Hybrid Arcade - Can this be done?

[DashRendar]

I have available a working, excellent quality arcade machine in a very nice cab.  But I would like having a MAME machine, as I'm sure a single game would get old after a while.

What I'm wondering is if it's possible to rig it so the original game works while adding a PC to run MAME off of, while having some sort of switch between the two.  Almost like a KVM switch, but in reverse.

I'm sure it must be technically possible, but I'm not sure if that's been done before.

So the monitor, control panel, and speakers, would need to be on a switch of some sort.  The switch would need to be able to change from the PC to the arcade's JAMMA board.

I don't want to gut out a working nice arcade machine, but I do want to add functionality to it.  Has anyone done anything like this?

[HaRuMaN]

There are Jamma switchers you can buy.

Hook your PC to a Jpac, get a Jamma switcher, and you're golden.

[DashRendar]

Perfect, thanks for the quick response!   

[mwong168]

What I'm wondering is if it's possible to rig it so the original game works while adding a PC to run MAME off of, while having some sort of switch between the two.  Almost like a KVM switch, but in reverse.

I'm sure it must be technically possible, but I'm not sure if that's been done before.

What is the original game in your cabinet right now?  I just helped a good friend of mine convert his Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting jamma cabinet to mame without having to compromise the original wiring or control panels.  Luckily for him that I had an old x-arcade PS2 dual stick that I wasn't using and a J-PAC which I had previous planned on using in my MKII jamma cab before I sold it this past December.  Just met with a nice guy from the KLOV forums who had an ArcadeVGA v1 AGP video card for cheap.  Now those were all the parts required to convert his SFII cab into a Mame cab along with an old AMD desktop system and a set of HP speakers and sub.

Now first thing he did was label all the wires on his control panel before he disconnected it.  Then he gutted the x-arcade joystick and labelled all the wires and basically took the control board out and hooked up to the control panel in his cabinet.  Hooked it up quickly and everything tested out just fine. 

Next step was unhook the jamma connected and hook it up to the J-PAC.  Then we had to connect a ps2 male to male cable from the ps2 mouse port to the J-PAC for power.  Then we connected the VGA male to female cable from the ArcadeVGA to the J-PAC.  Turned the computer on and windows XP appeared shortly, we thought something was wrong because we couldn't see the bios post screen or windows start up screen.  It had something to do with the screen resolution and refresh rate.  Initially the screen was flickering and scrolling pretty bad but after installing the latest drivers from the Ultimarc site we were good to go.

The final step and the most time consuming part of all this was putting all this stuff and the new speaker system into the cabinet but it all worked out really nice.  My friend wired one of the coin reject buttons that acts as a power switch for the computer and the other reject button as the coin insertion function.

No wires were spliced or cut and the cabinet can be put back to original in less than 10 minutes without have to solder or re-wire anything.

[DashRendar]

It's a Gauntlet Legends cab.  New monitor, new joysticks, and cab in new condition.

My goal would be to be able to play the original Gauntlet Legends off the JAMMA board, but flip a switch and kick it over to a MAME pc and back again, without having to swap out control panels or anything.

[mwong168]

There is a working Gauntlet Legends ROM and CHD file that works fine in Mame so really no need to switch back but that is just me.