What do I need to hook up to my Arcade Monitor?

[jub3i]

I think this stuff has been asked before, but I couldn't figure it out completely.

I bought an old cabinet with a 25" monitor.  It hasn't actually arrived yet, so I haven't looked at it.  I hope someone can still help me out though.

I plan on getting an ArcadeVGA card.  I asked the seller and he said the monitor has a JAMMA connector and it would plug right in to a JAMMA whatever.  Do I just get a J-PAC and plug them both into that?  I think I read on Ultimarcs site that the J-PAC also works like an I-PAC.  I plan on going 4p so I was going to buy the I-PAC4.  I don't want to buy the J-PAC if I don't need to, can I just split a 15-pin VGA cable and wire that up directly to the monitor?  I thought I've seen some schematics on how to do that.

Lastly, I'm kind of confused on the whole 1V - 5V thing.  I don't know if it's regular video cards, the ArcadeVGA or both that output 1V.  How do I know if my monitor needs 5V?  Does the J-PAC fix that or do I need something else?

I might still get the J-PAC if it's too much trouble to wire up to the monitor manually and if it's needed to convert to 5V.  I just don't want to spend the money on it, if it's really easy to do without.

Thanks for the help!

[mattv]

The jpac will make your job much easier, you can connect it to the Jamma loom, plug your arcadeVGA into the Jpac with a standard VGA cable, plug in the keyboard and bobs your uncle. As long as your tube/monitor works this is pretty much a no brainer

It is certainly possible to attach your arcadeVGA to your monitor without a Jpac but it makes life harder for two reasons
1) you will need to chop up a VGA cable and connect it directly to the inputs of the monitor, I'm pretty sure thee are instructions for this on the ultimarc web site
2) you will probably need a "video amp". the Jpac has one of these built in but you can buy them as a seperate unit for not very much money from ultimarc. There is really no way to tell if you need the video amp until you connect the monitor . Most of them will work without the amp, but they may not look very good (dark?)

SO the jpac is a better option than Ipac4 in this case, but it only has inputs for two players.

Have you thought aboout hacking up a couple of cheap USB controllers for players 3 and 4? if you are using an arcadeVGA then you can run windoes easily so USB devices should work fine.

I think whayt we really need is a new product from ultimarc, the Jpac-4 - combining the best features of the jpac and hte ipac ! yeah baby

[MonitorGuru]

Jamma connection has nothing (technically) to do with the monitor, it's the pin size/layout specification for connecting the wire harness to an arcade game board.

Almost all monitors, even going back to the late 70's (pre-Jamma circa 1984) use the same input pin connectors as today.  .156 pin header, R,G,B,Ground,HSync,VSync in a row (for the most part).  

I don't know enough about the IPac and JPac to make comments on that and dont have time to research now. I believe however the intent of the JPac is that it features outputs that connect into an existing JAMMA wired cabinet harness, so that you don't need to do any individual wiring from the control panel to the JPac or from the computer video to the monitor.  But this makes a huge assumption: Your new cabinet has the full JAMMA harness still installed, unaltered, and wired correctly.  If not, you could either rebuild it or just go with the IPac which requires you to run wires yourself between the IPac and each control and monitor.  (Others here with IPacs/JPacs please comment as I don't own either, but believe the statements above are correct)

All computer video cards, including ArcadeVGA only output at 7/10ths of a volt (0.7v)  Arcade monitors require 4-5 volt top peak for full brightness of the signal.

However, MOST arcade monitors will properly display the image if you adjust one of a handful of settings to "brighten" the picture, or in otherwords, amplify the signal once it's already into  the monitor.  These controls include:

SCREEN (one of the 2 controls on the big black flyback transformer, OR on neckboard)
Brightness (usually next to the video input cable)
R/G/B Gain controls (not cutoffs), individually balance the brightness level of each signal.

I have connected up 3 old PCI/AGP video cards to old arcade monitors and all were adjustable to display the image as well as a real arcade board.  Only buy the video amplifier (or build one) if your monitor doesn't have the ability to display the signal bright enough after adjusting up the dials.