@purbeast0
Is the arcade project guided mostly by assembly instructions? I'm wondering if you have to get into some circuit board design. Or maybe somewhere in between.
It's kind of a mixture of both. It's not really circuit board design you have to know but rather just how to read the manuals and find the pins on the board.
The guy who makes the switcher and aux board is the one who suggested how to do the initial wiring with the gun. The aux relay board only switches 4 extra inputs. Well each gun has 4 wires running to it, for a total of 8 wires. But you can't switch 8 wires on his aux board, just 4.
Each gun has the following wires on it.
+5v
Trigger
Ground
Sensor
So what he recommended to do was wire both guns +5v and ground directly to the PSU. Since it's a light gun cabinet, the guns will always be on, which is fine.
Then that leaves the trigger and sensor for each gun that needs to be wired, which are the 4 inputs I am wiring to the aux board. Then for each game, I have a harness (the ones I've been posting recently) with 4 wires going from the aux board to 2 connectors with 2 wires each - a P1 connector with trigger and sensor, and a P2 connector with trigger and sensor.
That is kind of where his guidance stopped but it made sense at that point.
And the manuals are available online to find the pinouts, and thus far though, the pinouts have all been identical so the harnesses are the same from a wiring standpoint thus far.
For example here is the manual for Police Trainer -
https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media...d/Police_Trainer_-_1996_-_P_-_P_Marketing.pdf
If you scroll down to the 3rd to last page you can see the pinout of the board. If you look in the bottom middle of that page, you can see the pinouts for gun1 and gun2. There are 9 pins there, but on the board there are only 4 with 5 "empty" spaces that nothing is soldered to. But the first 4 pins of both of them are +5v, trigger, ground, and sensor. So that is where I place the P1 and P2 connectors.
Then I just did the same thing for Carnevil. Here is that manual -
https://www.arcade-museum.com/manua...Player_Dedicated_25in_1640069101_Nov_1998.pdf
If you go down to page 4-4 you can see on the bottom there is a GUN WIDGE BOARD with a player 1 and player 2 pinout. And notice again, pins 1-4 are the same as above. So that is why the harnesses are identical. This one has some extra pins on it because true Carnevil games is a sawed off shotgun and you reload by cocking it back, but there is a setting to make it reload by shooting off screen which is what I have set with my cabinet.
There was another thing I found out about Carnevil though just from research, that you have to wire the SYNC wire directly from the monitor to the board, otherwise it won't recognize gun shots and the screen just flashes. So I tapped into that already by splicing a connector and crimping 2 wires onto it so I can have 1 going to the JAMMA harness as usual and then the straggler going directly to the Carnevil board.
And then I have the physical manual for Maximum Force as it came with my game, but you get the point of how it is all done.
I have done a lot of research the past month or two about all of this and learned a ton. But in the end, it's REALLY not that complicated and it's just wiring up things. These are basically like big computers where you just connect things together.
That's probably a lot more than you care to know lol, but I enjoy this stuff now. It's turned into a hobby where I'm enjoying putting these together as much or more than playing them.