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I-PAC 2 Help
gb_phil:
Hey Everyone!
I purchased a custom arcade machine several months back and just received it yesterday. Long story short but this build was plagued with issues and missed it's shipping deadline multiple times. I was expecting to have the machine a month or two sooner than I received it. The day the machine was set to go out last week the company found that two of the buttons on the machine weren't registering for some reason. They wanted to keep it and fix it but the two buttons are honestly not essential (pinball buttons) and I didn't want to postpone getting my machine any longer. I'm new to arcades but I'm not new to Hyperspin, emulators, etc. So I figured I could either figure it out myself or find someone online that could help.
I'll include a picture of my panel below. It's a two player set up with a dedicated four way in the middle with some buttons. There's also a trackball, two pinball buttons on the left side of the panel, two pinball buttons on the right side of the panel, and a pinball plunger on the front of the panel. Everything but the four pinball buttons is pictured below.
Whenever I go into Notepad all the other buttons clearly work but the two pinball buttons on the right do nothing. I went into WinIpac and started from scratch with a new panel overlay and telling it how every button was wired up and everything shows as working there expect for the two pinball buttons. I can see they are clearly wired into the Ipac 2 but not sure where to start troubleshooting. I've never wired one of these up before so this will all be new territory for me. Any suggestions?
yotsuya:
Hi, Phil!
Who'd you buy it from?
Try taking the wires off the pinball switch and hook them up to another button to see if it's the lines or the microswitches on the buttons.
gb_phil:
Great idea! I actually just switched some wires around before coming back here to see if anyone had any suggestions and it seems I'm narrowing down the issue. One pinball button was plugged into 1SW8 and the other was plugged into 1B. I took the plunger wire from 1SW7 and swapped it with the pinball button at 1SW8 and voila. The button worked but the plunger didn't. So could it be an issue with those two ports on the IPAC itself? I went ahead and swapped those two back and then put the pinball buttons into 1Start and 1Coin and all is working. I'm not familiar with all this stuff but I'm assuming having those buttons in other ports being used shouldn't hurt anything right? I mean if I map the keys to unique keys the system shouldn't care right? Or would mapping to them to different keys not matter and the system always will insert coins if the pinball button or the insert coins button is pressed? If that's the case then I guess I'll need to find some other places on the IPAC to double up. Certainly open to suggestion there.
The build company was InsertCoins.com out in Vegas. They did a good job. Most of the hold ups where the fault of the shipping company, bad boards, late artwork, late crating company, etc.
gamer83:
Well phil i could be wrong,but it sounds like maybe the ports the pinball is plugged into on the ipac arent mapped to a keyboard key yet? Why are you testing the buttons in notepad?thats what the winipac utility is for.dont test inside notepad because if a button is mapped to keyboard ctrl shift alt etc nothing will show up in notepad when you press that key.
What you should do is,load up the ipac utility,make sure all your buttons and joysticks are showing in the virtual panel exacyly as your real panel is laid out.if its all set up press the pinball buttons and see if they light up on the virtual panel.if not then either the button is missing from the virtual panel,no keyboard key is assigned to it, or it is not binded correctly to the ipac in the panel configuration.
gb_phil:
Thanks for the advise gamer83!
I was using Notepad just because I'm accustomed to using it for keyboard mapping (I have an HTPC set up with Hyperspin and four Xbox Controllers). Originally the buttons weren't showing on the layout so I created a new layout from scratch. I manually put the controls on the virtual panel to mimic the pattern of my physical panel and then I assigned each control the correct wiring information. I know it's the correct wiring information because I followed each wire to the IPAC. Most of the stuff was connected in an obvious fashion (Player 1 Start connected to Player 1 Start, Player 1 Button 1 connected to Player 1 Button 1, etc). The company that built it thankfully used color coded wires so that made tracing the wires back a whole lot easier. So even after creating a virtual panel from scratch and mapping what control went to each slot on the IPAC I still found the two pinball buttons did not work. I mapped certain keys to those to see what it would do and still nothing. It's odd but it seems those two slots on the IPAC just aren't working unless I'm missing something here.