Bovine Communications

Mame Project

Arcade Controls

The controls were not as bad as we had thought. We mounted
all the buttons and joysticks where we wanted them.

The cabinet used to be Robo-Cop when we bought it for $75.00
The monitor was broken but  was replaced (see Monitor section).
We sold the working Robo-Cop JAMMA board on eBay for $65.
It was only a single joystick with two buttons centered
in the control panel.
So as you can see we changed it a lot.

As usual we common-d all the switches to ground,
and then wired each switch to a break out board
from Hagstrom Electronics.

These are great because they take all your connections and
put them on a 40 pin IDE cable (cheap and plentiful)

The break out board is then connected to the KE-USB36.

This thing is great but pricey, for both parts it cost about $100.00
Now all we did was use their software to program each input to
a corresponding keyboard stroke. Here is a PDF of our wiring.
Also to save you the trouble if you use our wiring here is a copy
of the saved setup programming file. (This file is only useful if you
have the Hagstrom USB36 encoder and the corresponding software
that comes with it. Download the saved setup Mame.U36

The programming software looks something like this..


We plan to add a spinner very soon, and will update this when we do.
The Hagstrom already has a port for spinner / trackball.
All you do is connect this USB device to the computer and the computer
finds 2 new devices a new USB keyboard and a new USB mouse.


We connected the coin box to the break out box.

We connected the white switch on the front to the box
and programmed it to be an escape so you can return to MameWah.

You will also notice the two red switches and one green taped together?
The green is wired for a "service" switch to alter game setup, like
difficulty, pricing, or blood levels in newer games.

The blue switch in the bottom left of the picture is wired
as a pause button under the control panel to allow easy access
when you need to pause a game while playing.

That's it for the controls, not too hard really, it just looks complex.

If anyone knows where to get 8\32 carriage bolts for the joysticks that
would be really nice, we only have 3 real ones and were forced into
using screws which look bad and are way too sharp while playing.
We can not find these ANYWHERE!!!