Please,help me understanding if my JPac is faulty or not... please

[ilGaspa]

Hello everyone!

First of all, if I'm posting on the wrong board, please forgive me: I'm a bit on the depressive side today and, altrought I've already sent a mail to andy at ultimarc for help, I prefer asking help to you all too.

I received a couple of days ago my JPac, however I have problems with the board; I connected it to the pc via the supplied usb cable, the board passes the self test (little green led blinks than stays lit) and I can use all the cabinet controls without problems in mame... However, the video part of the board seems dead: I tried connecting it to my PC, then to my laptop (jumpers on both 15 and 31 khz position), however the two SYNC IN and SYNC OK leds stays off. I can see the double image of the windows boot process on screen (the colors seem way over saturated and the image runs vertically, but I can definitely recognize the windows "flag". I wasn't able to "lock on" the image on the cabinet monito as I... hem... can't find the VHOLD pot -_-)... however, altrought a video signal is definitely being received by the board, the SYNC IN led stays off, and the SYNC OK too (whatever I do, I never see these two leds light up).  I double checked every JAMMA connector pin and every gound of the cabinet before connecting the JPAC, so I'm sure I didn't damaged the board... What should I do? I sincerely hope I'm doing something wrong, as I live in italy and sending back the board for assistance wouldn't be the easiest thing. Could this be a problem with my video card output signal? Is there some kind of hidden service menu on the JPAC to make it do a complete self diagnostic, so I'm sure it works ok?

PS My pc uses a Windows XP / Asrock Geforce 6600GT / Soft15KHz combo, and my cabinet's monitor is an Hantarex MTC-9000

[HaRuMaN]

Doesn't the JPac board require that you use the arcade-vga card also?  I'm not sure on this, let me look.

[HaRuMaN]

The J-PAC routes VGA video from the PC VGA card to the JAMMA connector and therefore to the monitor. But of course it's not that simple! There are configuration issues when using arcade monitors on a PC with a normal VGA card (as opposed to our ArcadeVGA card). The VGA card must be told to output a horizontal sync frequency which is much lower than the VGA standard. The J-PAC amplifies the VGA 1 volt signal level to approx 5 volts peak-peak which is the arcade monitor spec.

Ahh... you don't need the ArcadeVGA card if your video card is configured properly...

[ilGaspa]

Exactly: without an ArcadeVGA or some kind of software that forces the video card to ouput 15KHz signals there's no way to drive an arcade monitor, but my card (with soft15khz) IS outputting 15khz signals... the problem is that, regardless of the signals being the right frequency or not, the yellow SYNC IN led should light up, and it does not. The green led (SYNC OK) should only light if the signal has the right frequency, and it doesn't light... so my problem is that both led stays off, like if the video part of the jpac board was dead (and this on all my 3 PCs)...

[ilGaspa]

Well, Andy from ultimarc answered my mail He told me it's probably a problem with one of the board's chips and the he'll send me a replacement! I can't believe it, it's really the best service I've ever seen: here in Italy I'm used to wait weeks, even months sometimes for my items to be repaired from repair centers! Andy answered me in more less 4 hours o_o Simply great!

[ilGaspa]

Well, it seems I'm really unlucky lately: some of the mails I sent to andy got lost, so I'm still waiting my chip... I'll write here if the replacement worked as soon as I receive it!