like Simpsons or Turtles can’t see players 3 or 4. In fact, when I go into AdvMame menu to try and set the controls for players 3 and 4 none of the 3 and 4 player inputs register. This makes me think I’m doing something wrong with the adapter or software.

Players 1 and 2 work fine and all inputs work fine when connected to the NBAJam boards.

FC4229AF-76C8-440B-BDBD-19535D1FCFF3.jpeg (102.91 KiB) Viewed 2803 times

Thoughts?
Kris

[dee2eR]

Your connections look fine from a quick look. You are using the NBAJam headers, I'm not sure which way your wire should be coming out but I think the wires look to be in the right spots.

I'm guessing the issue is ARpiCADE isn't in four player mode. What actually happened when you tried the 4 player mode option and which version of ARpiCADE are you running? I may have to run some tests to figure it out.

[gt7766c]

I verified the wiring is correct. I didn't notice on your PCB the 1-15 pin numbers at first. Verified against the nba jam schematic.

I'm running 3.84 (incidentally, how do you tell in the software which version? I only know this from memory).

When I selected "switch to 4-player" in the Arpicade menu, the screen went blank for about 5 seconds and then Arpicade rebooted.

I think this is the issue in config.txt as it doesn't look like it got uncommented:
# Enable 4 player adaptor over i2c
#dtparam=i2c_arm=on

I will manually uncomment the line and report back this evening local time.

Thanks dee2er!

[gt7766c]

Well... that didn’t work. I took the comment out and booted but didn’t work.

I got out the voltmeter and started poking around. Pin 1 of that first IC in the adapter picture read 3.3v. Is it supposed to be 5? Could that be part of the issue.

Unfortunately, while poking around I wasn’t careful enough and blew the 1amp fuse on the ARpiCADE.

I’ll need to fix that before continuing. Thoughts on temporarily attaching an external fuse holder? I have pins and other vids so I have a handful of different fuse values lying around.

Thanks for any tips.

Kris

[dee2eR]

That's unlucky, at least it's just a fuse. You can attach a fuse holder if you like. By snapping or bending the outer solder posts of the fuse holder you can fit one to the PCB if you want. Use a 2A or 2.5A fuse for RPi3 versions. The original fuse on the board would have been a 2 amp fuse, but I haven't updated the silk screen on the PCB.

After that I'd try this version of the software, it's older but is the only release I've done pre-configured for the four player setup. https://arpicade.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=702
if the four player board is still unresponsive on that version it's probably a hardware issue.

The 3.3v should be fine, it's sourced from the Pi.

[gt7766c]

Ok thanks. Will try all that out this weekend and report back.

Kris

[gt7766c]

Hey dee2er, the mega link for version 3.82xx says it's no longer available... Any other way to get that version?

Kris

[dee2eR]

sorry it looks like 3.83 is the oldest version still on mega.

[gt7766c]

Do you recommend I try a clean install of 3.83 or try upgrading to 3.9?

My basic question is, is the 4player code on the latest versions or do I need to have 3.82xx for the adapter to work?

Kris

[dee2eR]

The latest versions should work (pretty much any version from 3.82xx onward should work), no idea why it didn't for you. I will get out a four player board today and 3.9 and see what happens.

UPDATE:
I started with the ARpiCADE 3.9 release. Booted without changing anything, exited to the service menu and selected 4 player mode. System rebooted, unexpectedly it froze for me when the game selection menu loaded, I pressed ctrl+alt+del+backspace and the system rebooted and then worked normally so I'm not sure what happened there... I launched TMNT in MAME 0.172, I had to use the MAME menu to add coin inputs for player 3 and 4, they were picked up normally and after setting them they worked in game. The other controls in the game worked without having to mess around.

Not sure why I hadn't already set the coin inputs for players 3 and 4... odd thing to miss. It maybe possible when you tried 3.84 the same was happening... but it's hard to say for sure. It maybe unique to MAME 0.172, I didn't check anything else.

EDIT: re-reading your original post it seems something else was happening as the inputs weren't picked up in MAME at all...