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Pole Position MAME?
deano728:
Are there edge connectors available that I can buy that will fit into a pole position harness (there are 2 of them) so that I can connect a JPAC and an arcade VGA for driving games? I want to keep the original harness intact because the PP boards still work and I want to be able to play the original... Any ideas and anything I should be aware of before trying to get this going? Thanks!
Luigi:
22-pins are common.....Bob Roberts has the 15pin-connectors, too.
http://www.therealbobroberts.net/conectas.html
Search for : 15/30 Common on Atari games
Good luck :cheers:
ArtMAME:
What do you hope to accomplish by using a JPAC? Pole Position is not JAMMA compliant anyway and the only switch you could possibly use it for would be the shifter.
The steering wheel is an optical encoder and the pedal is an analog pot. You would need an Optipac for the wheel and an Apac for the pedal. Are you wanting to interface these also using the JPAC?
The only other thing I see you using it for is possibly for the video amp on the JPAC but you can get just the video amp from ultimarc.
Not trying to bust your balls, just trying to see what your thinking is on this. I have an idea of how it could possibly work, but let me hear yours.
deano728:
Thanks for the feedback - this is why I asked. I am sorta new at this and guess my strategy won't work. I don't really have a strategy for accomplishing this, however, I do want to give it a try. If you wouldn't mind sharing the correct way to do this, I would appreciate it.
It sounds from your email that I could somehow buy the edge connectors from Bob Roberts(Thanks Luigi!) then getting an optipac, which I could hook into an arcadevga, correct? I am not familiar with Apac, but I am guessing I can find that on the ultimarc site? Any other pitfalls or things I am missing?
Will the steering wheel and gas pedal allow me to make selections in gameex or any other front end?
Thanks for the heads up ArtMame!
Dean
ArtMAME:
Well I have MAMEd a completely dead Pole Position, so I am pretty intimate with the logistics.
First off, I will just come out and say that if you have a working Pole Position, just keep it that way, and get a different cabinet to MAME. It will take a lot of work and heartache just to get a MAME version of Pole Position working correctly. Have gone as far as I could with it and I still did not get it 100% (see below). If you have your heart set on a Pole Position driving MAME cabinet, get another dead/stripped Pole Position and use it, there are plenty of dead ones around. Or you could just wait until your PP dies, yeah I know, that’s morbid, but PPs are notorious for breaking down.
First off, the steering wheel acts like a mouse X axis, that is left and right movement. I am not familiar with GameEx but if you can use left/right mouse movement to select games, then that is possible. You would use the Optipac to interface the wheel to the computer. It is basically a glorified mouse PCB.
Now the pedal acts like a PC joystick, you know the old flight sticks that have the 25-pin connector, which a lot of the PCs don’t have today unless you install a sound card that has one. There are USB analog sticks available now. You would use the APAC to interface the pedal to the PC.
Now the shifter on the original PP only has 1 microswitch, and it stays either ON or OFF to control the Hi/Lo gear in the original game. Now the standard version of MAME does not support the ON/OFF shifter scheme of the Pole Position shifter. If you just hook up standard compile of MAME, you will have to change gears by moving the shifter DownUpDown or UpDownUp depending on which way you have it wired. You will not be able to switch gears by just moving the shifter Up for Hi and Down for Lo.
You have to recompile the MAME code to support the ON/OFF shifter. Which I don’t know how to do. There are a few threads on here that subject. I was able to get a recompiled MAME.exe that supported the PP shifter, but I had to futz with the ROM files to get it to run, and after that, I was missing the car explosion sounds during the game so I never got it fully working 100%.
So basically all the controls you will have will be Left/Right mouse movement, single axis Analog Joystick movement, and one switch for the shifter. You could get 2 more switches by wiring up the Coin doors.
So all that is just for Pole Position (and Pole Position 2). Now if you want other driving games on there, they may have slightly different control schemes like 4-position shifters, gas and brake pedal, extra buttons, etc… so you have to find a way to deal with that.
OK, that was a mouthful… so before I make up a wiring diagram showing you how to interface all that with the PC while keeping the original wiring harness intact, let me know if you still wish to continue with this…