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I have GroovyMAME running on an Arcade Legends 3 Machine, do I need a J-PAC?

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sylar:
...the OS can't see joystick/button input.

Out of the box, the Arcade Legends 3 is a PC running an Asus AT3IONT-I motherboard that boots from a USB Stick running FreeBSD. Take the USB stick out, and it becomes a normal PC. There's also a JAMMA board with an FT232 serial to USB converter. The sticks, buttons, and trackball are all wired into a JAMMA harness that the board connects into.

My main issue is that GroovyMAME cannot see these controls. It does see the FT232 at /dev/ttyUSB0, but when I screen it it's all garbage no matter what baud rate I choose. The board is chatty as well, constantly pinging the trackball for status.

What would you do if you were me? The JAMMA board is a Hanaho UA3IO (or UA310) board. This board appears to be standard JAMMA, but there is no VGA out. The Arcade Legends 3 software and ROMs are all on the USB stick, but the sound is wired from the PC board to the JAMMA board, which seems strange to me.

All help is appreciated!

Pictures and references attached.

krick:
I'm pretty sure a J-PAC would work for the buttons and sticks based on the wiring schematic PDF.  Buttons 1 through 4, the stick, and START for each player go through the JAMMA connection.  Buttons 5 and 6 for each player are in that separate connector.  I'm not sure about how to get the trackball working.  Does it have a USB interface?

If its not a completely standard PC, you may want to consider removing the Arcade Legends 3 board completely and replacing it with a standard PC running Windows or Linux, whichever you're more comfortable with.  You could put the original PC away in case you want to restore the game back to its original state.

Whatever you do, do NOT hack up the original wiring harness.  Find the correct connectors and make adapter harnesses as needed to connect things.  It's a bit more work, but it's the right thing to do.  Don't be "that guy".

Bob Roberts probably has just about any connector you could want...   http://www.therealbobroberts.net/

sylar:
Thanks so much! I'll order a J-PAC and report back here.

sylar:
As promised, I'm posting my update here.

I received the J-PAC yesterday and it appeared to work! I haven't gotten a lot of time to mess with things but it seemed like without any customization, the joystick and buttons worked, though there wasn't an insert coin button mapping.

So that leaves what didn't work. As expected, player one buttons five and six were not working, as well as the trackball. But the surprising thing to me was that now I'm not getting sound. The way they wired things was they had the sound output from the PC going to the sound input into the Hanaho JAMMA board, and I'm pretty sure they had that board powering the speakers.

That board seemed to be a combination serial converter and sound card replicator! I think they really, really didn't want people modifying this sucker for MAME.

So it seems like next I'll need to figure out sound, I'll need to rewire the interface for the trackball and buttons 5 and 6 on both controllers, and I'll need to make it so that the CRT monitor doesn't go crazy. Got my work cut out for me, it seems.

So yeah, I don't want to be THAT guy, but I may not have any other choice. Bummer, unless anyone has any other recommendations.

krick:
None of this is going to be "plug and play", if that's what you were expecting.  Half of the fun of this hobby is working on the machine and figuring out solutions to problems.

That Hanaho board was probably a sound amplifier of some kind.
You probably need to rig up a cheap amplifier to drive the speakers.

I used what's called a "PC speaker hack" in my cabinet...
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=16381.0
http://mame.3feetunder.com/pcspeakerhack/

You can google and find lots of other similar setups.

If you look at your wiring diagram PDF, in the middle of the page, near the top, there's a 9-pin connector for the speakers.  If you get the correct connector, you should be able to wire up a PC speaker hack and plug it directly into the 9-pin connector in the harness.

As for the other buttons that aren't working, check out this JAMMA pinout on the J-PAC page...
http://www.ultimarc.com/jpac2.html

There doesn't seem to be a coin door.  How did you add credits to the game originally?  Was there a dedicated coin button somewhere?

Buttons five and six can be wired into the extra screw terminals on the J-PAC but like I said before, resist the urge to cut the wiring harness.  If you trace the wiring from buttons 5 and 6 for each player, it should end in a connector that was plugged in to the old board.  Get the correct connector to mate up with that connector and then wire from that new connector to the J-PAC screw terminals.

As for the trackball, follow the wiring from the trackball and see where it goes.  Trackballs basically have two interfaces.  Older trackballs had optical sensor boards that connected to some kind of encoder that fed the signals into the game board through (usually) proprietary connectors.  Newer trackballs have USB interfaces and plug into the game board via a USB plug.  Try to figure out what you have and then go from there.  I'm betting it's USB but it's possible that it's not to force people to buy repair parts from them.

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