John's Arcade Forum - Classic Arcade and Pinball Collecting and Restoring Discussion Forum - RETRO MAME - Nintendo Vs Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this board and to the whole arcade scene in general.

I recently bought a old arcade machine that came with the game Robocop.

I was wondering what 'type' of game my robocop pcb is. I looked up pictures of the pcb online and the boards i can find look completely different then my pcb.

Here are some pictures of my robocop game: http://imgur.com/a/lm6TK#0 (http://imgur.com/a/lm6TK#0)

I'm guessing my pcb is a pre-jamma version of the game ?

Can any of you experts help me identify this please ?

Its a bootleg robocop PCB. The red dots on the eproms gave it away. I think its still jamma, you didn't get a good shot of the edge connector but from what I can tell it still looks like a jamma compatible connector. It isn't keyed so you need to make sure you don't plug the harness in backwards but if you look at the first picture and look at the edge connector with the pins closest to the green tape, those are the power pins. So make sure you plug in your jamma harness with the power wires going on that side.

Thanks !

here are some more pictures from the cabinet and the monitor...
http://imgur.com/a/ngNui#0 (http://imgur.com/a/ngNui#0)

I'm not sure if it make things more clear or not.

I also wonder about the monitor, any info about that ?

My plan is to remove the non essential stuff from the cabinet and make it a mame cabinet
- as you can see it will require a lot of work to make it look nice but i do want a multi game cabinet.

Well i hate to say this, BUT if you are planning to put mame in it, consider using a computer LCD. It can be a real pain to get a CRT to work.

i considered it and my initial plan was to do that for my first project to keep it as painless as possible but there i got this nice working arcade monitor
and a compatible videocard it would be foolish to not use it.

The only thing i need to know is how and where to connect the monitor to my pc.
This should also be fairly simple if i can get a hold of the right cable.

I might have to start a new post just for that i gues because i don't think many people will monitor this thread.

You need something called a j-pac to hook your computer up to the monitor. You also need to use something like soft-15k to output the proper resolution. Setting it up to work isn't that hard as long as you disable native resolution in mame. If you want proper resolution out of mame you are going to have to adjust the monitor everytime you switch games.

I don't really need the J-pac i think. I just need a proper cable that goes from my videocard to the arcade monitor.

The J-pac can filter out bad signals to the monitor and connect a jamma cabinet straight to your pc.

Since i'm gonna flash the bios of my videocard so it outputs 15khz on boot/startup + use soft15khz (or CRT-emu),i don't need the jpac for filtering out bad signals.

And for connections i allready bought usb encoders that are basicly game controllers where i hook the buttons and joysticks to.


So the only thing i need is a proper cable and know where to hook it up to exactly :)
I will have to do a little research on that part.

The biggest reason to use the jpac is to have the HID controller for the joystick/buttons. The jpac just happens to also provide a vga port to make it easy to plug the monitor in. If you really want to use another HID controller and wire the monitor manually feel free to hack up a vga cable and splice that into the harness. That would be the easiest thing to do. But i strongly recommend the jpac.

If i knew i had to 'hack' a cable to connect the arcade monitor i would have gone the J-pac way, but since i allready got 2 zero delay encoders for connecting joysticks and buttons i will have to do without the J-pac and splice a vga cable and make it work that way.

Thanks for your time and help :)

I'd be curious to know if your board displays dark, as mine does on an MS9 monitor.

you mean the Robocop PCB ?

it played just fine. I took it out and i'm gonna sell it i gues, i have no use for it anymore since i'm in the process converting the cabinet to mame.