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 Post subject: Original LED Scoreboard
PostPosted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 5:17 am 
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I am doing a refit for an original DL cabinet that no longer has the player & disc, I'm installing a PC w/Daphne into it and wiring into the existing connectors to leave everything intact.


I am wondering if anyone has had any success with creating an interface board to plug the ribbon cable from the LED scoreboard into to allow Daphne to display lives/score directly to an original LED display?


Thanks,
Curt

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PostPosted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 7:40 am 
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People have got original scoreboards to work with a PC, and for some time now.

http://www.daphne-emu.com/wiki/index.ph ... Scoreboard

While the information provided in the Wiki is helpful, I'd much rather prefer to buy one already fabricated. Anyone up for the challenge?


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PostPosted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 8:22 pm 
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OtherworldSteve wrote:
People have got original scoreboards to work with a PC, and for some time now.

http://www.daphne-emu.com/wiki/index.ph ... Scoreboard

While the information provided in the Wiki is helpful, I'd much rather prefer to buy one already fabricated. Anyone up for the challenge?


Yep. That's the wiriing scheme I followed for my scoreboard. I have it hooked up to my Linux laptop right now (using the USB port for power - seems OK so far, but I haven't measured the current draw yet).

Do you still have the Dragon's Lair boards in the cabinet? The 16-pin scoreboard cable?

-ethan


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PostPosted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 9:56 pm 
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As of now I have nothing to connect to the scoreboard. I know I need a 16-pin connector for the scoreboard end, as well as a 25-pin connector for the parallel port on my Windows PC. I may pick up a 16-pin from a guy on the Dragon's Lair Project site, but that will only get me so far.

Ethan, if you would like to construct a cable for me or could provide further assistance with my construction, please message me with your email address.

Thanks in advance!


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PostPosted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 11:18 pm 
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OtherworldSteve wrote:
Ethan, if you would like to construct a cable for me or could provide further assistance with my construction, please message me with your email address.


Sorry, Steve. PM is disabled here. Write me at erd@iname.com (it already gets _lots_ of SPAM) and I'll shoot you a better address to use.

-ethan


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PostPosted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 6:17 am 
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Email sent. Thanks in advance!


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 8:51 pm 
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Thanks for the tip on where to go, I built out an interface box following the directions. Everything was very straight forward. Here are some photo's:

I didn't want to alter or damage the original ribbon cable in case the owner (this is not my DL cabinet - I'm just doing this as a favor for a friend) ever wanted to install a real Laserdisc and hook everything back up to the original boards.

http://www.atarimuseum.com/Daphne/100_3324.JPG

So I took a Radio Shack perf board and hobbyist box, soldered a header onto it and then drilled some holes and tie strapped the parallel cable to the board.


http://www.atarimuseum.com/Daphne/100_3326.JPG

I also ran a pair of 22guage wires along with the parallel cable to feed ground and +5vdc to the board from a female drive power connector that I ran into the PC box to tap for power.

I installed Direct I/O as I'm running XP, I loaded up Daphne with the score display set to LPT1 and as Daphne loaded Dragon's Lair I saw the display reset and blank out, then came up with the standard display info, 2 credits, etc. and the scoring was working during gameplay, it flashes to show the change from Player 1 to Player 2 after a death, all looks to be working well.


http://www.atarimuseum.com/Daphne/100_3323.JPG


Thanks again!

Curt

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 9:46 pm 
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Cool! It's always nice to hear success stories!


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 8:08 am 
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atarimuseum wrote:
Thanks for the tip on where to go, I built out an interface box following the directions. Everything was very straight forward....


Nicely done, Curt. Over the weekend, I took the pinout from the wiki and whipped up a simple schematic and PCB layout in EagleCAD. Once I get some fresh pictures of my scoreboard, I'll probably put them up for public download on my scoreboard webpage. The old pictures need to be updated - they were taken with my first digital camera, an Apple QuickTake 150 - crufty, but it had fallen from $800 to $30 by the time I bought it.

Since I happen to have a box of DB25M-to-IDC26 cables (like the ones that used to come with pre-ATX motherboard and ISA I/O cards for the parallel port, but male, not female), I put a 2x13 header on the PCB for the PC-side of things. One could easily leave a footprint for a DB25M on the edge of the board, but that would make the board larger.

Congrats again on getting things working.

-ethan


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 3:58 pm 
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Sweet !!! Sounds great, that'll make a lot of people happy for sure - stuff like this is easy for us solder jockey's but a nice simple PCB that people could use would go a long way to helping others with a nice little prefabbed board :-)

Did you make it so it could fit inside of a standard hobbyist box?



Curt

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PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 4:42 pm 
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atarimuseum wrote:
Sweet !!! Sounds great, that'll make a lot of people happy for sure - stuff like this is easy for us solder jockey's but a nice simple PCB that people could use would go a long way to helping others with a nice little prefabbed board :-)

Did you make it so it could fit inside of a standard hobbyist box?


The board is just a small, square board with mounting holes, not really designed for any particular enclosure. The idea was to make it as small as possible to permit maximum panellization to keep manufacturing cost down. Did you have a suggestion as to what would be a useful size for an enclosure? My recollection is that while one could decide to make something to fit a "Pactec box number mumble", there isn't a real enclosure size standard across vendors. I don't mind trying to make something work, but nothing comes to mind as a universal mounting solution.

-ethan


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 4:56 pm 
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It might be best just to give it mount holes for a #8 screw so that someone can use 2 3/4" #8 wood screws and mount it to the side wall of the inside of the cabinet out of the way and then run the parallel cable down along the older power lines that should still be feeding power to things like the backlighting and such.

BTW - has anyone found a good AMP board to wire the original speakers into?

I would again like to maintain the original parts as much as possible so simply cutting into the speaker lines and installing a plug onto them and then plugging an Amp board to the speakers and feeding the headphone line down to the PC would be the best solution, then in the future the AMP board coule be removed and the speaker lines could be plugged back into themselves to restore the original connections.


Curt

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 5:03 pm 
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atarimuseum wrote:
It might be best just to give it mount holes for a #8 screw so that someone can use 2 3/4" #8 wood screws and mount it to the side wall of the inside of the cabinet out of the way and then run the parallel cable down along the older power lines that should still be feeding power to things like the backlighting and such.


The mounting-a-bare-board-to-the-inside-of-the-cabinet motif was more of what I had in mind than a boxed enclosure. At the moment, though, I think the holes I was able to find in the EagleCAD menus are too small for a #8 screw. I tend to go for #6 screws on stuff myself anyway.

I entirely agree that any sort of mod like this should be reversible to allow the user (or a later user) to remove it and restore the cabinet to its original glory. Unfortunately, I don't have a DL cabinet at the moment, so I can't test for cable lengths, etc.

-ethan


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2007 2:42 am 
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I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Daphne community, and Ethan in particular, for assisting me in completing my Dragon's Lair cabinet. Everything is now functioning 100% and I couldn't be happier. Thanks to everyone for allowing me to relive a cherished memory from my childhood!


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:40 pm 
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Glad you are enjoying it, OtherworldSteve! :)


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