I’ve been prepping the control panel for a few days. Obviously, the first step was to remove the old control panel overlay. Surprisingly, I was able to peel it off without much trouble. Unfortunately, all of the adhesive was still on the control panel. I did quite a bit of research to determine the best way to remove the adhesive. Since I was working in the basement I needed something that was relatively odor free. I saw several suggestions for a product called Citristrip which I found in a quart sized container at my local WalMart. The Citristrip was brushed onto the adhesive and I let it set for about 6 hours. You can apparently let it sit for up to 24 hours. Using a putty knife to scrape, the old adhesive slid right off. I rinsed the control panel off with water and dried it with a hair dryer then sanded both the front and back sides down to bare metal. I had to do a lot of hand sanding on the back side as my sander wouldn’t fit. I used 100 grit paper until the panel was bare, then hit it with 150 grit paper. Just for good measure, I sanded one more time with 220 grit paper (click on each image for a larger version):

I then decided to hit the control panel with a couple layers of Rustoleum paint. There’s debate about the necessity of this step but since my panel had some rust prior to sanding, I opted for it as the Rustoleum should prohibit rust in the future. I applied one layer of Rustoleum semi-gloss black spray paint to the control panel and waited. 8 hours later, I was still waiting as the paint was tacky and had not set up yet. I had to wait two days for the paint to dry. I decided to look for another alternative and found the Rustoleum “Professional” line of paints. It is advertised as having better spray coverage and a much faster drying time. I can attest to both and it’s only about $1 more than the regular Rustoleum paint. I’ll be using this on all of my projects from here on out:

Now the nerve wracking part… installation of the new overlay. As I said, you only get one shot at doing this right. Here was my plan of attack: I took the tube from a roll of paper towels and cut it in 3 inch sections. I made a cut lengthwise in each section which allowed me to vary the width of the tube. I put a tube in the player 1 start hole, the player 2 start hole and the fire button hole. The overlay sat down over the tubes and was aligned perfectly. I then placed the trackball bolts into their holes to align the right side of the overlay. I then put masking tape on both sides of the control panel overlay just above the bend to the front. This held everything in place. I peeled back the backing paper down to the masking tape and applied the middle section of the overlay first working out to each side. Once the top was in place, I removed the masking tape, took off the rest of the backing paper and finished the job. A couple of passes with a j-roller assured good adhesion. I installed the new trackball, the player 1 and 2 start buttons and the fire button. I didn’t take any pictures of the process as I was too worried about screwing up! I also forgot to buy a new white button but will do so in the near future.

That’s it. I made it! No bubbles and no misalignment. I probably spent 1/2 hour stripped the old control panel overlay and removing the adhesive, 45 minutes sanding, 1/2 hour painting (excluding wait times for drying) and an hour installing the new overlay and putting the panel back together. I’m not sure I’ll be any less nervous the next time but as Mr. Rogers used to sing, just “take your time and do it right”.

The monitor that came with the cabinet had a serious case of burn in. So bad, one would probably think they could play without even turning the machine on. I decided to use my last spare monitor to replace it. The spare monitor had a little burn but I don’t think it will be noticeable while playing the game. I hooked up the spare monitor, powered it on and immediately blew a fuse on the monitor chassis. That’s a hell of a start. I found a replacement fuse and powered on the monitor only to find that the screen was reversed side to side, as looking at it in a mirror. I knew that I had to flip the vertical yoke wires to get the image correct. Bob Roberts does a better job of explaining this than I ever could.  Once I had the image oriented correctly and adjusted, I installed the monitor into the cabinet (click on each image for a larger version):

I think everyone will agree that the new monitor is a huge improvement. I did learn a lesson last night that I can’t believe hasn’t occurred to me before. It’s much easier to adjust a monitor outside of the cabinet than it is inside the cabinet! That’s all of the work I accomplished last night. I did get my parts ready to begin working on the control panel:

I’ve got a few vacation days coming up so hopefully I can get the control panel knocked out. If it gets above freezing, I might even start on some of the cosmetic repairs to the cabinet.

There are two things pretty common amongst Ms. Pac-Man cabinets that saw a lot of play on location. Flaking / destroyed paint and burn on the monitor. Mine has both. Fortunately, the monitor burn is only noticeable when the game is off. You really can’t see it when the game is powered on.

Someone tried to repaint a portion of the cabinet but did a poor job of matching the paint. If I decide to do a total restoration on this cabinet, there are really only two options. Option one is to obtain vinyl side art. This is usually sold in a 3 piece set. One piece to cover the entire left side, one piece to cover the entire right side and one piece that covers the front of the cabinet by the coin door. There are a few spots on the cabinet that would not be covered in vinyl and I’d imagine that getting a blue paint to exactly match the vinyl would be difficult.

Option two is to obtain a set of stencils and re-stencil all of the artwork on the cabinet. While it’s not really anymore costly than option one (provided you already have the needed tools) it is a hell of a lot more time consuming (estimated to be between 40 and 60 hours).  I won’t go into the details of re-stenciling a cabinet, but theres a great tutorial over at Jeff Rothe’s site.  Give it a read if your interested.  Here’s what my cabinet looks like (click on each image for a larger version):

It’s not too difficult to see the badly executed paint touch-up attempts. I’m not sure what happened that caused the cabinet to lose that much paint but I’ll eventually have to deal with it or sandwich it between two games so it can’t be seen. Unfortunately, the front artwork has a number of touch-up attempts as well but not near as much as the sides. The marquee is in very good condition.  For some reason, the back door doesn’t look right to me.  I’m not sure if it’s original or someone simply made a replacement.  Unfortunately, all tags and serial numbers are missing from the cabinet.

The control panel is in pretty good shape and probably just needs a good cleaning. You can see your first glimpse of the monitor burn in the control panel picture. The second pictures shows a full on shot of the monitor burn. You’ll also notice that it just has a generic bezel and not the proper Ms. Pac-Man bezel. This will be replaced if I can find one. I won’t pay the price for an “official” licensed reproduction so hopefully I can find a used original in nice condition. As you can see in the last picture, the monitor burn isn’t really noticeable when the game is running. It will work for now. Hopefully I can find a nice replacement monitor in the future.

I mentioned in my post yesterday that all of the original wiring had been removed and a Jamma wiring harness installed. In the board picture below, you can clearly see the Jamma to Ms. Pac-Man adapter. Finding original wiring is low on my priority list. You’ll also notice that the original power transformer has been replaced with a switching power supply. No big deal and probably more reliable. Since nobody knows what is on the inside, it’s really not important. The only time all of that may come in to play is if I decide to sell the game to another collector. I’d prefer all original, but I can live with it. At least it works!

I’m going to have to do a lot of thinking about the path I want to take with this one. Right now, I’m just going to enjoy playing it!

I haven’t had a chance to get any pictures yet. I’ll try to get some tonight. If you don’t know the history of Ms. Pac-Man, here is her entry in the Killer List of Video Games. As is customary, here are the scans of the original marketing flyers for Ms. Pac-Man, courtesty of ArcadeFlyers.com:

As usual, I’ve set up a dedicated photo gallery just for Ms. Pac-Man. Check back tomorrow for some pictures of the cabinet!

Fast forward 7 months and the cabinet has not been touched and is sitting in my garage. Much to my wife’s displeasure, this kept me from moving the lawn furniture into the garage over the winter! Over the weekend, I decided to move the cabinet into the basement and start working on it. I did not move the lawn furniture into the garage.

I shopped around for a few months looking for an original Sanyo 20ez monitor to put in the cabinet but didn’t have any luck. I found one on E-bay that went for more than I was willing to spend and had a few offers to ship monitors to me but they all needed some form of repair. I decided to use a spare Wells Gardner K7000 monitor that I had sitting around. It took me all of 5 seconds to realize that the mounting holes on the K7000 monitor did not line up with the mounting holes on the Nintendo mounting brackets. As a matter of fact, the K7000 did not have any top or bottom mounting holes at all.

It became apparent that I would have to bolt the monitor to the monitor shelf in the cabinet. I took a few measurements to find the center of the monitor shelf and also the center of the monitor itself. I then measured the distance that the monitor in my Donkey Kong cabinet stuck out from this shelf (towards the front of the cabinet). The monitor was bolted to the shelf in almost the exact orientation as the monitor in my Donkey Kong cabinet. If I had to guess (because I didn’t measure) the monitor in this cabinet probably sits a bit lower than the monitor is supposed to but once everything is done, I don’t think it will be apparent. Here are a couple of pictures of the monitor bolted into place:

In the first picture above, you can see the original Nintendo monitor mounting bracket at the top of the monitor. You can also see that the K7000 sits short of this bracket. In the second picture you can see the bolt locations on the lower left and right sides of the monitor frame. There are also two bolts at the top that can’t be seen in this picture.

Once the monitor was mounted, I needed to find a spot to place the 120 volt isolation transformer for the K7000. 20ez monitors used 100 volt transformers so I couldn’t use the one currently located in the cabinet. I located a spot near the power supply for the isolation transformer, mounted it and then connected it to the 120 volt and ground terminals of the terminal block. Here’s a picture of the isolation transformer mounted inside the cabinet. The isolation transformer has the 4 red wires attached to it…two coming in from the terminal block and two going out to the monitor. The terminal block is to the far right of the picture:

One thing that is needed on monitors in a Donkey Kong/Donkey Kong Jr cabinet is an inverter board. Without an inverter board, the image on the monitor will appear to be a negative of what should actually be there. The majority of the image will appear to be white if the inverter board is not present. I had previously purchased an inverter board from Mike’s Arcade and made the necessary connections to it.  The inverter board requried 12 volts DC to run, so I temporarily “borrowed” 12 volts from pin 4 of the 9 pin CPU connector at the power supply.  After a bit of monitor tweeking, the image is stable and clear…my blurry picture does not do it justice:

The final picture above is the front of the cabinet that will eventually become my dedicated Donkey Kong Jr machine. It is complete with a Donkey Kong marquee and bezel but those were removed while I worked on the monitor. Right now, the wiring to the inverter board and monitor is a bit of a “hack job” as I wanted to test everything before making it permanent. I will eventually clean up the wiring and add molex connectors as time allows. As usual, a dedicated photo gallery has been set up for work on the Donkey Kong Jr cabinet. Stay tuned….

When I put the new trackball mounting plate on the control panel, I discovered that the new mounting plate and old mounting plate were different sizes. The new plate had about 1/2″ of space remaining between the outer edge and the routed area it was to fit into. While the ideal solution would have been to bondo the space, I didn’t have any bondo handy but did have some Durham Rock Hard Water Putty at my disposal.

Here’s a shot of the control panel with the old button holes filled and the space around the trackball mounting plate filled and sanded:

While I think bondo would have been a better alternative, I didn’t have too much concern with using the putty as the mounting plate is bolted down and shouldn’t shift during gameplay.

Once I had the control panel prepped, I carefully measured and drilled new holes for all of the buttons, including the two new buttons not used on the 2000 Golden Tee board set that was originally in the cabinet (backspin & fly-by). I then installed the overlay that I custom designed in Adobe Illustrator and had printed by Mame Marquees:

I still need to fill the gaping hole in the front of the cabinet where a bill collector was once installed, but right now the game is functioning and playable. That will have to suffice for the time being.

I then mounted the Golden Tee 2005 PCB, hard drive and power supply into the cabinet and hooked up only the monitor and speakers for the time being.  I fired the game up and spent about 20 minutes adjusting the size and position of the image as well as the brightness and contrast settings.  I had a pretty decent image on the screen but noticed that it kept pulsing from light to dark.  I suspected a bad adjustment pot so I began to try and track down which one was bad.  While I was working on this, I inadvertently stepped on the power cord and the game powered off.

I quickly realized that the power cord on the machine was bad, so I decided to unplug it and replace it.  As I was trying to unplug the cord, I put my hand on top of the metal power supply and was shocked.  Not shocked at what I found, but literally shocked.  Not a jolting shock, more like someone had stuck 1000 pins into my hand all at the same time. Damn, that’s always a fun way to discover that the cabinet is not properly grounded.  Obviously, the power cord was causing the game to short but it  also had no ground pin.  Why I hadn’t noticed this before is beyond me but a quick switch of the power cord with a cord that had a grounding pin solved both the “shock” issue and the unstable monitor issue.

I didn’t have a camera handy, so I took a quick video of the working game with my cell phone.  Wait, I had a camera, I just decided to take a video instead of a picture?  It WAS late by this time.  The strobing effect you see is not present on the actual monitor, it’s a product of the crappy camera in my cell phone.  This is also my first attempt at posting a video, so it might work, it might not.

[See post to watch Flash video]

There is still plenty to do on this cabinet.  I need to apply the overlay to the control panel; cut new holes for all of the buttons and hook them up; install the track ball; and wire up the coin door just to name a few.  The cabinet also needs some cosmetic work but I want to make sure everything is going to work properly before I spend too much time on that aspect.  Stay tuned…

The price of admission was included with our vacation package so the kids and I decided to head there on our last evening while the rest of our group shopped.    I can honestly say, there was no way we would have gone had the price not been included already.  The price of admission for guests 10 and over was $42.50 per person.  For children aged 3-9 the price was $36.  For myself and the four kids to even get in the door it would have cost almost $200.  The price of admission can be less if you purchase your tickets in advance but it’s still pretty pricey.

Regardless, the place was absolutely packed.  The facility is 5 floors, with each floor consisting of a different “zone”.  Upon entering, we were directed to an elevator which took us to the third floor of the facility.  Coincidentally, that is the floor that houses the classic arcade games.  I didn’t make a note of the games they had but it was a fairly large selection.  They had the typical Ms. Pacman/Galaga combos, the Donkey Kong/DK Jr/Mario Brothers combo, a 25th anniversary Space Invaders but also a large selection of dedicated classic arcade games.  Dedicated games that I recall seeing: Lunar Lander, Mr. Do, Tron, Galaga, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Asteroids, Super Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pacman (w/ speed chip), Pengo, Qbert, Gorf, plus many more that I can’t recall right now.  There was also some type of Buzz Lightyear bumper car ride on this floor.  I tried to snap some pictures but all I had was my cell phone and the pictures didn’t turn out at all.  All games are set on free play except for crane games and the like that dispense prizes.

I was immediately drawn to the Tron machine, a game I hadn’t played in over 20 years.  I fired up a game and immediately noticed that the monitor was crap.  It needed a cap kit.  As a matter of fact, as I walked around the room 90% of the monitors needed cap kits and major adjustments.  My son attempted to play a game of Frogger, which was located next to the Tron machine.  The game would credit up but neither the 1 player or 2 player start buttons worked so it was impossible to start a game.  After being pummeled by Tron, which had a less than responsive joystick, I stepped to a dedicated Galaga machine.  While the monitor was again less than perfect, I did manage to beat the high score of 180,520 with a respectable 195,600.

I tried to play a game on the dedicated Donkey Kong cabinet but didn’t have much luck.  I couldn’t figure out why the high score was only 16,200.  I soon found out.  The game had a replacement micro-switch joystick in it.  The joystick stuck in the up position.  While that didn’t matter too much on the barrel level, it made the rivet level almost impossible.  Any attempt to climb down a ladder would immediately send Jumpman back to the top when you reached the bottom.  I found if I jumped at exactly the right time I could get him to stay at the bottom of the ladder.  Needless to say, my score of 40,800 was nothing to brag about but given the joystick problem I seriously doubt that anyone was going to top it.

We then went up to the fourth floor where we found a selection of more “modern” games.  The kids all played a few games of Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution.  These all worked fairly well as expected.  We then attempted to play a few games of air hockey.  The games were supposed to last 5 minutes but each time we attempted to play a game, the puck got stuck when someone scored.  They only way to get the puck back was to credit the table and start a new game.  The table next to us also had the same problem.  There is also a snack area here that serves beer and wine.   Most of the parents were getting liquored up while their kids ran through the facility, cutting in line for games we had been waiting on.

We attempted to go to the first floor to ride some of the virtual reality attractions but the lines were all too long.  The second floor had some interactive games that the kids played for a bit but quickly tired of.  We really wanted to do the roller coaster designer with the option to ride it in a simulator, but again, the line was too long.   After about 2 hours, we headed out the door.  The kids had no interest in half working classic games and it was too crowded to try anything else.  For the cost of admission, I would expect the games, particulary the classics to be in better shape.  I did notice a sign that was placed sometime after we entered offering 1/2 price admission after 8:00 (might have said 7 or 9, I don’t recall).  Even at that, I’d pass unless you take a tool kit.

My intention is to run Donkey Kong Jr. in this cabinet.  Here’s the question…leave the cabinet original colors, etc. and just run Jr. in it, or completely convert it to a Jr. cabinet with orange paint, new side art, bezel, control panel and marquee?  Pictures later.