Pac-Man is Alive!

After four months of hard work I've finally finished restoring/converting my Pac-Man cocktail arcade cabinet to full glory. This cabinet has been locked away from the world for more then a decade, maybe even two decades. It was hidden away in my buddies garage forever, and then a few more years in mine, until I had the time to invest in restoring it. The cabinet was empty other then the original monitor, and in very poor shape. So I made the tough decision to "MAME" the cabinet. I'm sure I'll be flamed by the purists out there, but for me and this cabinet, this was the right decision.

I started off by stripping the cabinet bare, and giving everything a thorough cleaning. I had to rebuild the under carriage and leg levelers as the wood was splintered from years of moisture. I sanded rust off the metal components and gave everything a new coat of paint. I installed my old 19" IBM CRT monitor, which to my surprise fit perfectly with only minor alternations.

I then installed a vast array of new components:

• 11" Cocktail Control Panels from ArcadeDepot. I had to modify the controls from pac-man's centered solo joystick to a proper joystick & 3 buttons layout.


• Red/Blue Suzo Universal STC 500 (OMNI Stik) Joysticks (set to 4-way)


• Red/Blue Translucent Pushbuttons from FX Buttons


• Mini Round Momentary Pushbuttons


• Reused my old I-Pac4 Encoder from Ultimarc, however I may installed a GP-Wiz40 Eco from Groovy Game Gear that I have lying around to try it out.


• Cold Cathode Lights from NW Computer Accessories


• an old Dell Optiplex GX1 - running Micro XP Pro.

To keep the cabinet as authentic as possible I only installed MAME and classic ROMs that have a cocktail cabinet dip switch mode. No Nintendo, Sega, Virtual Pinball, or jukebox craziness on this cabinet. I configured everything under the MaLa front-end, and set the machine to boot directly into Pac-Man (you can then backout to select other games to play).

I still have a few more lighting, electrical, and software tweaks to make to the cabinet, but it's in fully function order. It was ready in time for my 30th B-Day party, and got a lot of usage and rave reviews.

Mark another knotch in the project tree, let's see what's next ...