j-pac and JAMMA harness with missing wires

[boojix]

i'm new to this whole scene, but i've been reading the forum archive for the past week or so in preparation of getting my cabinet up and running.  i ordered a j-pac as soon as i found out such a thing existed, and now i'm wondering if i might have jumped the gun a little.  here's my situation:

i have a working Alcon cabinet that i want to use as a MAME machine.  thinking it was exactly what i needed, i bought a j-pac before i really understood all of the various aspects of the whole setup.  now that i have a better understanding of what's involved, i've run into a dilemma.  Alcon is a one-joystick one player (at a time) game, and that's how my cabinet is wired.  it has all of the standard JAMMA one-player wires (1P start, up, down, left, right, select, shoot) but all of the two-player wires are not in the harness at all.  eventually, i plan to have a two player setup with six buttons each.  so, i think my options basically are:

1) wire the 2P controls into the JAMMA harness so they can interface with the j-pac
2) wire the missing 2P functions directly into the j-pac and skip the JAMMA harness
3) get an i-pac and bypass the JAMMA circuitry entirely

i guess my preference would be to go with #1 and keep the cabinet wiring standardized in case i ever get ahold of some JAMMA PCBs in the future.  and since i've already ordered the j-pac, this would be the easiest route.  in looking at the JAMMA harness, it seems that i'd need to find some wires that are designed to go into the harness so it'll connect with the interface (i haven't dealt with electronics very much, so i'm not really sure how to even describe what i mean, but the wires go into the back of the harness and then they connect with what look like little pins that in turn connect to the interface).  the spaces in the harness that currently don't have any wires going into them are bare plastic...  can i buy wires with ends like these (or something comparable) somewhere?

if not, or if doing so would be a huge hassle, would #2 work?  or would there not be enough leftover inputs for this setup to work?  never having actually used one, i'm not totally clear on this, even after reading the FAQ.

and if neither #1 or #2 is feasible (or relatively easy), i guess i'll have to go with #3.

thanks, and i hope this made at least a little sense.

[Rocky]

Bob Roberts sells additional JAMMA wires with the ends on them to add to your harness.

www.therealbobroberts.com

[krick]

I think that option #1 is the only real solution if you think that you might want to use your cabinet with an acutal JAMMA board.  And it will probably add to the cabinet's value slightly if you ever try to sell it.

Keep in mind that the original JAMMA spec only really supports 3 buttons per player.  So additional buttons for each player will have to be connected directly to the J-PAC.

If you want to have 4 players, you can cascade an I-PAC2 into the J-PAC.  You will have to reprogram it for the correct button assignments, of course.

As the previous post mentioned, check out Bob Roberts for supplies for adding additional wires to your JAMMA harness.

Another option, although more work, is to buy a new JAMMA harness that already includes the wires and rewire your cabinet.  I don't think I wouldn't recommend going this route unless there was additional compelling reasons to do so.

[microwrx]

What they said!

If you wire up the 2 player controls to the JAMMA harness then if you do get any JAMMA games you'll be able to get 2 player ones as well.  If you leave it the way it is you wouldn't be able to take advantage of most of the JAMMA games you can get.