ARpiCADE Forums

Just assembled my cabinet and have got to the point of doing my cabling.
Got the 4 player board connected up, but I have a few questions. Perhaps I should just randomly connect things and see what happens, but personally I'm a little more scientific than that.

1) Should I use the JAMMA harness connectors for Player 1 & 2 buttons 4, 5 & 6 or the Raspberry JAMMA board. Consensus here seems to be to use the 6 pin header on the Raspberry JAMMA board, but I cannot see a diagram or post detailing the pin outs

2) On the 4 player board, same question around pinouts for the 2x 15 pin headers, which pins are for which button(s)?

3) I've seen a lot of posts here about the Coin….. I'm not intending to have a coin mechanism, it's pure for my own entertainment at home. Am i right in assuming that if I connect up the coin button cable to a button, I can just press the coin button to get credits?

Thanks in advance and sorry if these questions have been asked before,

SK

1. either way is fine. You can connect to either the JAMMA edge using multiboard style 6 buttons on JAMMA (dipswitches 1&2 OFF, 3&4 ON), OR you can connect using proper JAMMA and a kick harness (dipswitch 1&2 on, 3&4 off). There's not an advantage to doing either way over the other, electrically they're the same, in fact buttons 4 and 5 are always going to both. The kick harness header is wired (from closest to the JAMMA edge):
p1 b4
p1b5
p1b6
p2 b4
p2 b5
p2 b6

2. if you don't have NBAJam wiring stick with the 'k' (Konami style) labeled headers, they support more buttons. The full 'k' header pinout is:
1 Coin
2 B6
3 Left
4 Right
5 Up
6 Down
7 B1
8 B2
9 B3
10 Start
11 NC
12 B4
13 B5
14 NC
15 GND

3. yes you can use a button instead of (or along side) a coin mech. There's also a credit shortcut by default (p1 start+p1b1).

Finally, if you're wiring from scratch I recommend wiring your panel (from left to right): player 3, player 1, player 2, player 4 as it will make playing 2 player games more comfortable as they will use the central controls rather than the leftmost.

Brilliant,
Many thanks, I'll probably not get to it tonight but probably tomorrow.
I'll go with the JAMMA board for P1&P2 Buttons 4-6.
I'm going with the opposite to your suggestion re. player positioning. P1 & P3 at the ends and P3 & P4 along the long side. Primarily because 3/4 player games are co-operative, and therefore if you have 2, shall we say, "competitive", people side by side, there is too much temptation to "inadvertently nudge" your competitor
Thanks again,
SK