Sega Aero City Harness Extension

As much as I love the Aero City, one thing that is really annoying about them is the length of the JAMMA harness it comes with. It starts off with a 36 way fingerboard to the JAMMA edge for a total of 30cm. It’s not long at all. It doesn’t reach a CPS2 board if it’s mounted on the PCB holder.

This has been a long overdue project as I knew it would be time consuming and quite boring to do, but it definitely needed to be done. 

I know there’s a pinout on the manual found online, but I also wanted to verify it myself, so I spent a good hour or so with the multimeter mapping out the pins and where they went from the JAMMA edge to the Sega Fingerboard. 

The end result is this schematic:

Since I wanted to keep a Hirose JAMMA edge and not the cheaper ones, I ended up purchasing 2x “Sega VS City” harnesses from YAJ to “sacrifice”. At $40 AUD each, I was OK with this sacrifice since the cost of a JAMMA edge plus all the wires would be more than the cost of the VS City harness. I depinned the connectors (which I can re-use) and then started chopping.

After a good solid couple of hours of cutting, stripping, soldering, checking, re-checking and then a full continuity reference check, I ended up with a harness that’s essentially doubled in length giving me A LOT more leeway inside the cabinet.

Rinse and repeat for the second harness (because I’m a complete sucker for tedious jobs)

By the end of the day, I’ve now got two “OEM” style Sega Aero City harnesses, fortunately for me and the schematics, they all check out and I didn’t fry anything, the 12v wire WASN’T in the 5v section or vice versa 😀