Posted by Tom A. on 17, 2000 at 7:33 PM:
Well, I have had my first failure in converting my newly acquired Capcom Impress JAMMA cabinet. I didn't fry anything as the monitor still works with a JAMMA pcb so that's the good news.
The bad news is that I spent many, many hours hacking a standard molded VGA cable. I took my time, removed the covers, all the epoxy over the wires (this was a terrible chore) and figuring out which pins go with which wires. I than soldered what I thought were the correct wires (looked at Brian's PC2JAMMA website for pinouts) to the fingerboard I just got from "the real Bob Roberts). I installed DOS MAME, ArcadeOS, got it working with the PC monitor first and than configured it for incabinet, fired the PC up, waited for the 3 beeps, turned the cabinet on and nada. I was hoping to at least get a rolling picture or something. Not a thing. I can't figure out what I did wrong.
I am now in the process of trying to hack a printer cable to see if I can do that better. I had to take a break as my eyes and mind are going buggy trying to strip these tincey wincey wires and put them in the connector.
If it does work, the signal quality surely can't be that good as some of the wires will be exposed. That's when I was thinking, doesn't someone make an adapter that can be plugged into a standard VGA cable that just terminates with tinned wire leads? This would make the job so, so much easier.
Any suggestions for acquiring such an adapter or tricks to making a good quality VGA to arcade monitor cable would be appreciated.
-Tom A.