Foreword

Certain parts of this project have been used with the owners permission. The intent with this project is not to make money on it and also to preserve the Arcade Cabinet in its unmodified original form. If anyone wants to build one then I will give them my full support, just email me. All the files needed to build this project can be downloaded from this web site. If you attempt to undertake this project then you do so at your own risk.

Introduction

After being inspired by Brian Lewis' PC2JAMMA project and being a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designer for over 20 years now, I decided to design a PCB which contained a complete interface between a PC and JAMMA cabinet. The goal of this project was to leave the PC and cabinet hardware alone and just connect them together with an interface card. In a nutshell, your PC becomes the game card and the cabinet is not modified in anyway!

The interface card can be broken down into three sections, Controls (keyboard), Video and Audio:

Controls / Keyboard

I suppose the biggest problem was the keyboard/control side of things. I managed to find that Leif Engman had already designed a purpose built keyboard encoder for an arcade machine. I used the ButtonBox2 design from his site. The advantage of his encoder is there are no masking or ghosting problems associated with a PC keyboard when used for MAME emulation.

Video

I have taken Brian's idea with the Arcade monitor control circuit and incorporated it into this project with a few modifications. This means that you need to have ArcadeOS as the front end on your PC. There is also a Horizontal/Vertical sync to Composite sync circuit taken from Hut in Helsinki.

Audio

The audio part of this design has a 4W per channel stereo amplifier which is configurable for either stereo or mono (pure JAMMA).

News

23rd August 2001: Still some more work to do on this web site before it is complete.

20th August 2001: This web site born! Please let me know if you spot any errors and I will correct them as soon as I can.