What's a jongle pcb??

Raven

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Ok, I bought a bunch of parts from a guy, and one of them intrigues me and confuses me at the same time. It's a JAMMA adapter-type board with a parallel port on one end, and is labeled as a "Jongle PCB". What is this thing, and what's it for?!?!

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I'm thinking it would make a cool setup for interchangeable JAMMA adapters.I just need to unravel it's mystery. (The guy I got it from bought it on ebay and had no clues either).
 
Kinda looks like it says "jpac' on that one side by the black connector, it would be an interface between a computer and a Jamma adaptor, so it'd be useful for MAME.

Or maybe not, i'm just guessin' here.
 
Nope, doesn't say JPAC (I've used those before anyway). This thing is cool though.
 
Another thing it could be is for one of those kind of homebrew arcade games that they only made a few dozen of, like for instance there's a Hooters driving game, ever seen that one? My boss had a couple out on location, they had computers in them. All that kind of weird shit had little boards and things like this in them, maybe it's from something weird like that.
 
Ok, I bought a bunch of parts from a guy, and one of them intrigues me and confuses me at the same time. It's a JAMMA adapter-type board with a parallel port on one end, and is labeled as a "Jongle PCB".

I have been looking everywhere for one of these!


















Not really. :) No idea what that might be.
 
In computerese, a "Dongle" is a connector that has multiple cables coming off of it to connect multiple items. This "Jongle" I'm guessing, allows you to hook up multiple input devices to your Jamma based cab. I see a "video in", optical inputs, and not sure about the others. I don't see any VGA to CGA conversion, so I guess your source video needs to be compatible with the display in your jamma cab. I'd start testing with video - take the "RGBS-GND" outputs off of a game board, and hook them up to this, then plug the board into into your jamma harness in a cab to see if the video shows up. Next, trace out the edge connector back to the pins to see where your buttons and joysticks should plug in. Then, build yourself a fancy multi-input device that puts the cables from buttons, joysticks, maybe a steering wheel, video, etc into a parallel port. Then, plug the parallel port into your device to see if they work. The boards looks like it just makes hooking up an array of input devices and mapping them to a JAMMA pinout as easy as plugging in a single parallel cable.

Could be useful -- I frequently use boat loads of alligator clips to make my connections -- This would be so much easier!

I know you've got the wire to build it -- if not, I can sell you some more 22AWG - 38 different colors to make this. I think a parallel port is 25 pins, centronics is like 36...
 
Yep, that's the plan. I got excited when I saw this as I have a ton of random boards without adapters and if I can figure this out (and it works the way I think it does) that will make it much easier to go through them. The only part I don't get on the inputs is the cluster between the optical and the video (the ones labeled D09-D16 and then X5UP1-2. They must be the stick/button inputs....

Oh yeah, I expect CGA in-CGA out, since there is no video conversion hardware onboard.
 
I threw together an ugly pac adapter with it tonight. Video and power were easy being connectors on top, but the sound didn't work for some reason. i don't even know where to start tracing back the control inputs to the 62 pins on the parallel port. The only one I could easily see was Ground.

I am disappointed that there is no -5V connection, and that it seems power, video, and sound ONLY connect on the top, not through the parallel port.
 
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