Adding Star Trek Voyager to my Police Trainer 2 Cabinet

SBenkovic

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Adding Star Trek Voyager to my Police Trainer 2 Cabinet

Finding a Bargain

Every summer a large community within my town holds a massive yard sale. Over 100 homes participate and it's fun to drive block after block looking for treasures. This last time, as we were driving past some homes, my daughter called out "Dad, a gun game!" We park, walk up to take a closer look, and we see that it's a Police Trainer 2 cabinet with a sign taped to the monitor that says $50. The owner assured me it worked. I quickly handed over the cash, beating out a couple of other potential customers.

When we got home I did a quick inspection and fired it up. My kids had a blast playing it the rest of the day. Some weeks later the display became distorted and we lost the image altogether. A cap kit and solder reflow later, the image was back and we haven't had a problem since.

Upgrading the Police Trainer 2 Cabinet

I had been thinking of ways to upgrade the cabinet and there were several things I wanted to do:
(1) Be able to play Star Trek Voyager, which shared similar hardware
(2) I wanted to replace the 14 year old hard drives with SD cards
(3) Be able to play either game at the flip of a switch
(4) Add rotating police lights to the top of the cabinet

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Running Star Trek Voyager

I knew that my Police Trainer 2 used a standard resolution monitor (WG 25K7401). After doing some research, I discovered that the Star Trek Voyager conversion kit can work with standard resolution monitors (it's a dip switch setting). I also confirmed that both games can run on the red conversion kit motherboard like the one in my cabinet.

So I saved an eBay search and after a few months I found what I wanted: a listing for a complete but non-working Star Trek Voyager board set with a buy-it-now price of $45. It didn't matter that the ad was for a yellow board from a dedicated cabinet nor that it did not work. All I really needed was the security button and the hard drive. Even if the hard drive did not work, I could always re-image one using the MAME CHD file.

When the package arrived, I swapped out the security button and hard drive, turned on the cabinet, and heard "Welcome Aboard". Success!

The red motherboard in my Police Trainer 2
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The yellow Star Trek Voyager board I purchased
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Replacing the Hard Drives

Now that I knew that I had a working setup, I wanted to store the two hard drives and replace them with something with no moving parts. Going back to eBay, I found an SD to IDE adapter card for about $10 shipped.

Examining the original hard drives I discovered that even though the drives were 40GB, the actual images on them were small. Police Trainer 2 fits on a 8GB card and Star Trek Voyager fits on a 32GB card. I used SanDisk Ultra Class 10 SDHC cards.

Copying the hard drive images took some trial and error. Most drive copy utilities want to resize the partitions to match the destination drive which prevented the game from booting. I eventually stumbled upon Disk Copy by EaseUS:

Disk Copy

This utility copied the partitions in the correct order and in the original size. It simply ignored the blank space at the end of the disk.

I tested each of the SD cards (along with their corresponding security button) in my cabinet and both games worked great. I taped the two cards together so that they don't get lost.

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Switching Between the Two Security Buttons

Although switching out the SD card is easy, switching out the security button is not. Also, it would be easy to drop and lose them into the bottom of the cabinet. I wanted to flip a switch to select the correct security button.

So it was back to eBay. I purchased a small double-throw On-On toggle switch, a 5cm by 7cm protoboard, and two dual coin battery holders. The security button is twice as thick as a coin battery so the battery holder has to accommodate this. I mounted the parts on the protoboard and wired it so that the switch selects one of the two battery holders.

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Rotating Police Lights

The cockpit version of Police Trainer 2 came with police lights on top that could be configured in the game's settings menu to always be on, only come on during attract mode, or have them off. I like the idea of lights that come on during attract mode but I cannot find any documentation as to how they were hooked up to the game. Were they connected to the megajamma board via the jamma harness? Via a special connector? If you are familiar with the sitdown model and can give me more info I would really appreciate it.

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Successful Project

My original plan was to have the toggle switch also select one of two SD adapter cards but I had no luck. Switching the power off did not work (the cards simply leeched power from the IDE cable), neither did switching the cable select line on the IDE cable.

Even so, I'm very happy with the results of my experiment. Switching games is now as easy as
(a) powering down the cabinet
(b) swapping the SD card
(c) flipping the switch
(d) powering up the cabinet.

Access to SD cards and switch through open control panel
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