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Pandora's Box DX buttons not working

mmmmaerk

mmmmaerk

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I put a Pandora's Box DX in my Versus City but none of the buttons worked, just the stick on the P1 side. My friend said I'd need a CHAMMA to JAMMA adapter but I just hooked that up and still none of my buttons work.

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Thanks for your help.
 
I mean could something be wrong from my buttons to the JAMMA harness. I found a JAMMA pin out diagram but I'm having a hard time making sense of the wires in my cab. I don't have a kick harness because I only have 4 buttons on each panel.
 
mmmmaerk said:
I mean could something be wrong from my buttons to the JAMMA harness. I found a JAMMA pin out diagram but I'm having a hard time making sense of the wires in my cab. I don't have a kick harness because I only have 4 buttons on each panel.
Click to expand...
Follow your harness pinout carefully to each button. Then follow your ground pin to the cp and make sure each button has its ground connected.

A quick test would be use a different PCB and test the buttons..
 
Do you have any other games to rule out that it's not a problem with the Pandora's Box?

I'm surprised the stick works but nothing else does. In my experience it's been all or nothing with chamma connected to jamma.
 
I don't have anything else to test unfortunately. This Pandora's box isn't even mine, I'm borrowing it from a friend.

How do I know which wire is ground? Is it the white one on each button?
 
I tried switching out start and button 1 with Hori buttons I had laying around. They work and I was able to launch a game. i guess I should've tried this first.

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Button 2 was working but it seemed to not work consistently so I swapped that one too. I was hoping the buttons were the only problem so I replaced button 3 but that one still doesn't work. The wire colors for 3 and 4 don't match.

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I don't want to start ripping stuff apart before I fully know what I'm looking at. Could different colored wires be used for one button connection?
 
I think your adapter may be routing buttons 4-6 to the extra connector it has and not passing it through to the Jamma harness.

As for the wiring, there's no guarantee that the color will be consistent all the way from the Jamma harness to the button. I'm not personally familiar with a VS City, but all Sega cabinets follow the same basic wiring for the control panel. Button 4 should be pin 9 when looking into the female connector under the control panel.

Blast_cp_cab_pinout.jpg


If you don't have one I recommend getting a multi meter. Something you can use to do continuity testing with a beep. I got a cheap Hyper Tech branded one at Walmart. The super cheap ones don't always have a beeper.
 
$30+$13+$10? $53 for the same outcome as a JNX Atlas w/CPS2 for $25 shipped? Crazy stuff.
 
XianXi said:
Doesn't your cab need the 8pin kick cable?
Click to expand...
Probably for button 4-6 assuming the adapter doesn't pass through 4 to the jamma harness.

That doesn't really account for why he's having a problem with button 3 though.
 
I just ordered kick harnesses from Lemony Vengeance and I hope to get 6 button panels soon. Maybe that will make this easier.
 
notsonic said:
Probably for button 4-6 assuming the adapter doesn't pass through 4 to the jamma harness.

That doesn't really account for why he's having a problem with button 3 though.
Click to expand...
Take a pink eraser and rub it on the jamma edge of the Pandora. Ive seen it multiple times that the factory coating sometimes doesn't make a good connection.
 
I tried using the Pandora without the adapter since I replaced the broken buttons. All 4 buttons work in Street Fighter games, with the top 2 buttons correctly set to LP and MP and the bottom two being LK and MK. Not very useful without a kick harness, but whatever. In 4 button games like Breakers Revenge and Tekken, button 4 still doesn't work.

No buttons work on the player 2 side at all. I used a multimeter and connected a few of the buttons to their pin on the JAMMA harness and got nothing.
 
mmmmaerk said:
No buttons work on the player 2 side at all. I used a multimeter and connected a few of the buttons to their pin on the JAMMA harness and got nothing.
Click to expand...
Sounds like your 2P controls are not connected. Time to trace them down and see where the connector isn't connected.
 
I'm getting closer. I found the Pandora's settings menu. P1 Buttons A B C and D all work but they're mixed up. I guess it doesn't matter too much because I can adjust the buttons per game.

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I noticed something weird when using the multimeter. P1 button 1 is on pin 22 and button 2 is on pin 23, like normal. Pin 24 is not a button. I don't know what that orange wire is connected to. Pin 25 has button 3 and pin 26 has button 4. According to the JAMMA pinout I printed, 26 is unused.

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I'd like to get my wiring normal so this isn't a headache when dealing with a real arcade PCB, but I'm probably getting ahead of myself. I'll worry about that when my new panels and kick harnesses get here.

I crawled inside looking for what might be wrong with the P2 controls. I don't really know what I'm looking at.
 
After further investigation with the multimeter, I found where the connection gets messed up.

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The connection from the buttons to the connector inside the panel is fine. The connection on the other side of that going to this part of cab is no good:

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Sorry for describing all this in such a vague way, I don't know what these specific connectors/places on the cab are called. What do you think? Am I on the right track?
 
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