Sanding Pac-man cabinet, wiring Mr. Do!

Today was the day, and a long one.

We got the belt sander from Wes and got to work in the early afternoon. I sanded one whole side of the Pac-man cab before I felt like I really needed to go and get some more belts. We went and got a two pack, and a plastic bristle brush to wipe off the wood particles if the belt got clogged.

I then sanded the remaining three sides of the cabinet. The hardest seemed to be the back up at the top, with the small area, all the holes and areas where stickers had been. We took a scraper to parts of it to get some of the paint off. In the end, the whole cab looked great, back down to the base plywood for a fresh start.

I took some citrus cleaner and cleaned the bottom of the cab and the top a little bit, without spending too much time on either. The top isn’t really clean, but I was in a bit of a rush and knew we wouldn’t finish everything today.

Then I took some CLR and mixed it into some warm water and wiped down the inside of the cabinet. It was a little damp, so I put it out in the driveway in the sun, and went inside for an hour or so to let it dry.

Then, later we came back out and got started. The cabinet didn’t have the monitor mounting rails in it when I got it, because there was no monitor, so fortunately I had the rails from my other Pac-man cabinet so we used those. I will just have to find myself a cheap second set of rails for the game.

We put the monitor in, mounted it, and then Justin got to putting in the other parts. He put in the switcher power supply, the isolation transformer, and redid the wiring. He had to hack apart the Vs. Golf power supply for the cord, and for the fuse mounting because the other one was completely fubar.

While he was doing this, I was taking apart the old control panel and figuring out to do with the controls. The Joystick was a rusted piece of junk that was mounted too low, so I took out a bat handled joystick from a Ms. Pac control panel to use instead. I took off the buttons and the control panel overlay was just pressed between some composite board and plexiglass, so I was able to save that. I then had to get all the wiring right, so I had some soldering to do for the new joystick.

Justin got everything hooked up, including putting the power switch back in, and getting the gameboard ready, turned on the game, and Bam!, it looked great. Only problem was the screen was upside down, and there didn’t seem to be a dip switch to flip it, so we took the monitor out and turned it around. When we did that I realized the way the frame was facing that this was the correct way to have it mounted based on the other Pac machines I have seen.

I made a little tag for the connector to signify the parts side, and then turned my attention to the control panel. I took the extended clip racks off the old vs. control panel and then drilled some holes in my Pac-man control panel to mount those. First try, the control panel snapped into place in the cabinet.

So the last thing we did was test the controls. The joystick had to have two wires swapped, but because I use easy connects, that wasn’t a problem, and the game was working fine. I wasn’t able to mount the buttons yet because there is no spacer with the metal control panel, no wood like there was in the original, so I have to figure out what to do there. I also have to add some screws to fasten the joystick, and I would like to sand the whole thing down and give it a new coat of paint before I am done.

It was a really solid day of work. The marquee bulbs don’t work right now, but they are getting power, so that is good. And because they are just regular bulbs, they are easy to replace.

Next step will be mounting the joystick, and then figuring out how to mount the buttons, if I put wood on the back or what my choice is. Quite and upgrade from where the cabinet was when we first got it.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Dynamo Tetris Cabinet takes a 25″ monitor?
• Jr. Pac-man finished!
• Dynamo Cabinet 19″ Monitor Mount Board Dimensions
• Buck Creek Winery, Mr. Do! control panel
• Replacing Crazy Climber joysticks Part 1

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