Has this happened with your IPAC?

[gamecreature]

My Mame cabinet is going to be using an older IPAC that's currently wired into a stand-alone CP. Yesterday I connected up all of the hardware that's going into the cabinet and everything seemed to work fine, except for the fact that the IPAC is no longer recognizing the "shift" operations. Do I just need to reprogram the EPROM or is this a symptom of something more serious?

[lharles]

I've encountered just this sort of thing!    After getting through the difficult parts of my build, (read: woodworking), I got the wiring/OS/MAME install done in fairly short order. 

However, after making some changes to the button config with the WinIPAC utility, (not sure if I got the name of the util correct - my apologies if I didn't), I lost the use of some of my 'shift' functions as well.  My IPAC was purchased new, within the last couple of months though.

I'm runnin' Windows XP and in the end, I edited the registry to run an import of the custom .ipc, (again, not sure of the name but I believe that is the proper extension), everytime I boot.

{"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run"}

This adds all of the functions back.  Worked for me.  Not sure if this is entirely applicable to your situation but I hope it helps.

[Level42]

Well, this happened to my J-pac about a week ago, and the cause for it was that my Suzo Inductive joystick had lost power because the ground wire had come loose.
As soon as I completely disconnected the joystick (it was the player 2 stick) the shift function worked again.

I guess the J-pac "saw" a sticking contact because of this, so please first check all your buttons and sticks for sticking contacts.

However when I first got my J-pac (got it "new" from the guy that I bought my JAMMA cab from) it had the same problem. Apparantly, the guy had been experimenting with the J-pac and blown out the big IC. Drop Andy a mail for a replacement IC if the problem persists.

[gamecreature]

I guess the J-pac "saw" a sticking contact because of this, so please first check all your buttons and sticks for sticking contacts.

Yep, turns out that's exactly what it was. Once I fixed it, everything was working fine again. Thanks!