Progress on Pac-Man
I'm finally back in town from the trip back home to KC. This trip reminded me of all the reasons I live in the south. Of course, we came back to 40-degree weather, but it's still the south...
During the week I was out of town, I received a call from the prospective buyer for my Pac-Man cocktail. He's still interested, and wanted to know when I was going to have it ready. I told him that it should be ready by mid-December. In light of this fact, Sunday I decided that I should probably get back to restoring that cocktail. That, and I'm waiting on parts to come in before I can button up the Addam's Family.
Unfortunately, I didn't win the auction for the G07 boards (they went for something like $75 with shipping), so I was stuck with a dilemma: figure out why the G07 was causing the 1.5A fuse to blow, or swap the monitor. Considering the fact that the burn-in on the G07 was abysmal, I decided that a swap was going to be the best bet.
In light of what I learned with the K4601 from Defender, I'm limited to vertical-only monitors as a replacement. This leaves me with two options: a relatively new Happ monitor out of a Ms. Pac I just picked up, or the W-G K4900 out of a bootleg Donkey Kong Jr. I picked up in January. Since the W-G looked like a closer fit and had connections that were an exact match for the Pac, I decided to go with it.
Surprisingly, the swap went very smoothly. I removed and discarded the frame for the K4900, and bolted up the G07 frame to it. This was a perfect fit and it dropped right into the cocktail frame. Unfortunately, the carrier plate for the K4900 main board didn't have holes in the right place to match the G07 frame, but that was a simple matter of drilling four new holes. Voila! Nice new picture.
Now that I had a working machine (remember that this was actually a Ms. Pac), it was time to downgrade it to a Pac-Man. Looking around on the Internet revealed that this is a simple matter of removing the daughter board from the main board, and moving the Z80 CPU back to where the daughter board was plugged in. Once that was done, replacing the six Ms. Pac EPROM's with newly-burned Pac-Man EPROM's got this going (thanks MAME).
On a side note, I discovered a weakness in my Data I/O 29A EPROM burner. It doesn't understand all of the Motorola S-Records. I spent a good two hours fighting with the burner and various dumb terminal packages trying to get it to work. I finally figured out that the header record that was being generated by my binary to s-record program was confusing the burner. Of course, it gave no indication whatsoever. It just ignored the data stream. Nice...
Once all of that was complete and functional, I plugged in my TwoBits.com ABC Pac-Man tester and went through all of the diagnostics. Everything passed with flying colors. Woo hoo! Electronics DONE. Now for the cosmetics.
The only real remaining issue with the machine is the state of the "shelves" where the controls sit. The controls themselves are in great shape, but the paint on the shelves has worn clear through in a couple of areas. That, combined with the grunge on the stickers makes for an ugly machine.
To address this ugliness, I went ahead and unbolted the shelves from the frame and removed the controls and buttons. This left me with a couple of pieces of sheet metal with heavy plastic stickers. I was able to clean up the stickers using alcohol and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Those things are amazing! The stickers look like brand new, but they're still attached to the shelves that don't.
After a bit of thought, I decided to try carefully peeling the stickers off of the shelves using some Goo Gone at the same time. Believe it or not, the stickers came off flawlessly! Once the peeling was started, just squirting some in the seam where the adhesive sits made short work of the whole job. Once completely removed, a simple cleaning with some alcohol, then some soap and water had the plastic control panel stickers ready to be reapplied once the work on the shelves was done. $49 saved there!
The final piece to be addressed was the shelves themselves. After removing all of the adhesive residue from where the stickers were, I started attacking the paint with some 100-grit sandpaper. Surprisingly, it came off pretty easily. Especially when I switched to using my finishing sander. :)
Now that the shelves have been fully stripped, I'm ready to repaint them. I was originally thinking about having them powder-coated, but it doesn't look like that's how they were originally done. I think I'm just going to go pick up some Rust-Oleum Primer and Flat Black and spray paint them. They should be as good as new.
During the week I was out of town, I received a call from the prospective buyer for my Pac-Man cocktail. He's still interested, and wanted to know when I was going to have it ready. I told him that it should be ready by mid-December. In light of this fact, Sunday I decided that I should probably get back to restoring that cocktail. That, and I'm waiting on parts to come in before I can button up the Addam's Family.
Unfortunately, I didn't win the auction for the G07 boards (they went for something like $75 with shipping), so I was stuck with a dilemma: figure out why the G07 was causing the 1.5A fuse to blow, or swap the monitor. Considering the fact that the burn-in on the G07 was abysmal, I decided that a swap was going to be the best bet.
In light of what I learned with the K4601 from Defender, I'm limited to vertical-only monitors as a replacement. This leaves me with two options: a relatively new Happ monitor out of a Ms. Pac I just picked up, or the W-G K4900 out of a bootleg Donkey Kong Jr. I picked up in January. Since the W-G looked like a closer fit and had connections that were an exact match for the Pac, I decided to go with it.
Surprisingly, the swap went very smoothly. I removed and discarded the frame for the K4900, and bolted up the G07 frame to it. This was a perfect fit and it dropped right into the cocktail frame. Unfortunately, the carrier plate for the K4900 main board didn't have holes in the right place to match the G07 frame, but that was a simple matter of drilling four new holes. Voila! Nice new picture.
Now that I had a working machine (remember that this was actually a Ms. Pac), it was time to downgrade it to a Pac-Man. Looking around on the Internet revealed that this is a simple matter of removing the daughter board from the main board, and moving the Z80 CPU back to where the daughter board was plugged in. Once that was done, replacing the six Ms. Pac EPROM's with newly-burned Pac-Man EPROM's got this going (thanks MAME).
On a side note, I discovered a weakness in my Data I/O 29A EPROM burner. It doesn't understand all of the Motorola S-Records. I spent a good two hours fighting with the burner and various dumb terminal packages trying to get it to work. I finally figured out that the header record that was being generated by my binary to s-record program was confusing the burner. Of course, it gave no indication whatsoever. It just ignored the data stream. Nice...
Once all of that was complete and functional, I plugged in my TwoBits.com ABC Pac-Man tester and went through all of the diagnostics. Everything passed with flying colors. Woo hoo! Electronics DONE. Now for the cosmetics.
The only real remaining issue with the machine is the state of the "shelves" where the controls sit. The controls themselves are in great shape, but the paint on the shelves has worn clear through in a couple of areas. That, combined with the grunge on the stickers makes for an ugly machine.
To address this ugliness, I went ahead and unbolted the shelves from the frame and removed the controls and buttons. This left me with a couple of pieces of sheet metal with heavy plastic stickers. I was able to clean up the stickers using alcohol and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Those things are amazing! The stickers look like brand new, but they're still attached to the shelves that don't.
After a bit of thought, I decided to try carefully peeling the stickers off of the shelves using some Goo Gone at the same time. Believe it or not, the stickers came off flawlessly! Once the peeling was started, just squirting some in the seam where the adhesive sits made short work of the whole job. Once completely removed, a simple cleaning with some alcohol, then some soap and water had the plastic control panel stickers ready to be reapplied once the work on the shelves was done. $49 saved there!
The final piece to be addressed was the shelves themselves. After removing all of the adhesive residue from where the stickers were, I started attacking the paint with some 100-grit sandpaper. Surprisingly, it came off pretty easily. Especially when I switched to using my finishing sander. :)
Now that the shelves have been fully stripped, I'm ready to repaint them. I was originally thinking about having them powder-coated, but it doesn't look like that's how they were originally done. I think I'm just going to go pick up some Rust-Oleum Primer and Flat Black and spray paint them. They should be as good as new.
Comments