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I just received my Raspberry Jamma adapter, setup the Arpicade SD card and love it!  Still some tinkering with roms and artwork, but works wonderfully in my Astro City for tate shmups.  Thanks for all the great work on this!

My question is since I am powering the Pi 5 through the GPIO / Jamma, how do I make the Pi 5 auto boot when I turn on the cab?  Right now I have to hit the power button on the Pi which isn't very "arcade". 

Thanks!

Check your 5v, Pi5s like a little over 5.1v or so (don't go over 5.25) at the JAMMA edge and if it's low can misbehave.  The system should just start up when your cab powers up without you pressing a button. 

If you don't have a multimeter or other way to accurately measure the 5v it's safest to not touch it.  Arcade power supplies usually have a 5v adjustment on them as different boards have different current draw and voltage losses etc.  It's a good idea to measure and adjust the 5v at the JAMMA edge whenever changing JAMMA boards out, although in practice if it works most people don't check that often...  If you don't have a multimeter I'd recommend picking one up, they're very handy in this hobby.

Thank you very much for the reply!  I definitely have a slew of multimeters, did 7 years working as a car audio tech in a past life.

I measured it at the jamma edge and took it all the way to 5.25v steady.  Still, when I power down the machine and power it back up, the Pi 5 sits there with the LED red.  As soon as I touch the power button, it comes to life right away.  Took the voltage back to 5.18v and left it there as it seems to be nicely in the range you listed.  The power supply is strong and recapped and the wiring harness is in amazing shape.  All the connectors are seated fully and no damaged cables or pins.

I read elsewhere that when using the SD card with the GPIO power, the Pi 5 won't auto power on like the older models?  Just with the USB power adapter it auto starts. Not saying you are wrong, just that it won't power on for me just by it receiving power from the jamma edge.  Any other ideas what I am doing wrong or missing?  I know it is a relatively minor thing to push a button, but just seems like I must be overlooking something.

No idea where you read that but unless it's a new model I'm unaware of it should definately power up with the machine, no button press.

I had an email last night about this behaviour, if that was you too it's the only case I've heard of this happening (as far as I can remember).  If that wasn't you that would be 2 people in 24 hours and could possibly indicate there's been a Pi5 hardware revision I don't have... if there is a new model maybe there's a quirk I'm unaware of (or possibly a firmware change or similar).

Is there plenty of 5v and gnd wires in your JAMMA harness?  If it's one of the newer harness' they often have inadequate power wiring, just one very thin aluminium 5v wire (with thick insulation).  If that is the case adding more 5v and GND wires to the harness may help, but I'm not sure why it's not starting up with power on at the moment to be sure...

Definitely wasn't me who emailed you, just got mine setup today.

I had just searched for the condition of Pi 5 won't auto power on and read a few discussions like this:  https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2194234&hilit=rise+time#p2194167

I wasn't sure about it and wanted to check here to see if it was expected, which doesn't seem to be the case.

My Jamma harness is an original Sega piece, double 5v and ground.   Wire condition and the connector looks great but I will check it over in more detail tomorrow.  Voltage doesn't fluctuate even running in any meaningful way.

Maybe my Pi is a dud, I will have to double check everything after some sleep with a fresh set of eyes. 

Thank you again for the suggestions!

You original SEGA harness is probably more than adequate, I've never seen a bad SEGA JAMMA harness.  It's the cheapo modern ones that are an issue.

Please try adding this line:

usb_max_current_enable=1

to config.txt

I belive it should have your Pi5 starting up without having to press the button.  I can't test it as my Pi5s already do (I did test that nothing went wrong with it in there), please report back if it works out.  I'm going to email the other guy the same advice and hopefully this is all that is needed.

I added that line to the config.txt in the boot folder.  Double checked that it was there afterwards.  Still not wanting to cooperate for me. 

Works great as soon as I hit the button, no performance issues, just seems it doesn't like the rate or something in the way that it is receiving power at startup and makes me hit the button.  If I unhook the jamma harness and connect the USB for power, it of course boots, but that won't work with the jamma board connected. 

Be interested to see if the other person who was having this issue has more luck.

So far no luck from the other guy either.  Most of the posts I can find about this behaviour are people using a USB stick/drive for booting, I suspect something has been changed in the eeprom on the latest RPi5s.

Could you please post the output of the command

rpi-eeprom-config

Probably easiest to do while you have it running outside the cab.  Pressing f4 will exit the game select menu, f4 again will offer to exit the service menu, say yes, then the console will appear.  Once you're done to shut down you can type

sudo poweroff

I'm interested in POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=  but anything else may also contain a clue.

Sure thing, here it is.  I obviously added the last line in my troubleshooting attempts.  That with the usb max current enable still didn't make it boot on power on.

[all]
BOOT_UART=1
POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0
BOOT_ORDER=0xf461
psu_max_current=5000

Well that's not it then.  It looks the same as the Pi I checked, excluding the line you added in troubleshooting. 

Maybe it's the firmware itself.  I just remembered this in part of an email last month:

" the Pi I ordered had upgraded RAM on it, and there is an issue with certain firmware and the "upgraded RAM" versions - so eventually found my way to an older version - september 2024"

Not sure if it was actually the same issue you're facing it was in a longer email...

Yeah, I can't seem to get anything to go around it from the different "fixes" I have read for GPIO red led at startup. 

I have read some creative stuff where people tie into the two solder points for different variations of relay/switch power toggles, but that seems a bit much and I'm not exactly sure how to trigger them in the cab. 

I am not a Linux guy and will have to read up on what is necessary to flash the firmware if that is an option.

Otherwise, this unit is great, overclocks well, is stable and I am really impressed with ArPiCade on the Pi 5 with the eighty or so 90's/00's shmups I have loaded.  It even seems to run titles like Pink Sweets very well. 

Kinda frustrating something this trivial annoys me, but all my cabs are either original hardware or behave like it and it does lol.  I may just role the dice and buy another Pi 5 from a different vendor and the 8GB model instead of the 4GB to see if that makes any difference - maybe a different firmware version.

Hopefully this helps:

I used this bootloader recovery image to save a (seemingly) dead RPi5 last year ( https://www.arpicade.net/index.php/topic,71.0.html ):
https://mega.nz/file/M8sj3JbB#UUjtBlylgfK4onQE9XpaGXaEtXGgWYdOc9PSrd0GIHA
(it's a bit newer than the one mentioned in the email from January but I've used it before.)

I recommend running it while attached to a highres monitor or TV, not a low res CRT.  Basicly burn the image to SD card and run it in the Pi, takes maybe 10 to 20 seconds for it to do its thing.

*If successful, the green LED on the Raspberry Pi will blink rapidly forever. An unsuccessful update of the EEPROM is indicated by a different blinking pattern corresponding to the specific error.
*If an HDMI display is attached, then the screen will display green for success or red if a failure occurs.

Once success turn it off, swap SD cards to an ARpiCADE card, stay at the high res setup for now.   Boot ARpiCADE (likely you see some flash of high res stuff prior to the OS booting, exit menus to the command line and type:

sudo -E rpi-eeprom-config --edit

change NET_INSTALL_AT_POWER_ON=1 to
 NET_INSTALL_AT_POWER_ON=0

also add the line

DISABLE_HDMI=1

(ctrl+x  to exit, 'y' to save, enter to overwrite the orig file) - it will make the change when it exits.  Run a 'sudo reboot' just to be sure you don't see any high res or other unexpected.

You should now be good to try in the cab.

-----
If this causes issues, eg. your RPI5 that is newer than the firmware doesn't take the old firmware (please let us know if this happens) you should be able to use the Windows RPi-imager software to make an up to date version of the bootloader recovery SD and in theory put back the newer code you had.

Thanks for that, I weighed it out and decided to go an alternate route to avoid going backwards with the Pi 5.  I took a short Jamma extension harness, removed the 5v pins in it and connected that between the cab and Raspberry Jamma.  That kept me from any modification to the cabs harness.  Then just hooked up the Pi 5 USB power supply and everything is working perfectly.  My cab already had an surge strip integrated into it that powers the amplifier which all starts at power on, plugged the Pi adapter in there.

I figured in addition to not rolling back the firmware, the Pi 5 power adapter may have more headroom than the thin GPIO cables as a bonus.  Runs perfect, starts immediately and the amp sounds clean.  Really happy with it, thanks for all your help!

Bit of a weird follow up to this thread... the other guy with the "new Pi5 issue" sent his Pi5 over to me to see if I could figure out what was happening.

When I tired it his Pi5 booted up first try with no button press on my JAMMA test bench.

All I can come up with is either his 5v is slightly low (but so close it seems to work fine with a button press), or his power supply raises to 5.1v from power on more slowly than the Pi5 likes.  I'm leaning towards the slow ramp up to 5.1v theory (maybe just an old power supply drifting slightly out spec as internal components age) as it still started up when I turned down my 5v to lower than usual for a Pi5.

I believe he did try a couple of firmware versions prior to sending me the Pi, not sure if that made any difference or even which firmware it has on it now...

Thanks for the follow up and that makes sense.  My Astro power supply had the caps replaced but is the older version that came in them.  Voltage was good but it may of taken too long as you said to ramp up.  Even at 5.25v it still didn't work so it must be a slow rise time.  I could pop it in my Big Blue which has a brand new power supply at some point.  Figured it had to be a me (and him) issue since nobody else was having it.

My Arpicade has run perfectly, I did get a male to female finger board instead of the extension harness and just removed the 5v pins.  Was the easiest "fix" using the Pi adapter for me since the power supply works with all my dedicated boards and the cab had the switched AC outlet inside already.