My experience with the Ultimarc Minipac

[adamhaeder]

I've seen quite a few posts with quite a few posts about the minipac, so I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

I'm building a cab using the Project Arcade book and plans. I originally was going to stick with the example control panel design, and I purchased the parts from Ultimarc with that in mind. This included a few dozen buttons, 2 joysticks, 1 trackball, and 1 minpac with wiring harness. My reasons for the minipac were twofold: I wanted to use a trackball (and possible spinner later), and since I don't have much experience wiring, the premade wiring harness was a big plus. I ordered the minipac with the usb cable.

After I received the parts, I decided to change to a 3 player control panel, which means that the minipac was not big enough for my needs (yes I should have decided this earlier). So I ended up buying another minipac, with the wiring harness. This was a little cheaper tho, because the wiring harness didn't support the trackball or spinner.

I connected the first minipac via usb to my WinXP Pro machine and it was automatically recognized with no trouble. I initially attempted to use the windows program that came on the included cd to program it, but that failed, saying it was unable to connect to the minipac. From this forum I found out that you can't use the new program to program the minipac, you have to use the old one. So I got that from ultimarc.com/download and tried that. Still no luck - the error is always a communication failure. I've tried every setting in the program itself with no luck. I moved the minipac to a different WinXP Pro machine, but the same thing happened. By this time, I had received my 2nd minipac, and found the same thing - couldn't program it on either of my desktops using the windows-based program.

Dug around some more on the ultimarc pages and found that the minipac has an interactive programming option - connect a ps/2 keyboard on the passthrough, start notepad, and hit ctrl-alt-p. This starts the interactive programming mode. This was a lifesaver for me, as I can't seem to program it any other way.

So, finally, I had player 1 and 2 and trackball wired through minipac1, and player 3 wired through minipac 3. I connected a keyboard to the passthrough of each individually and programmed them (with ctrl-alt-p). Now, since I ordered the 2nd minipac with a usb cable as well, I couldn't run minipac2 through the keyboard passthrough on minipac1. I just plug them both into their own usb port on my pc and it works fine, windows thinks it has 2 usb keyboards.

My only issue remains this: it doesn't look like the interactive ctrl-alt-p programming mode can program shifted controls (at least not that I can see). Plus I would like to be able to figure out why the windows programming tools don't work.

I did have a small hiccup with the first minipac - after 1 week of flawless operation, I turned the pc on one night and it wouldn't recognize the minipac. Saw a USB device but said it was unidentifiable. Nothing I did could fix it. I unplugged everything from the minipac, let it sit over night, plugged it back in the next day and it's worked fine since then. Still haven't figured out why that happened.

So, in conclusion, I'm mostly happy with the minipac. The wiring was amazingly simple, due to the inclusion of the wiring harness. 2 minipacs on one PC work with no problems.  I would like to figure out why the programming tools don't work, but I've worked around it for now.

[AndyWarne]

This is definitely something worth emailing me about! In fact you can use the later programming utility with the current version of the Mini-PAC (with the self-test LED on board and auto PS/2 USB switching).
I will be able to help by email: andy@ultimarc.com