Peale
06-13-2007, 07:46 PM
You have leaf switches.
You'll have to drill another couple holes for your third buttons.
You can safely use regular microswitch buttons in their place.
You can add a wire to the existing ground loop with no problems.
shawnbo42
06-14-2007, 09:41 AM
The hardest part of what you want to do is the placement of the third button. That is, making sure they are even on both player 1 and 2 . You don't want one button nicely spaced on player 1's panel, and player 2 is off in the breeze someplace. Once you've measured/placed where you want your button to be, drill the holes, and wire them up. As Peale said, what you have now is a leaf-switch type button. Many older cabs used them (think Pac-Man era), newer machines use cherry switch style buttons. Either way, they both work, it's really up to you which you prefer. Some folks enjoy playing games like Track&Field with leaf-switch buttons, some prefer Double Dragon with cherry switches. Your buttons should all have 2 wires to them, the button input (from the JAMMA harness, the wire you found labelled Button3), and a ground. When the input makes a contact to ground, the game registers a button press. The connectors you have there are quick disconects. I usually use them on cherry switch buttons rather than soldering, makes it MUCH easier to change a switch when they break (not too often that it happens, but when it does, do you REALLY want to break out the soldering iron?). You should be able to get quick disconnects at any local electronics supply store, possibly still Radio Shack (they don't carry what they used to). Anyways, hope that helps you out some.
shawnbo42
06-17-2007, 08:34 AM
Well, generally 18 or 20 AWG will do, anything smaller than that, it gets kinda tough (just try and strip and solder telephone wire sometime). On the other end of the spectrum, when you open up your machine, if you were showing off to company, it looks kinda strange with 18 awg all over the place, and then a handful of speaker wire or something else thrown in there. But, to more directly answer your question, a wire is a wire in this case. You're not sending any current through it, so really any gauge wire will work for this particular application.