X-men 6 Player second RGB out info and question

buaku

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Ok so I played with my X-men board some more and I'm finally getting somewhere.
The post I found online said the pinout for the second RGB connector was
1 R
2 G
3 B
4 Gnd
5 sync?
6 +5

I tried that and got no signal, but the encoder board got power (JROK and NeoBitz).

So I went poking around the net to try and learn how arcade monitors are set up and the schematics I found seem to indicate the monitor takes H and V sync separately. Also the 6-pin header reminded me of a video extension cable I saw here: http://arcadecontrols.com/BBBB/rgbcable.html

I thought maybe this secondary output is putting out the H and V sync separately. So I went poking around the net some more and I found one schematic that showed a way to combine the different syncs into a composite sync (http://www.tkk.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/vga2rgbs.html).

Well I haven't tried that but I did decide to just try combining the H and V sync wires into the Sync In of the encoder boards, and I got a signal! The JROK handles it pretty well, but the NeoBitz has wierd colors and the picture blinks in and out and is sort of scrambled. I think it's just because of the different encoding chips used. I was happy I was getting a signal at all!

I thought I read somewhere a singal sync input can determine which signal is which, but I forget where I read that...maybe that's just how the composite sync works.

I also think the reason the boards got power is because the H-sync is at 5 volts. A website I came across seemed to indicate that.



Is it a good idea to combine the syncs like that?

And just how does a JAMMA harness hook up to a monitor? The harness seems to put out a single sync, but the monitors appear to take two separate sync inputs. There must be something I'm missing.
 

Neo Alec

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The pinout you just posted only shows one sync. And I'm pretty sure I've seen a definitive pinout already online -- maybe it was a PDF of the official manual. That was back when I was considering the 6-player version. It shouldn't be a problem to get working with the Jrok. Interesting you can power the encoder right off the connector on the board.
 

SuperGunGuru

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I just happened to have my spare 6 player manual handy. The pinout for the second monitor connector is shown as:

1: Red
2: Green
3: Blue
4: Video Ground
5: Empty
6: Sync

JAMMA uses composite sync. If you were hooking it up to a monitor with separate sync wires, you could just tied those 2 into the one JAMMA sync wire.
 
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norton9478

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I am miffed that you would just wire up an encoder without running some voltage tests first.
 

buaku

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I just happened to have my spare 6 player manual handy. The pinout for the second monitor connector is shown as:

1: Red
2: Green
3: Blue
4: Video Ground
5: Empty
6: Sync

You are awesome!! That's exactly what I've been looking for!!
Do you have any idea where to pick up a manual? I've had no luck

JAMMA uses composite sync. If you were hooking it up to a monitor with separate sync wires, you could just tied those 2 into the one JAMMA sync wire.
Ohh ok, maybe thats what I thought I read where the different inputs could figure out which sync signal is which. Thank you very much for the info!!

norton9478 said:
I am miffed that you would just wire up an encoder without running some voltage tests first.

Well the dude in the killercabs forum is the one that figured out the voltage on that pin 6. His testing on his 6-player board showed that was giving off 5 volts. He got his board working using SCART. I figured things would be fine since he didn't run into any issues. I suppose I got lucky this time. Normally I just make sure I don't have any wires crossing or anything like that. I didn't think it'd be a big deal since he didn't run into any trouble. Lesson learned.
The google cached version I was looking at is actually the link that mainman posted. I used another email address and was able to get registered.



SuperGunGuru is there anything in the manual that talks about flipping the picture at all? The 4 player manual shows a video flip option, but I don't recall seeing it when I was poking around the menus on the 6-player version. It's a little hard to read all that stuff backwards.



The dude in the killercabs forum actually ended up swapping the yoke on a spare TV to get the picture to show in the right direction. I don't have a spare TV to do that with. It'd be cool to get it working on a TV that can do a split screen type thing. I know the Sony Bravia's do it (They call it P&P). My other idea would be to slap 2 capture cards into my computer and show both screens side by side on a widescreen monitor. That might be easier because then I might be able to flip the screen using a software solution.
 

Neo Alec

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I originally was thinking what I would do is just line up two similar TV's next to each other. That would be less than ideal because of course there would be a seam between the two screens. I used to feel there was nothing but negatives to the whole proposition, but then I was thinking, it really is rare that you see those six player cabs anywhere anymore, and even if you know where one is setup and running, how often do you actually get a chance to play it? Just having the ability to get the thing running at home is like having a rare piece of arcade nostalgia come to life in your home.
 

buaku

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I originally was thinking what I would do is just line up two similar TV's next to each other. That would be less than ideal because of course there would be a seam between the two screens. I used to feel there was nothing but negatives to the whole proposition, but then I was thinking, it really is rare that you see those six player cabs anywhere anymore, and even if you know where one is setup and running, how often do you actually get a chance to play it? Just having the ability to get the thing running at home is like having a rare piece of arcade nostalgia come to life in your home.

Yeah I was thinking of the wow factor...if you could get something like this up and running in a home setting, it'd just be cool as hell!

I can't help but think there's got to be a way to build a circuit or maybe modify the board somehow to swap the horizontal output. I mean the 4 player board appears to have that option!

Also what amazed me more was there are some arcade machines that use 3 monitors! I think I found that by reading the wikipedia page on the X-men arcade game.
 

Neo Alec

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I can't help but think there's got to be a way to build a circuit or maybe modify the board somehow to swap the horizontal output. I mean the 4 player board appears to have that option!
My theory is the game doesn't have the flip option because, unlike it's 4-player counterpart, it was never meant to be played in anything but the original cab. Does the game display right side up with a Jrok on a TV?

Do you have enough molex connectors to wire up joysticks for all six players? I only have two Neo Geo adapters made up for my Konami multiplayer boards right now because I've never needed more than two.
 

Hewitson

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What I'd recommend doing is getting two TV's and decasing them and making up some sort of custom wooden cabinet to house them.
 

Xian Xi

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Shouldn't the flip screen be in the test mode since it doesn't have dips?
 

Neo Alec

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What I'd recommend doing is getting two TV's and decasing them and making up some sort of custom wooden cabinet to house them.
That's way too much work for one game. It's utter insanity.

Shouldn't the flip screen be in the test mode since it doesn't have dips?
:down:
The 4 player manual shows a video flip option, but I don't recall seeing it when I was poking around the menus on the 6-player version. It's a little hard to read all that stuff backwards.
 

buaku

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My theory is the game doesn't have the flip option because, unlike it's 4-player counterpart, it was never meant to be played in anything but the original cab. Does the game display right side up with a Jrok on a TV?

I suppose they did that so you could put the 4-player board in a 6-player machine and hook it up to either monitor.

The output that comes off the JAMMA harness displays proper, the image off the secondary connector is flipped. I've been using the JROK this whole time. I don't have any real arcade monitors.

The JAMMA harness is the right monitor and the secondary output is the left one. As far as I remember the right monitor sat in the machine normally facing you and left monitor sat down in the arcade machine and reflected up to a mirror that partially overlapped the right hand monitor. My guess is they did that so you didn't see two bezels or edges of monitors side by side. A way to obscure that border.

Do you have enough molex connectors to wire up joysticks for all six players? I only have two Neo Geo adapters made up for my Konami multiplayer boards right now because I've never needed more than two.

Yeah I bought some 15pin molex connectors if I ever get that many people to play it at once. I only have 2 NeoGeo sticks at the moment though. I figure if I need more I could try making my own stick. After dealing with the supergun a stick should be easy!!

Hewitson said:
What I'd recommend doing is getting two TV's and decasing them and making up some sort of custom wooden cabinet to house them.
Sounds very interesting. I could probably do that if I had spare TV's , but then you'd still have a border running between the two. The ideal solution to me is get the one picture flipped and find a TV that does side by side picture like a Sony Bravia (They call it Picture & Picture). Seems only the 46" models and up support the right inputs I'd need in P&P mode. That's an expensive solution though:P

The more practical solution for me might be getting a second TV capture card for my computer and running the video in there. There should be software solutions for swapping the picture.

Xian Xi said:
Use a mirror.

I would have no idea how to get that situated properly to avoid reflections. Plus I figure there's got to be a way to get the picture flipped! There's gotta be a circuit out there somewhere.

I thought I read somewhere you could put the 4-player chips onto a 6-player board and if you could maybe there would be a way to reprogram some of the chips to give you that screen flip option. Logic exists somewhere in there to flip the screen, so there's got to be a hardware solution!! I just have no clue how it would happen.
 

Xian Xi

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I meant to navigate the menu if you have a hard time reading it.
 

SuperGunGuru

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I thought I read somewhere you could put the 4-player chips onto a 6-player board and if you could maybe there would be a way to reprogram some of the chips to give you that screen flip option. Logic exists somewhere in there to flip the screen, so there's got to be a hardware solution!! I just have no clue how it would happen.
Unfortunately there's no option in the 6 player X-Men to flip the screens in any way. As you or someone mentioned, that PCB is made for that specific cabinet configuration. Who at Konami would have thought your average Joe would end up collecting these PCBs and look for ways to play them outside of the original hardware? The 4 and 6 player boards are physically different and I've never heard of anyone swapping roms with any success. I would bet it's possible to mod the board to flip the image output of the 2nd monitor, but I have no idea how to do that offhand. If you ended up using regular arcade monitors, you could simply cut the yoke plug in half and reverse one of the pairs of wires to make the image mirrored. It's interesting you mention a 4 player board with an image flip option. I'm pretty sure it's not an option on my 4 player PCB, but it's also been a while since I looked at its test menu.

http://therealbobroberts.net/yoke.html

I'm not sure offhand where you can find the manual available readily. I've yet to see a PDF version online anywhere. Perhaps it's time for me to scan mine. It's not a very big manual, but would be useful for the big techs out there who can really understand the schematics.
 

buaku

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I meant to navigate the menu if you have a hard time reading it.

Ohhhhh...my bad!

Unfortunately there's no option in the 6 player X-Men to flip the screens in any way. As you or someone mentioned, that PCB is made for that specific cabinet configuration. Who at Konami would have thought your average Joe would end up collecting these PCBs and look for ways to play them outside of the original hardware? The 4 and 6 player boards are physically different and I've never heard of anyone swapping roms with any success. I would bet it's possible to mod the board to flip the image output of the 2nd monitor, but I have no idea how to do that offhand. If you ended up using regular arcade monitors, you could simply cut the yoke plug in half and reverse one of the pairs of wires to make the image mirrored. It's interesting you mention a 4 player board with an image flip option. I'm pretty sure it's not an option on my 4 player PCB, but it's also been a while since I looked at its test menu.

http://therealbobroberts.net/yoke.html

I'm not sure offhand where you can find the manual available readily. I've yet to see a PDF version online anywhere. Perhaps it's time for me to scan mine. It's not a very big manual, but would be useful for the big techs out there who can really understand the schematics.

After poking around it turns out I was thinking of a post that talked about converting a 4P Turtles In Time board into a 2 player one.

That yoke article was pretty informative...seems easy enough if I had the monitors...but it just makes me think even more there's a hardware solution. There's gotta be an electronics genius out there somewhere!!

The 4-player manual I found floating around the net is what mentioned that screen flip options. It's shown right above the volume control in the Game Options.

That'd be cool if you had the time to scan the manual in. Maybe there's something to be learned from the board schematics.

Thank you all for all your help!! It's a big step to be getting video out of each output!!
 

Neo Alec

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Yeah I bought some 15pin molex connectors if I ever get that many people to play it at once.
Did you find a good source for the connectors? The only way I could think of was to buy spares out of cabs on ebay. They were cheap when they could be found. So did you make something like these?
3-4-playeradapters.jpg


I'm pretty sure it's not an option on my 4 player PCB, but it's also been a while since I looked at its test menu.
I'm almost positive my 4-player one has the option, as most jamma games do, but I don't have my equipment at hand to confirm this.

After poking around it turns out I was thinking of a post that talked about converting a 4P Turtles In Time board into a 2 player one.
That's totally different. All of the old 4-player Konami games (before they just added a dip switch option to change from 2-4 players in all later games) allow you to run the same board in either 2 or 4 player mode simply by changing the rom set. I've converted a 2-player Turtles in Time I bought to 4-player in this way, using an EPROM burner.

The 6-player X-Men board is a totally separate board with a special interface though, so I doubt there is any way to get it running using the 4-player ROMs. However, it is conceivable that an experienced programmer could manually reprogram the 6-player game to incorporate some options from the 4-player version. Seems like a lot of trouble. You're better off looking for an external way of flipping the screen. (Thanks for finding out and telling us all the screen is flipped on this board by the way, before I could go and do a crazy thing like trying to make the 6-player version work for myself. Your pioneering work is appreciated.)
 

buaku

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Did you find a good source for the connectors? The only way I could think of was to buy spares out of cabs on ebay. They were cheap when they could be found. So did you make something like these?

Yup!! that's totally the idea! I got the parts from digikey this time. I got the housing pins and extractor tool there.
Here's the housing:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=WM2687-ND

These are the pins I got:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=WM2612-ND

Here's the pin extractor:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=WM9927-ND

I haven't actually wired one up yet, but the 6-pin I wired for the RGB out fits just fine on the controller outputs, and these 15-pin housings are just a wider version of the 6-pin, so I'm confident there.


That's totally different. All of the old 4-player Konami games (before they just added a dip switch option to change from 2-4 players in all later games) allow you to run the same board in either 2 or 4 player mode simply by changing the rom set. I've converted a 2-player Turtles in Time I bought to 4-player in this way, using an EPROM burner.

The 6-player X-Men board is a totally separate board with a special interface though, so I doubt there is any way to get it running using the 4-player ROMs. However, it is conceivable that an experienced programmer could manually reprogram the 6-player game to incorporate some options from the 4-player version. Seems like a lot of trouble. You're better off looking for an external way of flipping the screen. (Thanks for finding out and telling us all the screen is flipped on this board by the way, before I could go and do a crazy thing like trying to make the 6-player version work for myself. Your pioneering work is appreciated.)

Yeah I'm sure someone with a lot of knowledge could figure it out. It sure would be nice!

Oh no problem! I was just scouring the net trying to find info. The dude on the killercabs forum had some helpful research and SuperGunGuru's confirmation of the pinout sealed the deal.
Getting a JROK encoder was a boon too. The colors don't turn out right with the NeoBitz. I guess the AD encoder doesn't play nice with this board.

Thanks for all the feeback!

Someone in another forum pointed me in a direction to some hardware that can do horizontal flipping, except the damn thing costs like 3 grand.
http://auroramultimedia.com/?section=products&id=2

It can even do side by side picture!!!! Except it only has like one set of composite/svideo inputs.
It seems it might be able to take component through a breakout cable into it's DVI port, but I'm not totally sure about that. If that was true I bet you could run both board inputs into this thing and it could spit out a single combined picture. If only I had a spare 3 grand around there, lol.

I'm still hoping I can find a solution to flip the picture. I've started looking up sources for how I can do video capture in C# and maybe I can whip up my own program that just displays the picture and flips it there in software. It's a big undertaking for me, lol.

This is pretty fun stuff. I like learning all this new info. It's one hell of an adventure.

I'll be sure to give an update if I ever find an economical way to flip the picture!
 

White Devil

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My 2nd video output looks like shit and although this guys solution sounds like it makes sense I don't necessarily understand.

Here's a video of the problem

http://youtu.be/-6FpqO5soFQ

Any insight would make my year
 

buaku

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What kind of converter are you using?
Are you running it to an arcade monitor or a regular TV?
Did you try running the secondary output to the TV that works fine?

Also the only way I found to flip the picture was software....I had two video capture cards and I think I ran them into VLC and just flipped the picture in software.
Plus I was then able to adjust the position of the image so i could get them lined up really well!

In another thread I was wondering if you could use an FPGA board to do the flipping, but then I worried about introducing too much lag to the picture.
I wonder if there is a way to mod the board or something too.
 

White Devil

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I'm using a GBS-8200 V5, and thank you for the info on flipping the video with software. I hope to one day build a cabinet with a widescreen LED. Meanwhile I have a 19" CRT that I'm going to flip the yoke and have next to a 19" LCD. It's not optimal but it's quick and easy to boot.
 

buaku

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Is there any way to get your hands on another video converter, or try on a different TV or monitor? Maybe GBS is having issues with the signal.
I do have another crazy idea.... Are you able to run the video through a VCR first, then out to the monitor?
VCR's seem to have a lot of stabilizing circuitry in them. I remember once using either the JROK or NeoBitz and trying to run it straight into my capture card and I couldn't get a good picture.
I then ran it through the VCR first, since my TV only had coax inputs, and then ran it from the VCR to the capture card and I got a stable picture.

The software idea is nice in that you can get even list of a seam between the 2 images, the only hard part is setting it up every time you'd want to play.
 

White Devil

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I have a GBS-8220. In order to run it through my VCR if need the version of the converter that converted to RCA/S-Video
May have to give that a try
 
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