Joust to JAMMA conversion

(C) 1994 Graham Bisset

Your attention is drawn to the following VERY IMPORTANT legal and copyright info
rmation :
LEGAL WARNING - READ - VERY IMPORTANT
Although I've made every possible effort to ensure the information contained wit
hin this document is precise, it may still be error ridden. However even if is
not, you may still damage your equipment, your machines or even yourself by usin
g the information contained herein. I make no guarantee of ANY kind; USE THIS
INFORMATION AT COMPLETELY YOUR OWN RISK. I will *NOT* be held responsible nor l
iable for any damage or injury resulting from any use of this document or the in
formation in it. If you are unsure about your ability to perform this conversio
n, then STOP! and seek the advise of a professional.
Copyright information
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The information which is given herein has been gleaned from the Williams Joust i
nstruction manual and my personal experiences while doing this conversion. The
only information which has been taken is information on what each pin on each c
onnector does. No other information has been taken nor has any reproduction of
any schematics been done. All my own ASCII !
Distribution Information
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This document is (C) Copyright 1994, Graham Bisset. You are free to copy and/or
distribute this document as long as it remains INTACT with all copyright notice
s and my name attached. You may upload this document to any information resourc
e eg bulletin board, USENET news, FTP sites etc that you think appropriate, agai
n as long as it remains intact. If any of this information is to be entered int
o a publication, that is ok, so long as I am notified of this before the article
is printed and full credit is given.
Also, you may NOT change or add to this document without my EXPRESS permission.
However, I will look on any changes favourably. Personal (private) use is unco
nditional so long as the ENTIRE text is included.
Document information
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This document gives information on how I converted a Williams 'Joust' Game from
the Williams format to JAMMA standard so that the game could be played on my Ele
ctrocoin Goliath cabinet.
This conversion I would rate as : Easy. The hardest part is having the patience
to make up so many cables to go from the board to the JAMMA connector. You are
going to need approximately 40 pieces of cable to connect between the boards
and the JAMMA connector. Other items you'll find useful are a IC socket for a
14 pin IC, a single push button and a small switch. You'll also need a 74LS04 f
or the monitor conversion and a JAMMA connector and *plenty* of cable.
I suggest that you read and then re-read this document BEFORE you attempt the co
nversion.
Right lets get started. Joust consists of 4 boards, the main cpu board, the ROM
interboard containing all the game ROMS, the input interface board and the sound
board.
The first thing to do was to find an appropriate sized piece of wood to hold al
l the boards in such a way as to make the interconnections easy. Having acquire
d the wood I layed out the boards as below :
--------------------------------------------------
| ----------------------- ---------------- |
| | | | | |
| | CPU board |<->| Main ROM board | |
| | | ---------------- |
| | | --------------- |
| | = = = |<->|Input Interface| |
| | +++ = = = | --------------- |
| | +++ = = = | ---------------- |
| | +++ = = = | | | |
| ----------------------- | Sound board | |
| | | |
| ---------------- |
--------------------------------------------------
Key
---
Interface : Input Interface
= : RAM chips
+ : Batteries
<-> : Link between boards with a ribbon cable
This gave excellent access to all the boards connectors' and made everything rea
sonably neat and tidy (a must! :-))
Now we have the diagram again, this time I have given the location of each conne
ctor a number.
--------------------------------------------------
| --1------------2------- ------------3--- |
| | | | 4 |
| | CPU board | | Main ROM board 5 |
| | | ---------------- |
| | | --------- |
| | = = = | |Interface| |
| | +++ = = = | ----6---- |
| | +++ = = = | ---------------- |
| | +++ = = = | | 7 |
| ----------------------- | Sound board 8 |
| | 9 |
| ----------------10 |
--------------------------------------------------
Aha you say, you've forgotten about the other connector between 1 & 2, well actu
ally I haven't. I dont use it, in the manual it tells me its the 'Memory Protec
t Interlock', since I dont have the original cabinet, I figure this is not much
use to me. I'm waiting for someone to prove me wrong though :-)
One *very* important thing to remember. You MUST and I repeat MUST ground every
board together, its up to you how you do this, there are essentially two ways.
Take a wire from one of the screws on each board and hook it to the next neares
t board, after you've done all of them solder that wire to one of the grounds on
the JAMMA connector. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!!!
Ok, perhaps the easiest thing to start with is connecting number 5 to 7 since it
involves no external connections.
Connector 5 has 9 pins, pin 1 is the key pin (to stop you putting the connector
in the wrong way round) and pin 9 is not connected. So from top to bottom the c
onnectors looks like
this :
Connector 5 Connector 7
----------- -----------
o - Pin 1 (Key) o - Pin 9 (N/C)
o o
o o
o o
o o
o o
o o
o o
o - Pin 9 (N/C) o - Pin 1 (Key)
The pins are numbered this way as if you're looking down on top of them as shown
in the diagram above. So for wiring this up you start at pin 2 on connector 5 a
nd connect it to pin 2 on connector 7, pin 3 to pin 3 and so on. All fairly str
aightforward stuff.
Right lets move on to the power to the board. Every board with the exception of
the interface board, needs power. You will notice that on each connector there
is more than one connection for power input of the same voltage, the first thin
g I though is that you didn't need to wire up every one, as long as there was on
e connected it would be ok! WRONG! Each one *needs* to be connected. :-)
Right connector one needs +5v to pin 7, -5v to pin 9 and +12 to pin 5. The easi
est way to do this is take these connections direct from the JAMMA connector, s
o take the appropriate pins from the JAMMA side and wire to connector 1. Ground
is taken from pins 2 & 3 and pin 4 is a 'key' pin.
Connector 3, pin 1 is ground, pin 4 & 6 are +5v.
The only other connector which requires power is number 10. Pin 2 is +12v, pin
3 is +5v, pin 5 is ground, pin 8 is -12v. Now on most JAMMA cabinets there is a
distinct lack of -12v. So what I did was wire it to -5v. This doesn't create
too much of a problem as long as the volume is kept low, in practice you'll find
that you can have the volume at a good level without any problems.
Lets move on to the subject of monitors. Here is where there is a little bit of
work required. First off, the monitor outputs are taken from connector 2, star
ting from pin 1 we have :
Pin 1 - Red
Pin 2 - Green
Pin 3 - Blue
Pin 4 - Video Ground
Pin 5 - Horizontal Sync
Pin 6 - Vertical Sync
Pin 7 - Composite Sync
The existance of this Composite Sync on pin 7 is not documented in the 'Interboa
rd Wiring' of the manual but it does exist, I can assure you. So wire the corre
sponding pins above to the correct ones on the JAMMA connector. If you use pin
7 then you must feed this line through a hex invertor. You can get these as 74L
S04 chips. I'd also advise you buy a chip socket for it, rather than having to s
older direct on to the legs of the chip.
If you look at the chip from above it will look like this :

-_- What you need to do is this, wire pin 7 to ground

1 -| |- 14 pin 14 to +5v, pin 1 FROM connector 2 (pin 7) and
-| |- pin 2 now is the inverted sync line so take this
-| |- to the JAMMA connector (Sync pin 'P')
-| |-
-| |-
-| |- BTW, the -_- denotes the notch in the chip
7 -| |- 8 (I never was any good at ASCII drawing :-))
---
Now on to the input decoder, this is the smallest board of them all with 2, 10 p
in connectors. Assume that the side furthest from the cable feeding to the main
board is pin 1. So that gives us :
Pin 2 - Player 2 move left
Pin 3 - Player 2 move right
Pin 4 - Player 2 flap
All the rest in the first bank of 10 are not connected.
The second connector (pins 11-20) is :
Pin 11 - Player 1 move left
Pin 12 - Player 1 move right
Pin 13 - Player 1 flap
Pin 15 - 2 player start
Pin 16 - 1 player start
Pin 20 - Ground
Right lets push on to the sound board. Connector 9 is where its at, by now you
are nearing completion only a few things to do. Connector 9 is easy. Pin 1 is
furthest *away* from the dip switches and push button. Pins 1 and 4 are used he
re. Pin 1 should go to SPEAKER + and pin 4 to speaker - (MINUS) on the JAMMA co
nnector (10 and 'L' on JAMMA respectively).
The next thing is volume, well for a short term measure I simply put a 1 Meg Ohm
resistor over pins 1 and 2 of connector number 8, but you should really add a p
otentiometer. Unfortunately I cant give you a figure for this as the docs I hav
e dont give the information readily. :-(
Right, last but no means least is the switch and button that are used for the 'A
uto up/manual down' and 'Advance' respectively. For the switch take pin 1 (furt
hest from the LED) and any nearby ground to the pins of the switch.
For the advance button use pin 2 and another suitable ground. You should find
that that is all you need for this part. The other pins on that connector (num
ber 4) are :
Pin 3 - High score reset button
Pin 4 - Left Coin
Pin 5 - Centre coin
Pin 6 - Slam (???)
Pin 9 - 'Key'
You'll notice that I didn't mention about pin 3, this is because on my setup I d
idnt add this, partly due to the fact that I dont want to make it easy to reset
the scores. There, thats logical isn't it?? ;-)
I dont use the coin switches since I have a switch in line with the coin mechs o
n the cabinet, so all I need to do is push that. I have also set the game into
'FREE PLAY' mode. Sorry but I cant give you any information about setting up th
e coin parts.
Thats you ready to fire up the game and test it, if you get RAM errors then you
may want to have some spare RAM handy to swap it out with. But I STRONGLY advis
e you to check your power supply first. My board was EXTREMELY unhappy at havin
g more that +4.7v (wasn't it Gregg!) the game would run, the 'All systems go' me
ssage would appear and you could play a (short) game, but it would always crash.
The problem was very strange but once I turned down the power a bit, it worke
d fine.
If you dont get anything on your screen, make sure that you've wired up your 74L
S04 correctly. I believe these are static sensitive devices so be careful and e
xercise the correct precautions when handling them.
Well that about wraps it up, essentially this is an easy conversion, the hardest
part, like I say, is having the patience to strip all those wires and make the
connections. But if you're determined to do it, nothing will stop you!!
I hope this information has been of use to someone. I know its written in a ve
ry simplistic style but it was my intention to make it easy for a complete begin
ner to understand, I hope no-one you have not been offended by me writing in thi
s manner. If you have, then you have my apologises.
Ok well, if you want, let me know how you get on. I'd be interested in hearing
if you found the information useful or not. You can contact be on the address b
elow.
Cheers & Good Luck!
Graham Bisset
e-mail:graham@uki.sinet.slb.com