I-PAC Pause Button

[Frobozz]

I got a question concerning the I-PAC.

I'd like to wire up a dedicated button to do a keyboard "P" to pause MAME.  Since the I-PAC I believe can do this via a "Player 1 + Joy 1 Down" sequence, could I wire a button up in parallel to BOTH those inputs to get the same effect?  

Same with the "Player 1 + Button 1" for coin-up?  

[Zipper]

much easier to program the i-pac so that an individual button is mapped to 'p'. The i-pac has a utility for programming any characters you want in the downloads section of ultimarc.com.

[Zipper]

I only suggest this instead of your method because I think you have to press the shift key first - and am sure that it will not work 100% if you connect them up together as you suggest.

[Frobozz]

Yea, was just wondering if I could save myself some inputs.  

[Tiger-Heli]

I-pac has 2 dedicated inputs for coin-up, so you aren't losing an input if you have a dedicated button (unless you wanted to remap that to have an additional input).

What I plan to do is reprogram the Coin 2 input to "P" and wire a pause button to it, as there are very few games that require a dedicated Coin Slot 2 and the ones that would often need a dedicated Coin Slot 3 and 4 which I can't support anyway.  Then again, I'm building a desktop controller, not a cab, so I can use the 5, 6, or 7 keyboard keys, if need be.

Hope this helps.

[Frobozz]

Yea, thanks for the post Tiger heli, you know, about 5.8 seconds after I finished my last post, I suddenly realized "Why do I need 2 coin inputs!?"  

I'm probably going to wire the coin door and button all together and just stick it on coin 1 now, doing exactly as you said.  

[ArcadeFX]

There are games that need 2 coin buttons.  Pressing the player coin 1 button only adds credits to the player one and pressing the coin player 2 button only adds credits to the player 2.  

If you are only building a one player control panel then no big deal.

[JustMichael]

Use button 7 or 8 instead since most control panels have up to 6 player buttons.

[Frobozz]

Here's the scoop as to my problem.

I'm making a modular control panel, similar to jelloslug's design.  Thus, I'm going to be able to swap out joysticks, track balls and button banks at will.

I'm trying to allocate how I'm going to set up my I-PAC to handle this all.  After reading over jelloslug's page, I was inspired by another one of his ideas.

I plan to take the first 24 inputs on the I-PAC, and divide them up into 4 sets of 6.  Then, wire those 4 clusters onto quick-disconnects (most likely some hacked up DB9 extension cords).

Two of the 4 would be set up for joysticks.  While most joysticks need only 4 inputs, those with triggers need 5, and 12-point rotary ones connected to an interface card need the full 6.  The other two would be configured for buttons, with a max of 6.  I was planning on making several button banks (Street Fighter 6 - red-white-blue, Mortal Kombat 5 pattern-block in center, Neo-Geo 4 different colored all in a row, etc)

Optical junk like spinners and trackballs would connect to an optipac and use different connectors, thus saving me some pain.  

Now, the last 4 inputs on the I-PAC, I was going to perma-wire as 1-UP, 2-UP, Coin 1, Coin 2...  but I also want to add a quick-hit pause button at the top of the cabinet just under the marquee, problem is, where to wire it.  Thus, back to my original question.  

I knew of the "shift" functions on the I-PAC, so I was wondering if wiring the pause button across the two leads in parallel would work.