Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

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chubsta
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Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by chubsta »

As the title says - is this possible?

I want to stick a mame board in a Jamma cab but dont like the huge PC power supply getting in the way! I want a nice all in one solution so has anyone done this?

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Re: Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by cools »

Depends on the PSU and CPU/motherboard.

Was looking at this with a Naomi JVS PSU - the problem is there's very little power available on certain feeds, so it won't work for my purposes with a P4. Might work with an Atom or similar non-gutsy CPU.

You'll need to look at the ratings on the PSU and compare them to what the system you want to put in there needs.

It's achievable but it's a balancing act.
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Re: Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by chubsta »

looks like im out of luck with my C2D 3ghz then :shock:
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Re: Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by cools »

Really depends on the PSU. But no, I expect you'll find they're not going to push the kind of power you'll need for that :)
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Re: Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by Mayhem »

If you really really don't want to add an additional PSU, then the best solution is probably to replace the existing JAMMA PSU with a single JVS+ATX PSU. I have two which I've been meaning to put up for sale, both from Sega for powering Lindbergh hardware, one in Naomi Uni form factor and the other in Versus City form factor (frickin' huge!).
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Re: Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by invzim »

In interesting challenge that is solvable :)

First thing you should do is make a power budget!

A core2duo in itself doesn't pull enormous amounts, this link http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/print/ ... fdale.html rates a core2duo E8500 to 33.4w @100% load - that is theoretically 6.8A if taken from the 5V rail.

Compare that to a farily standard JAMMA PSU:
http://www.starcab.net/product_info.php ... 0b2af8fbef

If you plan on using a decent 3D Graphics card, the power budget will almost certainly fail - but with a bit of care, powering just a motherboard should work. You can use a PICO-PSU to get 3.3v, I did this on a VIA ITX board - this is a very low power CPU:
http://kirurg.org/emame/hardware/

On another board, a 1.7ghz pentium M, I got away with using JUST the 12v off my cabs PSU:
http://kirurg.org/emame/hardware2/ - a rather beefy midway PSU, so wouldn't count on it working in a 1980's era pacman cab - btw this board is running happily these days in a Naomi case, powered by the standard Naomi Universal sun PSU.
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Re: Power a PC mobo from a jamma psu?

Post by Xenepp »

Mini ITX PSUs are a nice idea, someone actually runs one of my MAME setups on a 150w one and says he has no problems. Since the JAMMA 12v output isn't that stable it doesn't work for these but an external power brick is a lot tidier than a full blown ATX PSU.

I did think about building a power supply to power ATX from JAMMA but realized for the system to be stable I'd need to incorporate some logic to get it to communicate with the PC properly. There's more to a PC PSU than just power conversion sadly.

I think the best all round solution is just to mount an ATX PSU in your cab with an ATX power extension lead. You can then just disconnect it when you want to use JAMMA. To be fair, JVS has far more to worry about leads wise in comparison. A Type X system is even a desktop PC!

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