Gotcha, sorry. Trying to take in way too much info at once. I think, despite all of the great advice I've been given on making my own set up I'm going to go for the Vogatek it seems like such a simple set up to use, and i'm stuck for space here and I would want to take the set up with me to Korea when I leave again in two months. With the Vogatek I could take it with me and then buy a power supply etc when I get there. Now If I can just find one which doesn't have to be assembled before shipping.
I'm not keen on the way the PCB has to connect directly to the game board. That's asking for trouble. Make one yourself! It's easy and you can house it in a small project box (e.g. from Maplin). You could use an ATX socket so you can use a PC PSU, if that's what you want to do. Do Korea have SCART TVs? If not, you're going to have to build an adapter anyway.
Well I'm off to Stone Henge tomorrow with the GF so I'm gonna pop into maplins on the way back and grab myself a new soldering iron and some other bits and pieces and give it a shot. My brother is bringing around an AT power supply which should do. I'm worried about controller options, I don't understand any of the guides. I intend on using a 6-button Megadrive controller. If I take the ports out of a spare broken megadrive I have kicking around and simply solder wires from each pin on the Jamma connector to the corresponding MD pinout does that work? Can I use the ports from the MD if I clean them up? Does the regular Jamma connector support the fourth Neo Geo button or do I have to do something else. Also would it be possible to add the coin and any other button to the two spare MD buttons? My TV in Korea supported RGB scart.
You need to make a circuit to decode the signal from the MD controller. That, or open the controller up and solder wires directly to the tracks coming from the pads. That would need a 15 pin connector, though.
The MD pad is wired thusly: 1 Up 2 Down 3 Left 4 Right 5 +5V 6 Button A and Button B 7 Select 8 Ground 9 Button C and Start As you can see, the buttons are multiplexed. Therefore, you need a decoder. That, or wire directly to the tracks from the buttons, but that means using more than 9 wires, therefore you can't use the MD pad's original lead.
I just read a tutorial on making a decoder and it's too much for me to understand. What controllers would connect without a decoder needed? Sorry for asking dumb questions over and over again, but the few guides that are still around claim to be "super easy" but they miss out many simple pieces of information and other arcade forums are lacking in help topics.
Neo Geo or a pre-built joystick such as the MAS Super Nova stick. Ahh, I should just put up a website myself with the data on - it'd be easier just to link to it ;-) hehe!
There are multiple wires so you don't get floating ground and distributed loads (have 5V go through a single pin would be asking for trouble esp as JAMMA is rated up to about 8A and going through multiple components there would be a voltage drop) and there are multiple things that will require ground like Video, Buttons, Board, Speaker, etc.
oh no wonder there's unused pins. Thanks so much Why are you using a 6 button controller? Vogatek only supports 3 buttons through a megadrive control pad. You can't wire a megadrive port to a jamma connector. Jamma controllers use NO encoded information. So to activate a jamma controller button (or coin/bios button) you simply connect the pin to ground and that activates the button. Megadrive controllers use an encoded signal. So to have jamma buttons working over megadrive pins you need an encoder chip. The vogatek comes with encoder chips installed on it. But if you look at the vogatek auction on ebay he CLEARLY states that it only supports 3 buttons. The vogatek only encodes the information for a 3 button megadrive controller. Jamma uses 4 directions, 3 buttons, and a start button. If you notice, a megadrive has the EXACT same amount of buttons on it. So the vogatek just encodes the standard jamma buttons into a 3-button genesis controller signal. Any other buttons (like kick buttons in street fighter, or the 4th neo geo button, cion, misc) you will have to wire it yourself. So no you can't really wire the extra genesis buttons into coin/whatever. Here's a picture of what I did for the extra buttons. I just wired extra function buttons into the supergun unit itself. Most superguns work this way and have coin/extra buttons on the supergun instead of the controller. Almost all of my arcade games I set to freeplay so I don't need to insert coins. And if I have a game that requires credits then I just pump it full of credits and not have to worry for hours. Here's a picture of my supergun controllers (they're running on a vogatek that uses a megadrive control port) I circled which buttons are which to make things easier to understand. As you can see...regular controllers....nothing fancy....now let's take a look at what I did on the inside apologies for the terrible picture quality...my camera is really bad. Anyway, I simply soldered all the controller buttons onto the corrosponding button contact on the genesis controller pcb. And I wired all the grounds together and just soldered them onto a single ground point on the controller pcb. So all of the jamma buttons which is the 3 buttons, start button, and direction buttons, they're wired into the genesis pcb. For extra buttons (street fighter kick buttons/neo geo 4th buttons) I wired them just into straight wires. Unfortunately since extra buttons are different for each game they need to be straight wired. But it's only 3 extra buttons (I don't play anything that uses more than 6 buttons total) so 3 extra wires isn't so bad. So here's a picture of the cord coming out of my controllers the black cord is the megadrive cable which sends the encoded information for the regular jamma buttons. The white cord is for the three kick buttons which are straight wired. The reason why it's okay to encode the standard jamma button controller data is because EVERY jamma game uses these buttons. So they're always going to work the same way. Thusly I can run an information decoder off of the supergun and that's all I need. But for extra buttons the buttons are usually wired directly off of the game pcb itself. So if I was to encode that information then I would need an encoder for each board. Which would be a bit silly. Let's take a look at the end of my controller cable Since I need to unplug my kick buttons for each pcb I wired them into a usb port. USB ports have I think a total of 5 wires. That's more than enough for me, I only need 3. So yeah really the only hard part of this job was soldering the button wires onto tiny little contacts on the genesis controller pcb. But the rest is fairly simple. So for neo geo buttons, the 4th button is connected to the unused pins on the jamma connector. Here's a chart Everything that is NOT BLUE is regular jamma. Fairly simple. So to answer your question, yes a regular jamma port supports the neo geo 4th button but you have to wire that button directly into the controller yourself. The only thing you have to be careful with is make sure that you're buying a neo geo that doesn't use stereo sound over the jamma harness. My neo geo has stereo sound through seperate pins on the board. So all is good, I just hook up stereo sound through those pins instead. I heard if you hook up jamma speakers to a stereo sound neo geo jamma pinout then you will blow the sound amp on your neo geo (or something to that effect). Anyway I hope this makes things easy enough for you.
That said, if he is going for a Neo Geo 1 Slot then the vast majority of games available are 3 button titles. So no real need for the additional looming until he wants perhaps a more comprehensive set up. If going for a Naomi motherboard then 6 button set up is advised.
Thanks for the comprehensive info guys, I'm finally starting to get my head around this. Well today I went to Maplins and picked up what they had (which wasn't much). I managed to get: 1x 10A fuse (20mm) 1x 2A fuse (20mm) 2x 20mm PCB mounted fuse holder. 1x 15 way D-sub socket and header (for the controller - whatever it may be). 1x 100ohm resistor (for the +5v to scart) 1x Push button (for coin operation) 1x 29 by 58 strip board. Solder, Heatshrink, new iron. As well as 8 different colours of wire (some thicker wire for power.) All I need now is the Jamma connector (which is on order) an AT/X power supply which I'm getting tomorrow. Molex connectors (for the video lead)..was thinking of getting another set and connecting the power supply via molex too? As for the female scart socket I was going to desolder one from a spare Sky box I have in the cupboard. I think that's just about everything.
You know, someone could make a pretty good business out of selling decent priced Supergun units! My edge connection soldering is terrible and I have had to rely on pre-produced Supergun's and Capcom I/O, or whatever the various cabinet has supplied with it. I really want to try and produce one myself now! Cheers! Good luck Twimfy! Let us know what you come up with! There is something very satisfying about plugging in a piece of equipment you've been repairing or working on and finally seeing it working properly. Once you start on one Supergun, you'll be wanting to keep adding and modifying! One honest 'cade owner I know has a signature that relates to his Candy Cab, which is '90% Tinkering and modding, 10% gaming!' - so true!
Playing with yourself, eh? :110: I'd wire two in - even if you don't use them, it's handy to have a P2 port just in case. Working or not? A SCART socket is a pound or two. How much would you get for a spare Sky box? More than two quid, I would have thought! Yeah, go for it if it's knackered. That's what I did with a Freeview box. Stuff had melted in it - WTF?!
Yeah, my Sky box is humped, a replacement is £30+ for the older models and a lot more for the new Digital versions.
Hmm Sky box + ebay = cash for PCB's unless you anyone here wants it for £20 or something. As for player 2. Well I bought one set of D-sub connectors because that's all they had left. Maplins in yeovil is shit, they have nothing of use and I remember a year or two ago you could buy things individually and now I've got bulk packets of everything. So far this is costing me more than I thought. Funny you should mention making money out of superguns. I was thinking that if I get it right and can find cost effective suppliers I may start making a few for some extra dough. But lets not get too far ahead.
Let me know which Sky box it is and whether it is fully functional. Mine works, but is forever posting up 'Your batteries need replaced' even when they are brand new, plus most of the time I have to wipe the static of the sodding viewing card! Argh! No wonder I hardly ever watch TV. Hmm, perhaps an Assembler collaboration Supergun is in order. Someone producing the casing, someone the PCB and innards and someone else doing the graphics overlay! I'd buy a limited edition AssGun anyday of the week lol :evil:
I tried years ago and there was no interest! Odd, huh? I might do it again. I've been toying with the idea of making a pretty special rig. I probably will when I get the time (and money!), but it isn't going to be all that cheap. And you complained that everyone else was making innuendos!! :lol: I always disliked the word Supergun. How about AssJAMMA? :110:
It's this one Not sure of the serial number as it's sitting in the garage right now but I'll have a look later. SuperAss? (was the only combo left...had to be said.)
