Crazy Taxi Multi Harness w/ Button Panels

[GamingDoyle]

Introduction
So, lets say you are one of the MANY owners of a Crazy Taxi Naomi Universal upright cabinet and you're thinking to yourself "Crazy Taxi is great, but I wish I could play other JVS driving games too without missing out on anything and I don't want to cut any original wiring or re-pin anything". Oh and you happen to have a Naomi with netboot or own a bunch of games somehow. I know, I know the amount of people this applies to is overwhelming, how will I ever clear up my inbox?

Anyway this is a little project I wrapped up recently to do that and I thought I'd share some links and details in case anyone else wanted to do the same. In case you don't care about the sausage making but like watching short videos of things here you go:

So yeah, I set out with the following goals:

• Ability to access easily with thumb screws to switch quickly (at the speed of screwing anyway)
• Ability to switch easily with just a couple AMP connectors
• Ability use missing buttons not on the Crazy Taxi control panel
• Have the buttons light up according to the game logic
• Have the panels blend in relatively well

So to meet the above I needed to make some wiring harness adapters, a 3D printed swappable panel for auxiliary buttons, a master harness to get the output lamp signals from the Sega IO to the auxiliary panel and button presses to the 1p/2p panel connectors via the harness adapters. Here's all the bits piled together:

So it amounts to 3 harnesses and two panels that combine to cover the Naomi games and OutrunSP on Chihiro. It would be easy to expand this to Triforce but I don't own a Triforce so you know if you've got an extra Triforce type 3 lying around let me know. eyebrows eyebrows. Anyway the flow looks like:

Unscrew these	Open this	Stick one of these in	grab one of these guys	Goes here	yay

 

[GamingDoyle]

Making Stuff Part 1 - Wiring
So you're in luck if you have one of these, the Sega IO board is already fully populated such that the Player1, Player2 and Analog connectors inside the panel have everything it needs for CT and everything else. The only parts of the Sega IO that aren't pinned are mostly the output lamps for buttons that are never used. But now we will be using them so we need to get with making a master harness that will run from Sega IO board to the little cutout we are using for the auxiliary button panel, and through to the main control panel that we can open with thumb screws to access the Player1/Player2. By making the auxiliary panel use a 12 position AMP connector and split off to the Sega IO and the front control panel compartment to another 8 position AMP connector you can swap button panels and swap control harnesses without needing to take the face off.

The process of figuring out what mapped to what and confirming the output lamp switches was to leverage a sheet Chunksin had made and to confirm/update it from the CT perspective just using a regular control panel and some VERY fancy paper clips jammed into the 60pin jst connector of the sega IO

For the harnesses themselves, I'm just using 12 position AMP connectors for the Player1 & Player2 connections in the panel and a female connector to accept the existing Crazy Taxi connector which normally plugs into P1. Finally for harnesses with auxiliary buttons, those are connecting to the master harness via an 8 position connector

12 position AMP (1P)
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/176278-1/2328020
12 position AMP (2P)
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/176278-9/5124073

pins
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/175151-2/1152994
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/175149-2/1149437

8 position connectors
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/176286-1/2055440
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/176275-1/2055442

12 pin female (accepts existing CT connector)
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/te-connectivity-amp-connectors/176289-1/2328041


60pin JST RA connector pins:
https://gam-gec.com/product/ra-sc1290/


The details of how each harnesses is mapped to the existing P1 & P2 connectors can be found in this google sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...Bks6oRMujqdP3EsHK9HqRcr_8/edit?usp=drive_link


More detailed pics of each harness in case you like pictures and hate Excel

harness1 (CT acceptor side)	harness1 (adapter to panel side)	harness2 (CT acceptor side)	harness2 (adapter to panel side)	harness3 (CT acceptor side)	harness3 (adapter to panel side)

Game to Harness Mapping
Game	Harness	Panel	Comment
Jambo Safari	Harness 1	N/A	No extra buttons
Initial D 1/2/3	Harness 2	A	View change
King of Route 66	Harness 2	B	View/Cruise/Horn/Wipers/Mic
18 Wheeler	Harness 2	B	View/Cruise/Horn
Outrun2/Outrun2SP	Harness 2	A	View change
Club Kart	Harness 2	A	View change
Faster than speed	Harness 3	A	Boost
Maximum speed	Harness 3	N/A	No extra buttons

For the lamp output side of the master harness, you need the linked JST pins above

60pin JST RA connector pins:
https://gam-gec.com/product/ra-sc1290/

 

[GamingDoyle]

Making Stuff Part II - More Wiring
Ran out of images I could attach on the last one, so here's a closeup of the end of the master harness going into the 60pin RA JST connector. They just push right in, might need a little nudge with a smalls screwdriver. You could use different colored wiring to distinguish them, I used what I had available and threw some heat shrink tube labels on them to not lose track. Thanks Epson Label Printer.

Button Panels
For the auxiliary button panels, I used 12V light up buttons I bought from Amazon. These were mainly used because we have 12V easily accessible off the Sega IO and because they fit the space available above the large metal mounting post that the panel sits atop of. Also they were inexpensive.

momentary buttons:
https://a.co/d/fcOfbOb

latching buttons:
https://a.co/d/aMcPKI6

spade terminals with insulators:
https://a.co/d/bE4pnuC

So its important to use insulated terminals here. Why? Because you've got 12V you're sliding past a large chunk of metal so you don't want to short the IO boards 12V against the cabinet frame.

Why the latching buttons you ask? Well the blue button on the 18 wheeler/KOR66 panel is a "cruise control" button I added which latches. This keeps it in high gear because otherwise you have to hold the shifter up on those games and that's annoying. This is due to a design difference in the physical shifter used for Crazy Taxi and those games. See the google sheet for details on how this is wired.
Microphone
The game King Of Route 66 is responsible for most of the buttons on the shared panel between it and 18 Wheeler as well as a microphone jack. In the game you can press a button on the CB to talk to other players on the real cabs, or to request a Boost by saying "Boost" as well as responding to in-game characters. The CB radio in general is unfortunately an expensive endeavor if you want to add support for it because there are a couple things required that come from everyone's favorite gouge eBay. First the cheap stuff:
CB style walkie
https://a.co/d/aWnfR85

Panel mount microphone jack
https://a.co/d/euRwCMf

JST PH connectors (I happened to have these, not strictly required)
https://a.co/d/0SbaHNl

3.5mm mic jack (mono)
https://a.co/d/iqx6TNm

12ft mono audio cable
https://a.co/d/iuH3Os5

To get this wired it isn't too bad, you just need to wire up the mic jack to a mono audio cable through the panel, and one of the button signals on the master harness so it can trigger a button press on the right IO. (see the google sheet for details on button for the mic)

You don't have to do it like this, I just made mine with a little JST PH connector and a separate detachable 3.5mm jack to make it easy to take things apart if there is some issue in the future (and the detachable 3.5mm jack so the panel can be pulled out but the long run of mono microphone audio cable can be left in place. (photo 2 above you can see its strapped to the mount toward the bottom)

Now, getting that long 12ft long mono microphone cable run alongside the frame of the cab through the existing cable management is a bit of a trick. I had some flex steel tape for already that I'd used for wire pulls in the past and I absolutely had to use it here

flex steel snake thing	lower left bottom in deep darkness lies a naomi wire slot going up toward the panel	Pops out by the monitor	At this point you've won

All right and since I buried the lead thoroughly at this point, here is the pricey part. The microphone wire gets down to the Naomi and then what? Well two things:

1. It plugs into a Dreamcast Microphone adapter like you would use with Seaman. Yup that one.
2. The Dreamcast microphone plugs into a little adapter PCB 839-1132 which was only used in a couple games. So yeah, its hard to find and right now the only one out there to buy is $99 from a guy on eBay. Its basically a controller-less Maple adapter so maybe someone clever could adapt one of those maple bus pi pico type projects to replicate it?

 

[GamingDoyle]

Making Stuff Part III: 3D Printed Aux Button Panels
This part was completely new to me, I had never designed a 3D Printed thing before, I don't own a 3D printer and I hadn't used any of the 3D modeling software people use for these tasks. So that made it pretty fun to work on. Anyway here's what I did:
1. Bought some cheap calipers off Amazon:
https://a.co/d/2xh7aqw

2. Got a free personal copy of AutoDesk Fusion360:
https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/personal

3. Used the calipers and a protractor and did my best to recreate the panel in 3D using the software

4. Printed 1:1 printouts of the 3D modeled object so I could line it up and compare it with the real deal

5. Sent it off to print using Craftcloud:
https://craftcloud3d.com/

6. Test fit the singleton print and ordered the rest

Fancy paper prototypes

Test fit of the real deal

Overall this process was very smooth and had good results. For the 3D prints I went with nylon because I read it was a tougher material than pla and because I knew I wanted to try dyeing it rather than painting.
Anyway, here are the STL files to modify or print:

one-button
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-wbJloeL4h18AkylQJkMZ-X8AySOxRGP/view?usp=sharing

four-button
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_QigAZ4MFK92yK2R31fVEbNxaQCe7ubA/view?usp=sharing

They could be combined but just to keep it simple I have the as separate files here.

 

[GamingDoyle]

Making Stuff Part IV: WELCOME TO DYE

This part was again way outside my wheelhouse and definitely more into the realm of arts and crafts than I'm used to. It took me a couple rounds of trying and sacrificing a few pieces before I got it to look how I wanted. First off, the 3D print material is Nylon as I mentioned above. That means you can dye it with nylon dye just like fabrics or backpacks or shoes or whatever that are nylon or nylon adjacent synthetic based. To do that you can use a line of products specifically for nylon dyeing from a company called RIT

In the case of the Crazy Taxi panels, I tried two different types of dye, RIT synthetic daffodil yellow, and sunshine orange. The first attempt was not good. The method I tried this first time was microwaving the water to about 200F and then submerging the items to be dyed.

The top here is sunshine orange, I tried it on pieces of another print and different ratios always yielded a deep orange. The bottom one is daffodil yellow but the camera makes it look better than it is here, its actually more like peach or apricot in real life

So with that failure out of the way, I did some googling and youtubing and found people recommending adding soap, adding vinegar etc. Tried a couple experiments with my cut ups with that but these also failed. Finally I decided to try the recommendations of boiling it continuously. So its not at a full boil but still at around 200F but kept pegged at that. This was a much better result!!

So at 200F for 5minutes with about 6 cups of water to 3 tablespoons of the RIT daffodil yellow synthetic dye you get a yellow that matches the stock blank panel pretty well:

So I let it boil another 1-2 minutes to get a color more like the dark two on the top of the last photo since my Crazy Taxi shroud is a darker color than the stock panel. Overall its not 100% perfect but I'm very happy with the result! I think with more accessibility to a 3D printer and more practice with the dye you could get a pretty exact color match but it was definitely at a good enough level for me at this point.


Conclusion
If you read all that I'm impressed.! It was a fun project, and maybe I'll extend it a little further with Triforce at some point but its definitely more fun to be able to use all the buttons in King Of Route 66 than not IMO. I'm sure someone more skilled with 3D printing could make a much better panel as well so there's more that could be done if someone wanted to go further there. You could also separate the panels more (e.g. 18 wheeler doesn't have a wiper button so that's useless to it) but I didn't want to go too crazy with a bunch of panels to swap. I think MKGP has two buttons so maybe that would warrant a panel. Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

 

[Kidkaos]

Dang dude very friggin' cool! Any chance you'd offer a kit for sale? I have a white Jambo I'd love to do. Triforce would be cool for MKGP but I have that on the TTx3 multi so I wonder if there's a steering wheel option for that

 

[GamingDoyle]

Dang dude very friggin' cool! Any chance you'd offer a kit for sale? I have a white Jambo I'd love to do. Triforce would be cool for MKGP but I have that on the TTx3 multi so I wonder if there's a steering wheel option for that

Nah, sorry, it was fun to do but I’m not looking to sell things. Now the fun part of figuring stuff out is done making more would be boring . Keep in mind jambo is pinned opposite for the shifter if you try to use this as a guide so you’d have to always swap those when looking at the mapping doc