Is JAMMA not as standard as I thought?

TOK

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I've been buying up various horizontal games for my JAMMA machine. Its only a four button setup and all of them have worked fine, but I just found something odd.

The shooters that use two buttons always use buttons 1 & 2, and Soul Edge (the game originally in the cab) and Soul Calibur use 4 buttons as expected, but I just put a Tekken 3 board in there, which is a 4 button game and the 4th button isn't working.

Was hoping to avoid doing a 6 button setup on this machine, but is it common to have some of the buttons use a non-standard configuration, like skipping button 4 and using button 5 or 6 on the harness?
 
JAMMA standard is three buttons. Soul edge and soul calibur use the three JAMMA buttons and one for each player on the 48pin extender. Tekken only uses 2 of the Jamma buttons and 2 for each player off of the 48 pin extender. My guess would be that the extra buttons were never wired on the extender, if the game was originally a soul edge.
 
*e* ^^^^^ Yeah that's the simple explanation, I'm barely awake so simple didn't come to me. :)

Soul Edge and Tekken 3 I'm pretty sure are both System 12 boards, so hopefully you have a connector for the 2nd set of smaller pins. They're a bitch to find if you don't. It's entirely possible (check the manuals) that the pins used for button 4 on soul edge is not the same as the one used for button 4 on tekken 3. You may have to run another couple wires off the kick harness.

Paladin, yes Jamma standard is 3 buttons, in the case of those 2 games there's a second set of (much smaller) pins on the board they're on which functions as a kick harness ala MK and Street Fighter. There are games out there though which make use of the extra not normally connected pins on a jamma harness as buttons 4 and 5 for p1 and p2, time killers and blood storm being the only ones coming to mind off the top of my head.
 
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usually when I hear about JAMMA compatability issues, it's when the cab they have doesn't have the -5 wired to the connector, and the board they're trying to use needs it...
 
I do have the harness for the second smaller connector off to the side of the standard JAMMA connector. Soul Edge and Soul Calibur use that setup as well.

I had always heard the extra buttons referred to as a "kick harness" and figured that was also standardized. Reading the comments here, I can see that isn't the case.
So, is anyone in a similar situation? Do you guys make adapters to cross the wiring over for quick swaps or am I the only mental patient looking to rotate JAMMA games on a weekly basis?
 
I do have the harness for the second smaller connector off to the side of the standard JAMMA connector. Soul Edge and Soul Calibur use that setup as well.

I had always heard the extra buttons referred to as a "kick harness" and figured that was also standardized. Reading the comments here, I can see that isn't the case.
So, is anyone in a similar situation? Do you guys make adapters to cross the wiring over for quick swaps or am I the only mental patient looking to rotate JAMMA games on a weekly basis?

I had a cabinet that I wired up with all of the standard kick harnesses. As long as only one of them is ever plugged in, you are good-to-go. You can also set up some quick disconnects to handle the "sometimes it's button 4" on the C/25 pins just in case you ran into a board that grounded these pins or something odd like that.

In addition to the wiring, I also rigged up a slide assembly (called a "lid stay" for building wooden chests) that I found at Lowes. I used this to build a "clamping" assembly to temporarily mount boards. I basically mounted a wood block on an L bracket on one side, the sliding assembly on the other side, and would use it to "pinch" the boards and hold them in place. It worked perfectly. Unfortunately, I sold that cabinet and had never taken pictures of the assembly.

Here's a link to a similar slider to the one I used. I mounted a wooden block on the end of this slide. http://www.closet-masters.net/TorqueFlapStay-6.aspx
 
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Thanks Eagle... My JAMMA cab actually has a plastic pre-made tray similar to what you describe for holding the boards. The board presses against one side and the other side slides back and forth about 6".

You push the sliding side against the other side of the board and turn a thumbwheel to lock it down.

I guess I'll order up the parts to make the correct harnesses for each board.
 
I'd say that it is 5 buttons....

But Namco didn't use the 4 button pinout because they wanted to push their cabs and not have people swapping into a Neo Geo machine.
 
just to be correct,soul edge is system 11 not 12

Absolutely correct, I really need to keep from hitting the "reply" button when I'm that tired. :)

I had a cabinet that I wired up with all of the standard kick harnesses. As long as only one of them is ever plugged in, you are good-to-go. You can also set up some quick disconnects to handle the "sometimes it's button 4" on the C/25 pins just in case you ran into a board that grounded these pins or something odd like that.

Even if you have multiples plugged in to multiple boards all powered up at the same time, some diodes in line will solve any issues with phantom button presses, etc. There was discussion of that in one of the threads about the 6-1 switchers a while back. If the plan is to swap boards on a regular basis, the multi-headed kick harness might be the way to go.
 
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