Need advice on converting original Ikari Warriors cab to MAMe

[yotsuya]

It's funny, I'm probably the last person you'd want to ask about MAMEing a working Ikari Warriors. My cousins and I would walk to Circle K on the weekends after saving up our coins and spent a lot of time and money on that game. It's a great game with a unique control setup that you just can't get from MAME unless you use all the original parts as well as some specialty USB controllers.

PBJimbo likes to throw out that none of us probably went to arcades BITD. Well, I DID, many, many times, and a lot of these old games and old cabinets hold a lot of memories. Add to that the work I've done on actual machines over the past 5 years, and I've gained a new appreciation of them, especially when they just "work".

Carry on, I'm out of this one. 

[mgb]

People keep mentioning that this cab (with the rotary sticks) will add more complication to the MAMEification. If he wants to play Ikari Warriors, any cab is going to have the rotary complication. If the games he's most interested in playing have rotaries then he is closer than the rest of us from a hardware standpoint to making it work.

Also, I dig the idea of preserving dedicated cabs if they were built as dedicated cabs. Games that shipped in generic cabinets don't lose much inherent value (I don't know about financial but I mean real value) being pulled from their cab.

Anytime someone says they are looking at a flat-pack cabinet we say "no, no, build from scratch, you can handle it, it doesn't take much to learn how" but someone says "hey, can I convert this rotary stick game cabinet into a MAME system for rotary games?" and the response is "no, no, it's too complicated"?

I think if you're concerned about the preservation of the cab and it's art, leave as much of it intact as possible, use jamma or custom harnesses to reversibly make the wiring work to an encoder and video card and then fire it up as a MAME cabinet specializing in the games that work with the native controls. That's my plan with my magical spot (of course I don't have an original board in mine.)

But he simply put that he wants the eastiest way to mame it.
He hasn't stated what he's looking to play on it. This cab is not well suited to a simple play all me cab

[bfauska]

He hasn't stated what he's looking to play on it. This cab is not well suited to a simple play all me cab

I love the game to death (as does my fiancé's 5-year old), so I don't want to hack it up where it's not easy to get back to it's authentic state if I want to sell at some point (which I highly doubt I ever would)....Just want to increase the functionality, and since Ikari as well as it's sequel (Victory Road) are on MAME, I thought it would be a kick to do this project. Another thought was to convert the cab to JAMMA with a harness so that it's set up for an easy JAMMA board swap as well and then go the JPAC route, but that seems less efficient overall and obviously a lot more work.

That part made me think he was planning on playing Ikari on his MAME cab, which would certainly benifit from the complexity of dealing with rotaries in his build which the Ikari cab already has.

[PL1]

Here is a list of rotary games from the wiki

That's the old wiki. 

New and updated wiki rotary game list is here.


Scott

[pbj]

How about we let the owner chime in before we continue dissecting his motivations and penance for his crimes.

[Punchmaster72]

How about we let the owner chime in before we continue dissecting his motivations and penance for his crimes.

Ha ha...Thanks for that.

So, I didn't get a chance to snap a pic of the cab last night but I'll do it soon. And yeah, to clarify a bit: I'm really just looking to be able to play the entire library of vertical rotary-controlled SNK titles in my Ikari. Don't want to hack the machine up, remove the sticks (especially not after taking them apart, cleaning, and re-building them!). Once again, just want to up the variety/functionality factor a bit because I know my fiancé's son would go ape-s**t over the other rotary games. So, back to the point....Is there really any harm to switching the connector to JAMMA? That would open me up to both SNK JAMMA PCBs like Victory Road and Guerrilla War as well as the JPAC option for MAME without really doing anything un-reversable to the dedicated cab, right?

[Generic Eric]

How about we let the owner chime in before we continue dissecting his motivations and penance for his crimes.

Ha ha...Thanks for that.

So, I didn't get a chance to snap a pic of the cab last night but I'll do it soon. And yeah, to clarify a bit: I'm really just looking to be able to play the entire library of vertical rotary-controlled SNK titles in my Ikari. Don't want to hack the machine up, remove the sticks (especially not after taking them apart, cleaning, and re-building them!). Once again, just want to up the variety/functionality factor a bit because I know my fiancé's son would go ape-s**t over the other rotary games. So, back to the point....Is there really any harm to switching the connector to JAMMA? That would open me up to both SNK JAMMA PCBs like Victory Road and Guerrilla War as well as the JPAC option for MAME without really doing anything un-reversable to the dedicated cab, right?

Others will answer you question here better.  You may be surprised to know when other have wanted to increase functionality, we've been shown plans of 3 trackballs, 4 players with 8 buttons.  Anyway. 

Search the googles for how to wire a cabinet for jamma.  or ikari warriors to jamma.  Some of the advice you may find is that it may simpler, if not easier to source a jamma version of that game, otherwise you need to have an ikari to jamma specific harness in between your PCB and your jamma wired cab. 

Best of luck.

[mgb]

How about we let the owner chime in before we continue dissecting his motivations and penance for his crimes.

Ha ha...Thanks for that.

So, I didn't get a chance to snap a pic of the cab last night but I'll do it soon. And yeah, to clarify a bit: I'm really just looking to be able to play the entire library of vertical rotary-controlled SNK titles in my Ikari. Don't want to hack the machine up, remove the sticks (especially not after taking them apart, cleaning, and re-building them!). Once again, just want to up the variety/functionality factor a bit because I know my fiancé's son would go ape-s**t over the other rotary games. So, back to the point....Is there really any harm to switching the connector to JAMMA? That would open me up to both SNK JAMMA PCBs like Victory Road and Guerrilla War as well as the JPAC option for MAME without really doing anything un-reversable to the dedicated cab, right?

well now that makes sense.

its just that sometimes you get people on here with a particular machine looking for the quick way to play 5000+ games with the setup.

what you want to do makes perfect sense.

off the top of my head I'd say either rewire the cp with a jamma harness or possibly better would be to find or make a ikari to jamma adapter, this way there's no problem with converting it back quickly if the need arises.
check out jammaboards.com if you need the supplies to do this.

you can then install the jpac and a rotary encoder, both available at Ultimarc

you will also have to take care of the video output for 15khz either by using an arcadevga or other with appropriate software.