Arcade Capture Setup

I recently discovered MermaidJS for drawing diagrams for work and found it to be really useful. I figured I’d use it to diagram how I can capture/record/stream from my arcade cabinets.

The SEGV echo.chan is a JAMMA extender that splits and the video and audio signals from an arcade board. Before I had this, I just spliced the video wires which led to a dim image and crappy quality since the video signal coming off an arcade board isn’t strong enough to drive two displays. The echo.chan has a video amp to maintain signal quality.

The OSSC is the Open Source Scan Converter which takes the 240p video signal and audio signal and outputs a 720p HDMI signal. The OSSC is a really fantastic piece of hardware!

The Raspberry Pi Input Display is my own creation that I’ve posted about before.

Hugo Shortcode

I created a little Hugo Shortcode called mermaid to easily embed these diagrams:

<div class="mermaid">
  {{.Inner}}
</div>

Diagram Source

Using that shortcode, here’s the source for the above diagram:

{{< mermaid >}}
graph TD;
  J([Arcade Board])
  Sp([Splice])
  S([SEGV echo.chan Splitter])
  C([Capture Card])
  Cab([Arcade Cabinet])
  Input([Joystick/Buttons])
  Pi([Raspberry Pi Input Display])
  OSSC([OSSC Scaler])

  J-- Audio+Video Outputs -->S;
  S-- Audio+Video -->OSSC;
  OSSC-- HDMI -->C;
  S-- Audio+Video -->Cab;
  Input-- Inputs -->Sp; 
  Sp-- Inputs -->Pi;
  Sp-- Inputs -->J;
{{< /mermaid >}}