Hey all!
I've been working on a cabinet that will have Pigskin 621AD and Arch Rivals on a Jim Riddle 2-way switcher. Both games use 49-way joysticks that have dedicated PCB connection points rather than using the Jamma harness's joystick mapping locations. No worries there as I made a harness that splits connections to each board per joystick and they work great.
With that mini backstory, now to the root of my issue...
I noticed when testing the joysticks specifically for Arch Rivals that the Left and Right directions on the joystick are flipped (but all works as expected on Pigskin). Essentially, when playing Arch Rivals, if either player presses the joystick in the left direction the game registers right direction movement and vice versa.
At first I thought maybe I got my wiring mixed up on the harness I created, so I removed my splitter harness from the equation and plugged the original joystick harness directly into the 49-way joystick.... and... it yielded the same results.
When pressing the joystick up and down (for either player) the game registers the correct upward and downward orientations as expected; this is isolated to just left and right.
I spent time reviewing some documentation and noticed a difference in pinouts between what the Arch Rivals ops manual states and information I found on Brad Raedel's site here:
williamsarcades.com
Information from Arch Rivals ops manual:
At first glance I thought I could just swap the pins, but knowing that the Up and Down orientations are working appropriately, wouldn't swapping the pins just swap the issues from L-R to U-D?
I wanted to ask the experts here before pulling pins, swapping them, and other time consuming efforts. Perhaps
@braedel could school me/teach me the ways or if others have advice, I'm ready to learn.
I also made a quick video to add a verbal summary to my information here:
Thank you!