Police Trainer 2 Boot Issue

tom9933

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I am the new owner of a Police Trainer 2 machine. The machine is in good condition and it seems to be partially working. Unfortunately rather than booting into the game it hangs on a grey screen with a mouse pointer and several icons (see attached). I am NOT able to move the pointer with either a keyboard or mouse. As part of the troubleshooting process, I have re-seated all of the connections, verified the bios settings and also the dip switch sessions on the MEGAJAMMA 101 card. The only thing I am not able to verify is the battery looking item that from other posts I understand is a security device. Has anyone see this issue before and is there an easy fix?
Thanks
Tom
 

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Well I got in touch with Skip in tech support and he thinks I have a bad drive. New one is 135, and he is switching me over to compact flash so that should be nice. He says he also does repair work on the Mega JAMMA boards that the machine uses. It sounds like they are required because of the security chip (looks like a battery).
 
Could be a hard drive... could be a bad motherboard... bad JAMMA I/O card... or, improper CMOS settings on the motherboard. I've seen 3 of the 4. :(
 
That was my thought as well, but I did see several read errors (they mount the FS as read only) on the drive when poking around on the Linux side. I cloned the drive and tried to fix them, but the behavior was the same. Interestingly enough the drive has multiple partitions and the one with the PT2 directory seemed to be the one with the errors....
I did verify all of the Bios settings and the parallel port was my first assumption as well. When I asked him about the security device (looks like a battery) he said if that was the problem I would get an activation error rather than this boot up issue, since it doesnt get that far I assume that could be another potential problem.
I totally agree that it seems like something other than the drive but the errors are the reason why I decided to order a new drive. My goal was to have the machine up and running for new years. I also bought an Initial D (V2) at the same time and its fine other than cleaning and a bad audio cable.

One other question while looking around and cloning the hard drive I was thinking about running MAME on another partition/drive. Has anyone ever tried to get MAME working with this parallel port based JAMMA card??

BTW I also have a Twilight Zone (heavily modified) and South Park pinball, but this is my first experience with arcade gaming outside of Intel, Amiga and Atari based PCs….

Thanks
Tom
 
Not sure about using that JAMMA I/O board with MAME but I do know that the JAMMA board thats used on many of the Ultracade platforms map to keyboard button presses so it may work.

Speaking of MAME, if there is a Police Trainer 2 CHD out there you can use that to recreate a drive.

Since you verified the BIOS settings my next guess is the I/O board.

Hmm.... Do you have the video cable running out of the video card DIRECTLY to the monitor or is it running to the I/O board then the I/O board is connected to the monitor?
 
I looked around and didn't find a CHD but maybe I'm not looking in the right places yet... BTW one of the first things I plan to do is to make a backup of the drive so if that helps anyone else let me know. They would have re-imaged mine, but since I question the drive and that would also take longer I went the new drive route. When I asked about downloading an image file his answer was I have a drive that I clone. I was expecting and would have even paid for a ghost or acronis image, but that wasn't offered.
As for connectivity, the cable comes out of the onboard video card and into the JAMMA. Interestingly enough while it seems like some modify the video signal this one doesn't seem to as during the boot up the monitor doesn't lock to the scan rate. It's only when it gets into the grey screen that the resolution changes to one that the cabinet monitor likes. It must be sub VGA because a regular computer monitor (17" CRT) won't lock to it. I run a data grade CRT for the home theater and thought about connecting it up to check the signal but I havn't gone that far yet. I did try to change the DIP switches on the board which is supposed to change the signal but they didn't seem to have any affect. Interestingly enough all of the serial number stickers match except for the one on the JAMMA board….

One other totally unrelated comment for channelmanic... If in your Atari work ( I checked out your site ) you run across a boot loader program that loads up with a rainbow image with a copyright 1980 that was actually written by my dad way back in the day. Every once in a while an old one pops up at a computer show and I've been amazed to see how far that little program went, especially considering that was back in the days of sneakernet. We gave all the Atari stuff away years ago as the diskettes all went bad but now I wish I still had it. Between that and the Amiga we had a ton of really great games. I still have the Wico joysticks :)
 
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Since your getting a new drive it would be a good idea to make a backup of it. Maybe some one else can help with this next part though.

I dont understand how the people that created the CHD's figure out where the data ends. In other words... Rush the Rock had a 10 gig drive in it from the factory. If you use CHDMAN to create a backup its going to be close to a 10 gig image when done. But, the archive is less then 2 gigs. So how did they figure that part out???

If Team Play sends you an 80 gig drive you may end up with an 80 gig CHD. I'm pretty sure that PT2 is no where near 80 gigs though.
 
I expect there is a lot more to it than just imaging the drive as you would for cloning. From a size perspective the original drive is 20 gigs and that had several free gigs when I made the backup with acronis. Also considering the requirement for the JAMMA board with the battery like chip I wonder if it would be any good without modifications....
 
Hmm. Not sure what your getting at but I do know that you can use CHDMAN to make a working clone of that drive as I've done it before. I didnt create an image but used the factory drive as a source and a new drive as the target and it worked.
 
Yes for a backup it should work fine, I'm thinking more to make that file MAME compatible I imagine it takes some additional work.
 
Yes for a backup it should work fine, I'm thinking more to make that file MAME compatible I imagine it takes some additional work.

Without a doubt. Theres a lot more going on there then just making a copy of the drive. I have no idea as to what that is but I only need MAME to help me create drives and backups.
 
Just to close out this thread I received the new drive from Team Play today and the game is now working. Now I just need to make a backup of this drive to put in the safe :)
 
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