ipac2 stopped working after an hour

[bobslay]

Hi,

Just swapped out an old PC with a PS2 ipac for a laptop with an ipac2 in my mame cabinet. I had the laptop at the front of the cabinet whilst I configured everything and it was all working great. Once it was done I disconnected the USB cable on the ipac2, moved the laptop to it's place in the back of the cabinet and reconnected the ipac2.

The green light is on the ipac2 but it is no longer recognising any inputs from joysticks or other switches.

I have gone into the ipac software and everything is still mapped to keys. I have gone into my emulator software, MAMEUI32 and tried to redo the mapping but when I choose a particular switch to programme and then press a switch (or move the joystick) I get no reaction.

It's like the ipac2 has stopped recognising any inputs.

The ipac2 software still recognises that the ipac2 is connected.

I hope I'm doing something obviously wrong. Can anyone please help me?

Thanks

[JamesTKirk]

I had a similar issue last week when I rebuilt one of my cabinets and put in a new computer.

Things I did to attempt to resolve:

1) Switched out the USB cable connected to the Ipac with another.
2) My computer was running Windows 7 so I went into device manager and told the USB hubs to never power down. I guessed that they may be shutting off if they didn't detect the Ipac at any point on boot up.
3) I had the IPac and another USB keyboard connected on PC boot up so I surmised that my front end was having a hard time differentiating between which keyboard to use. I attempted to resolve by disconnecting the secondary keyboard and powering down the computer and then disconnecting the plug from the back of the computer so that the computer had no power at all for about 30 seconds. If you have a laptop it would be important for you to not only disconnect the laptop from the wall socket but also pull the battery so that the PC motherboard has no power.
4) I upgraded the Ipac firmware.
5) I switched my USB cables to a 4 port powered USB hub and connected it to a USB 2.0 socket on the PC.
6) I re-did some of the grounding loop wire connections that I thought were suspect poor quality.

It's been about a week and my phantom Ipac2 connection issues have seemed to go away. Fingers crossed.