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What is a jamma harness?
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TravistyOJ:
If you want to keep the JAMMA wiring in tact, you will need a J-PAC (its like a PC to JAMMA converter), i would recommend this if you plan on playing any JAMMA games, if you are putting a computer in there and only a computer, u can rewire everything yourself.   Then u can use a Mini pac or ipac or any keyboard encoder. Just out of curiousity, what are the games/cabinets you would be MAMEing?
HOTR6:
I bought a computer and then got all the roms for like 400+ games. I need to figure out how it all works. I loaded the ROMS and have an emulator, I can't remember right now. I do remember that the ROMS did not load right and the games did not show up in the emulator. I need to fix the monitor prob in order to work on the rest. I would really like to get this done soon!

Here is what I have done so far.......

I built the cabinet!
I have the computer
I got the ROMS (but there MAY be something wrong with them because they didn't load  properly)
I have the buttons and the joysticks ( have not mounted them in the control box, I was waiting for my husband to design the pannel the way he wanted th buttons set for his hands. He is taking to long so I am going to do it!)
I had the monitor but the tube broke so now I have a chasis (I don't know what kind) and a mounting box

There it is.... Nice maple cabinet with a gaping hole where the monitor goes and a control pannell with nothing on it!!

So I figure I need to get the Ipaq and then wire all the buttons to that and that is plug n play!
I need to figure what I am going to do for a monitor. Will I scavange the tube from a tv I have and get the chasis from 8liners (maybe I should figure out what kind of chasis I have maybe it already is the kind I need)
Then I need to get the computer running and try to figure where I went wrong on the ROMs and emulator
After that MAYBE I will have a working arcade cabinet!!
What do you think?
RayB:
One step at a time there. I would hook up a PC monitor and get all your software 100% working before you go and switch over to an arcade monitor setup. Otherwise you're lumping all potential problems into one giant heap that you'll have to sort out.

Also, Spaz over-simplified the JAMMA harness explanation. It's not just for buttons. All arcade game machines have a few parts in common:

- Monitor
- controls
- coin switches
- power supply
- speaker

A JAMMA harness is one standard connector that hooks up to the game's circuit board. From that connector are wires that go off to all those things mentioned above (video signals, power voltage, control input, etc).

So what happens is you can take a JAMMA circuit board and swap it with another JAMMA circuit board and then play a whole different game in the machine, usually without doing anything else.

So there you go. Get the emulator software working first (you have ALOT of reading ahead of you, on this site). Next, the simplest thing to do with a cabinet that already has a JAMMA harness is to use a JPAC (not the IPAC) and an ArcadeVGA video card.

~Ray B.
TravistyOJ:
I'm a little confused, on some posts you ask questions like a newb, but now you are talking about a chasis-tube swap.  I just want to make sure you realzie that monitors can be very dangerous if not handled correctly.  I dont want to sound condescending since im somehwat of a newb, but i didnt want to risk overlooking that. 

BTW, what do you mean by ROMs didnt load properly?

You should post some pics up at the project announcements page so we all can see :)
Spaz Monkey:
RayB: thanks, I know I was missing some of the detailed items.

I think another deciding factor is what you will use for a monitor; arcade, pc, or tv?
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