Switching power supply.

[Fat_Trucker]

Converting an Electrocoin Xenon to MAME using a J-Pac. I know it is recommended to disable the switching supply but is this absolutely necessary?.

[RayB]

Isn't Xenon a pinball machine?

[Stingray]

Isn't Xenon a pinball machine?

http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=X&game_id=10502

-S

[RayB]

Oh god BLAH!!!
I used to work for Virgin/Mastertronic.  That game was run off Amiga hardware, did you know?  That's basically an Amiga game in an arcade cab.

[OSCAR]

I have an old Wrestlefest cabinet that I put a JPAC in years ago.  I must have been one of the first people to buy a JPAC, I believe I ordered one the day Andy released them.

Anyway, I never disconnected the power supply because it ran the coin door lights and I didn't want to rewire the cab to get the power from the PC power supply because I needed to keep that PC portable.  Well, that cabinet has been just fine ever since and it's at my brother's house, who plays the cab daily.  Never had a problem with the power supply or the JPAC, both have been fine since day 1.

[Fat_Trucker]

Thanks for that.

In reply to the others, the Xenon was a model name for a generic Jamma cab produced by Electrocoin in the late 80's.

Not sure if it made it to the other side of the pond but there are quite a few knocking about in Europe.

[paigeoliver]

All you have to do to disable the power supply is to unhook the AC power going into it. It should take about 20 seconds on a bad day.

[Fat_Trucker]

Thanks Paige.

The reason I was interested was that I may decide to start collecting PCB's for this beast once its finished and would like to be able to switch between MAME and original PCB's without having to mess about with disconnecting and reconnecting the supply.

I read that not disconnecting the supply was only really an issue if you decided to plug your board/j-pac in the wrong way around, so just wanted to check it was otherwise generally safe to leave it as is.

[paigeoliver]

A lot of power supplies will burn up if run without a load. Power some lights with it or something, like Oscar did.

You will also probably be happier if you have both a Mame cabinet and a JAMMA cabinet, rather than trying to do both in one cabinet. Especially since almost every jamma game ever is already in Mame. Its kind of silly to unhook the computer to stick that Double Dragon board in the cabinet.

[Fat_Trucker]

Yeh I know. The problem I have is that I don't have enough space for more than one (taken 3 years to talk the wife into this one )

I'm a bit of a collector and it would be nice to have a genuine collection of PCB's and the ability to play them. Although in all probability the machine would be running on MAME the majority of the time.

The illuminated coin mechs are both still wired so hopefully that will eliminate any load problems.

[paigeoliver]

Yeh I know. The problem I have is that I don't have enough space for more than one (taken 3 years to talk the wife into this one )

I'm a bit of a collector and it would be nice to have a genuine collection of PCB's and the ability to play them. Although in all probability the machine would be running on MAME the majority of the time.

The illuminated coin mechs are both still wired so hopefully that will eliminate any load problems.

That should be fine, assuming they are powered by the power supply and not a winding on the ISO transformer.