OPEN4PREORDERS! - Announcing D-MON hardware tool for use with soft15khz!
Over the past year or so, it's been an ongoing project of mine to create a hardware system to seamlessly integrate an arcade cabinet and a PC with the use of soft15khz. The system has finally reached a point with V3.01 of the main control board where it's completely bug free and plug and play. I'm currently looking to see if people are actually interested in these.
The system consists of several smaller PCBs:
D-MON (MONitor Delay circuitry):
This main board plugs into your PC's powersupply and the VGA output of your computer. This board serves multiple functions.
-It has an on-board RGB amplifier to convert the 0.75VPP VGA signal to (approx) 5VPP that arcade monitors expect.
-The H-sync and V-sync signals of VGA cards are gated together properly through TTL logic to get a proper composite sync signal that arcade monitors expect. It also solves the problem of some VGA cards outputting negative sync on one, and positive on the other sync line.
-An EDID dongle is optionally integrated for use with VGA cards that require it.
-Safety circuit for monitor frequency. If the input signal's horizontal frequency goes above 15khz, the board blanks all RGB and sync output to protect the monitor from possible damage due to a too high horizontal frequency. (Can be disabled by dip-switch)
-A delay circuitry is also integrated with a timer chip. The board connects to a parallel port. When a PC with XP boots, it will set all parallel port I/Os high. As the machine is turned on, the board will keep the monitor blanked (no RGB or SYNC signals, so the screen remains blank) until the I/Os go high, when it will start a (length adjustable) countdown, upon the completion of which, the monitor gets a signal and picture appears. This allows you to have a completely blank screen until the exact moment your front end's intro video starts, or right intzo your front end, depending on your adjustment. (Can be disabled by dip-switch, timer range adjustable by jumper, the safety circuit can of course shut down the monitor if the signal goes out of range)
-The board can be connected to your video card with a standard VGA-VGA monitor cable.
-All other connections are made with screw terminals for ease of installation.
-Powered from PC powersupply (needs both +5 and +12 volt connections)
-LEDs for monitoring the presence of the +5V and +12V power rails, and the status of the protection/delay circuitry.
D-SWITCH:
This small relay board connects to the D-MON mainboard at it's powersupply connections, and it's purpose is to switch mains power to everything in the cabinet.
Wire your PC's power button to the cabinet's main switch (of course replacing it with a button), route the mains power to the monitor and marquee neon or whatever else you want,and as soon as the PC is powered up, the relay on this board will turn power on to all peripherals! One button powerup!
-All screw terminals
-One mains input terminal, three output terminals. One for the monitor, one for the neons, and one spare for anything else you may want to power, like an audio amp, etc.
(If your monitor uses an isolation transformer, of course you need to wire the transformer here, not the monitor directly.)
D-JOY:
As the name suggests, these are Atmel microcontroller based USB joystick controllers, with 4 digital axes and 13 button inputs each. Two will serve an entire cabinet, coin door wiring included. Can connect to existing wiring, as it works on the same principle as arcade boards, grounding any output will activate the associated axis or pushbutton. Comes with 1.5m soldered-in USB cable, button connections are screw terminals.
D-AMP Jr.:
This is a low powered, 2.1 audio amplifier with 2x 10W RMS and 1x 18W RMS for 4 ohm speakers, that also plugs into the PC powersupply. While not particularily noisy, for palces where the machine will be in a quiet place, a separate powersupply is recommended to avoid possible noise from PC activity.
I'd like to know if anyone would be interested in these. The prices would be approximately the following: D-MON /w D-SWITCH - 60 EUR, D-JOY 17EUR each, D-AMP 20 EUR each.
Of course these are subject to change based on how many I have manufactured.
Cheers!
Liste der Anhänge anzeigen (Anzahl: 2)
Okay, so I'm pretty much done with the installation of a complete kit into one of my cabinets. I will be uploading a short demo video to youtube in a few hours, I jsut need to cobble together a working front-end (I swear picking games out and creating a well working front-end environment is more hassle then the hardware part). Meanwhile, here are some pics.
Anhang 13092
Here you can see my very first prototype set. Top is the 2.1 amplifier, to the right of it is the relay board, the bottom left is the v2.5 D-MON (latest version in the next pic), and bottom right are two USB joy controllers.
Before going in-depth, the system seen above will be intended for completely customized cabinets, aimed at folks who build completely unique cabinets (ie: custom lighting, subwoofer built into cabinet bottom, etc. where you will definitely need your own wiring). For those interested, here's a gallery of mine of a recent custom conversion of a WWF cabinet with this system: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php...5768537&type=1
There will be an alternate version, very similar to a J-pac, with a jamma-edge, for those who want to keep their existing wiring intact, and get the conversion out of the way as easily as possible.
For the time being, the 2.1 amplifier will be abandoned, as there's some form of feedback between the two amp chips I'm using, making them noisy over time. In it's place a simple stereo amp will be available, which will more then suffice for most factory cabs.
The above boards will be modified only slightly, to accomodate standard connectors for USB, audio, etc, to eliminate the need for custom cables, and allow the use of standard pre-made cables.
Anhang 13093
The above pic is mostly for the curious, showing the development of the system.
The one to the left was the second iteration of the first version, which did not yet have frequency monitoring, it merely relied on the parallel port, had no RGB amplifier, but instead a simple stereo amp was integrated right onto the board, and all switching was solved with relays.
The center one was the first step towards the current final version, it had basically the same circuitry, except a lot of adjustments were pretty much hard-wired, and to change settings you'd need to change components.
The rightmost is the current version, which should be the final iteration, merely needing a few components moved around as it turned out rather cramped around the dip switches. The empty DIP8 space next to the VGA connector is for the EEprom containing EDID data for those who need it.