Battletoads cabinet, I need help

[battletoads]

3 weeks ago I had never heard the word 'Jamma' before in my life, but when I bought a fully working Battletoads cabinet,

[Lilwolf]

BTW, I have that cab.  Works GREAT for hotswappable control panels.  might be the best out there since the control panels are so darn easy to make extra for. 

As a quick note.  I would strongly recommend rewiring your cab completely.  You will have to modify it anyway.... So having a hybred of new / old wires will stink.  And it will help in the long run (so you know whats going on, plus you don't have to worry about other peoples wiring).

But here is a quick overview on the common ground.

To make a button press, you have to make a connection for the key specific wire to ground.  You can do this by hand if you want with your keyboard encoder (just wire the 'A' button to the ground and it will always have the 'A' pressed.  Unwire it and it unsticks. 

Now there is only one ground for all the keys.  So as long as you have the ground side of the button connected to some ground somewhere you are fine (keyboard ground, I wouldn't connect it to your power supply ground ).  Now this can be connected (and most common) with a daisy chain (ground is connected from one button to the next to the next ect... Or a seperate ground wire for each button (but that doubles the amount of wire you have to buy / wire / see).  So you should highly consider going with daisy chaining. 

but sometimes you just want to split items off.  It really doesn't matter.  You could have the ground wire coming out of you keyboard encoder... then split into 5 wires (just tie them together... wire nut and your done).  And each of those could be daisy chained.  this can really simplify your wiring. 

But all in all... if there is a metal contact from the one ground to another ground... its all good.  Not matter how its done.

Some advance uses... to disable a button, you can just break the ground.  And to disable a group of buttons you can break the chain of grounds.  So if you want to disable the coin buttons to require the coin door, you can do it.  Or if you want to disable the 4way joystick which is also has the same buttons as your player 1 8way joystick you can (useful so when playing street fighter with a friend, they cant grab the 4way stick to mess up your combo)


BTW, good places for wire is home depot for the common cheap color (get stranded, NOT solid core.).  Then buy some .187 quick disconnect ends (red) from peale in the buy/sell/trade forum.  Then get a crimper (6 bucks or so from home depot).  Then get wire from therealbobroberts.com.   He sells a group of different color wires (each color 10 feet) for like 7 bucks.  more expensive but nice to be able to easily trace back to a button. 

Then use the cheap generic wire from home depot for the ground.  Then use the individually colored wires for each connection.

Also, wire ties are good.  especially ones that you can screw into the underside of your control panel to make it look all nice and neat.

Just my recommendations. 

[battletoads]

Thanks!  Yeah, the cabinet seems like its ideal for making custom CPs.  I see what your saying about how to ground the wires, and I appreciate the advice with where to buy stuff.  I'm actually sort of restoring the cabinet in the sense that I'm buying PCBs for it, not converting to a Mame cabinet.  If I had the money to do so, it would be a Mame cabinet in a second.  So I won't be using any keyboad encoders with my project. 

When I look inside the cabinet, I can see that some of this guy's ground daisy chain leads back to the 2 bottom plugs on the Jamma cable, and some of the ground leads to the ground connector on the player 3 jamma+ cable.  When I have the jamma+ cables for players 3 and 4 installed in my new CP, should I run any of the ground back to the ground connectors on those harnesses, or would it not matter if it all ran back to the main 56pin Jamma harness?

[battletoads]

Also, the first of the 4 coin slots is missing the red eject part.  Can I somehow rig a pushbutton so I push the button and the game thinks I put a token in?  I know you can do this in Mame cabinets, but Im using all regular Jamma cables, not a computer.

[Lilwolf]

Yes you can hook a button to the coin door.  But I would consider going with a coin door myself.  They are pretty cheap when you can find them on ebay.

And as for trying to get the extra wiring then for the jamma.  The rules should be the same as I mentioned on the grounds... But I don't believe there are any standards for 4 player cabs... and especially for ones with 4 buttons each.  So creating a wiring connector so you can get games in the future to run probably isnt' a good idea.  But maybe making a connector inbetween (like a db25 serial cable) might be.  So you create a special wiring harness for the non-standard inputs for each game.  And you swap that out when you swap the board itself out.

and last.  A mame cabinet isn't all that expensive if you already have the computer... Everytime you spend money though you make the conversion easier.

ArcadeVGA - 90bucks.  GREAT item hands down.  You hardly ever see them for resale because nobody wants to get rid of theirs.  But you CAN get a trident card for 5 bucks that will work with advanced mame / menu in dos.  Or 45 bucks for a trident3d whatever card that also has windows drivers for it.  IE, the more you pay the easier it is. 

Ipac4 keyboard encoder is AMAZING!  GREAT!  EASY to wire.  But could hack a few usb joysticks for 4 bucks each on ebay (some issues with some frontends).  Or get 2 20 keywiz ecos but then you don't have the easy config.  Or 2 of the gameport cards.  add 15 bucks more on the keywiz and you have screw terminals for the high end version.  NOTE:  I would NOT hack a keyboard for a 4player cab or a USB keyboard for anything.

IE more you spend, the easier your wiring.

Anyway.  The time spent on a mame cabinet can allow you to play 1000s of games...  And can be done on the cheap if you have the time.