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Build Your own Ms. Pac-Man machine from Scratch
AngryFlute writes "This guy has built his own Ms. Pac-Man tabletop cabinet from scratch, and he generously shares the plans and pictures of his step-by-step work online. " Nate gave me an arkanoid tabletop for christmas last year, these things are just
very cool (if only I had room for more ;). There are many excellent sites for building your own game boxes (tabletop and upright). I've seen variations that use a PC and MAME or some other emulator, as well as ones designed for easy replacing of old game boards. This stuff is a very cool hobby and I know many of you are into it. What are you guys experiences?
I don't see the point in that. The games you list were designed with a PC in mind: keyboard, mouse and all. Why take those games away from their natural home?
OTOH, putting MAME in a cabinet is a great idea: taking the games in question *Back* home (and it's been done many a time). Putting a Sega Saturn, a Playstation or a Dreamcast in a cabinet is also a great idea, because of all those arcade-prefect conversions. PSX Tekken 2 in a cabinet is virtually identical to playing the game in the arcade. Ditto Dreamcast Virtua Tennis... etc.
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growing up in arcades (no, literally, my parents owned a chain of them, and i grew up in them) we always had machines and pieces of machines and such. hell, i could probably build a ms. pacman machine from the parts i have in my basement.
on a similar note, i was at an arcade lately and saw a ms. pacman machine with a huge (compared to the original) monitor and the ROM was hacked. it wasn't an original ms. pacman cabinet, either. anybody else see these? AND it cost $0.50 to play! what gives? ms. pacman is supposed to cost $0.25 and NO MORE! i never thought i'd live to see a dollar bill machine on a ms. pacman cabinet. *sigh* Anyway, anybody know if they're using real ms. pacman hardware or just emulation?
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Are you sure that's what he was doing over there? Pr0n shop, dark corner, fast moving right hand....Hmmm...
Or, if javaScript ever gets in your way from doing anything, you could always disable it.
thank god for 'preferences'.
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
The first page deals mostly with the enclosure cabinet and *the second* deals with the wiring. So he did wire it up after all.
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God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ --1Thes5:9
in my experience, ms. pacman features faster gameplay and a higher difficulty rating than the OG pacman. depends from machine to machine, but this is generally the case.
Some of us have fallen in love with the notion of giving without reserve-Raoul Vanegiem, Revolution of Everyday Life
Scramble was one of my favorite video games. I'd love to see how to make one of those.
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
LOL
;)
Google must not have found the updated wiring page then
Just goes to show you, don't believe everything you see.
-inq
I work my wood three times a day.
(oh, all right, just mod this down...)
For some time I've been considering building an upright cabinet for more modern games such as Quake 3, Midtown Madness, and Call to Power. The primary difficulty is finding a good interface to the games as they all seem to require many more control inputs these days than the standard 8-way stick and 6 fire buttons offered by the newest jamma cabinets.
At least for the shooters like Q3A and such you might want to check out the arcade War: Final Assault, a networked first-person shooter from Atari. It has five buttons (forward,backward,L & R strafe, jump) and a joystick with a trigger for firing and a thumb button for discarding whatever weapon you have at the time. Granted, you can only hold one extra gun (besides your default one which cannot be dropped and has infinite ammo) and the joystick doesn't allow for quick movements, but if all your cabinets had joysticks everyone would be under the same restrictions.
I don't know why you would ever want to play Call to Power in a cabinet, it's a sit-around-and-think sort of game. Besides, compared to old Civ2 it still stunk..
biya
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----- The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them.
Well you hit my expertise button! I am also into pinball's. My dad and I bought tons of games throughout my lifetime. We bought em restored em, and sold em... I have had a blast with pinball, it is probably my second favorite thing beyond computers.
Electro-Mechanical machines are very interesting... Chances are if the game is blowing a fuse you have one of the 16 or so solenoid coils that pull in the relays, (should be two rows) that are going bad. The contacts on the "score motor run" (the timed bank of contacts with the motor) are very rarely known to blow fuses as they essentially have little power to them. If something quits working without blowing fuses then the contacts on the score motor run are the first ones to check.
I've been dying to do this for some time... Been living vicariously through the people that post instructions/pictures of their finished works (like the already posted http://www.arcadeathome.com link) Can't wait to buy a home and have some room to work on the ultimate gaming system (and have a place to keep it..)
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Shame on you Anonymous Cowards
Beg borrow or steal a telecom tone generator. This clips onto one end of a pair of wires, and you can use the probe to trace where these wires go.
I agree. I have a Space Invaders cocktail and a Superman upright (and wife has a 13 foot Skeeball machine). Wife would like Ms. PacMan. Personally, I was more of a Donkey Kong fan, but...
Anyway, those Ms Pacs are expensive. But this project does not really address the problem. I looked at the price sheet. He got his Ms. Pac board in trade. I know from Usenet and elsewhere that that is considerably cheaper than what I would pay for a board.
To reiterate your point: let's see a new controller that only requires a <cough> legal </cough> ROM image to run. Controllers, cases, screens. All fairly easy to come by. But the elusive PCB...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Plenty of people do this, but most just use old, stripped arcade cabinets purchased from local arcades or servicing companies. It's just cheaper, and less time-consuming, to use an old cab and then fill it with what you want.
m --the most comprehensive site by far. As it will point out, there are many options when building an arcade cab, one of the more popular being to wire up a PC to the arcade cabinet and use it to run MAME, so that any one of over 2000 supported games can be played. Plenty of special hardware is available to map arcade controls to keyboard codes for use by the PC in such a cabinet. This also makes playing a game designed for the PC, like Q3 or UT, quite playable on such a cabinet if you include all the right controls, like a trackball for the mouse and buttons coded to each key used in the game. There are also MAME front ends which make it easy to use MAME in arcade cabs, like Arcade@Home.
t m has them. Happ is one of the big suppliers for *real* arcade parts. so a lot of people who build arcade cabinets for home use use their products. They *are* expensive, but you're getting real arcade controls, designed to withstand thousands of hours of abuse by random arcade patrons. There are cheaper alternatives for the PC which can be adapted for use with a MAME cabinet easily, but they're not as authentic.
d e.shtml . I plan to build it to work quite authentically--I'm even going to put in coin mechs, and use those bronze arcade tokens we used when I was a kid--which Happ also happens to sell. It's also going to be as big as most four-player cabs, because I'm designing it with all the controls necessary for two people to play almost any two-person arcade game together using the original controller types, like trackballs for Marble Madness, dual joysticks for Sarge, etc., and it'll take up a lot of control panel space. In the middle will of course be the Atari flight yoke for use with one-player flight and driving games, and at the bottom of the cab near the floor I'm putting a set of pedals for racing games. Instead of using an arcade monitor, though, I want to get a large PC monitor so that playing games designed with PC resolutions in mind is easier. MAME can output authentic-looking arcade scanlines to a PC monitor anyway, so it's no loss of authenticity in the way the games look. With all the NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, etc., emulators available, it makes building an arcade cabinet driven by a PC even more interesting and fun. It should be a massive project when I get the chance to put design into practice..
If you're willing to spend more money for something new, try a cabinet from http://www.hanaho.com/ --they make new cabs, complete with your choice of different arcade monitors.
For the most info on this stuff, try http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade.ht
You mentioned Pole Position--if you want to give it a truly authentic feel, you'll need arcade foot pedals. http://www.happcontrols.com/amusement/amusement.h
I haven't built a MAME cabinet yet, because I'm poor [insert sound of tiny violins], but I will eventually. I've already been squirreling away components bought on eBay. For example, one of the hardest to find arcade controls is the unusual and quite nonstandard flight yoke used by some 1983-1985 Atari games like Star Wars, Return of the the Jedi, and Firefox. I bought one on eBay for $90, which is worth it because they're just so impossible to find and because Star Wars was the game I remember most fondly from childhood. We used to have a sit-down cockpit version of Star Wars at the local arcade, and I wanted the unique controller so that I could play it fairly faithfully. Someone has even given instructions on how to interface it to a PC, at http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade_ju
Anyway, those links should be enough to get anyone started. I look forward to whenever I do get the time and money to complete my project, but meanwhile I'm picking up some useful controls and parts.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
The page is still up today (Dec 1) but all the content's been removed thanks to the attention it's gotten from here - and the legal ramifications that came with.
dinosaur comics
I agree, MAME cabinets rock. But where can you legally buy the arcade ROMs you need to build one of those things?
I mean I know that there are defunct arcade systems all over the world, and that ROM chips can be pulled out of systems at junk yards. But we do want to be legal, don't we? Own the Ms. Pacman ROMs to run the emulator and all that, right?
The page has right-clicking 'disabled' with JavaScript. You right-click and get a 'Graphics on this page are copyrighted and not available for download or use.' popup window. That's just incredibly lame... especially since it takes all of 3 seconds to View-Source and get the image location and all I wanna do is Right-Click, Open in New Window.
.plan.
Granted, you can always use the workaround for this. In IE, links are triggered on a mouse-up and the Javascript is on the mouse-down. So, right-click on anything and hold the button down. The popup appears. Hit your Spacebar to dismiss it. Then release your mouse button. Voila... instant right-click menu.
Some day I hope to have a
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I just don't think of it as "News for Nerds" -- it's news for woodworkers.
And we all know how damn cool woodworkers are.
Those dashing devils...
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Ms PacMan is a testament to the strength of the womens movement. She may be PacMan's wife, but she took the title 'Ms' on purpose! The guy who built this machine is obviously a big proponent of feminism.
don't believe the hype
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If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
There was Super Pac-Man which was lame, and a Baby Pac-Man, which I think was a video game/pinball combo.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I just moved in a Pinball Machine - it's a blast. Lots of maintenance on games that use RealPhysics(tm) tho. Most all pins made after about 1977 are computer controlled anyway - this one's got a 6800, some 2716 ROMS, SCR's to drive the lights, interesting game play.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I encourage people to look in an arcade cabinet: you'd be surprised at just how little there is in there: speakers, monitor, controls, all wired up to a single interface connector.
Absolutely. The magic and hi-tech (of the day) exists entirely in those boards.
Even the monitor itself is no big deal: it's a TV CRT (not the expensive fine dot pitch CRT of even the cheapest VGA monitor), with support electronics that takes an RGB input and approximately broadcast television scanning signals (for most non-vectored arcace machines). Basically, if you had the boards, a good soldering iron, and some idea what you were doing, you could probably modify any old TV set to take the arcade machine's output. Hell, you'd even have an amplifier for the sound. :)
What I thought I was going to see, and something that would have been incredibly cool, was instructions on building a Ms Pacman board from scratch: using off the shelf chips and home-burnt PROMs (naughty!). Wake me up when we see that.That would be cool, but I think you might have to get up from your slumber for a few bathroom breaks.
It's not tough to make your own printed circuit boards. Positive photo-etched, draw up the layout on the computer, laser print it to a transparency, expose the board, then etch and drill. But when you add double or multilayered boards, it becomes exponentially tougher with each layer, since plate-through holes that are the staple of mass-produced PC boards are very tough to make. Not to mention aligning the patterns properly, etc.
Wire-wrapping on veroboard, like the original IBM PC prototype was, isn't really practical for most people: it's too easy to miss something from the schematic or do it wrong. Besides, with a whopping, lightning-fast 3MHz processor - let alone anything faster, you will get into RF problems which will translate into stability issues with the computer. The solution? Ground plane. And what does that take? A multilayer PC board. I've never seen anyone figure out a practical way of making a ground plane for a wire-wrapped circuit.
Some of the old ICs that are in those things would be very hard to get now. If I recall, Pac Man used a Z80. They're still available, since they're used in a lot of industrial controllers and stuff like that. But starting to find memory controllers and stuff that would have been in the original Pac Man machines running with ?1K? ?2K? - whatever - of RAM, would be tough as nails to find. If you can't get them, the addresses and handling of just about every device on the data bus will probably be different, and this will mean that you'd have to go through the contents of the ROMs and change them where necessary.
Remember, you can dis-assemble machine language from the ROMs back to assembly. But there won't be any comments in the code, or any spaces between subroutines to make it more human-readable or anything like that. And you would have to do that for every game you wish to reproduce. It would be hell.
So, you either buy a real Pac Man machine, or you hack a TV set into a wooden box, connect it to the output of your trusty NTSC-out video card (ATI All-in-Wonder series, Xpert@Play98, etc. work well with MAME), and stuff a PC into the cabinet.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I might be totaly cool to build a double desktop cabinet with 2 14" monitors, and two PCs with the floppy/cdrom accessible to the outside. If you tilt the monitors, they only remain visible to the respective players. I chose 14" monitors just because they're cheap.
Now, connect the PCs with a cross-over ethernet cable, and you have a bitchin' head-to-head any PC game you want.
Perhaps it has been done before, but I think it would be cool! It would certainly be a conversation topic.
Who knows...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
it's news for woodworkers.
Don't knock woodworkers They can handle a routing table better than most people here.
My girlfriend and I took a good friend to an 'adult entertainment' store one evening after he turned 21. The whole time he was there he played a 15 year old Ms. Pac-Man machine that had probably been sitting in the corner for as long unused. Funniest thing I've ever seen.
Okay, I loved Pac Man, but not to that extent.
Either the strippers were really bad, or the guy is gay. Try taking him to another place, maybe even one with naked men. I know that when I was 21, Ms. Pac Man woulda had nothing on a good striptease. That ain't normal.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If you're building the hardware anyways, and your RAM/demultiplexers are fast enough, you can make pretty much any addressing scheme look like any other addressing scheme. I bet you wouldn't even have to get very creative, though, 'cause I'll bet those old games all use 8-bit words.
Ugh. Kludge! Kludge! Yeah, I know, sometimes it's the only way to get the job done.
And yes, Virginia, there is still such a thing as a 74138.Off topic, but there is no longer such a thing as a 2N1671. Or a 2N5755. And I challenge anyone to find a 10 watt zener diode that isn't from ECG or NTE. (Sorry, I'm at work, and I have to build a fairly sophisticated regulator that was designed in the 1960s. We're deathly afraid of changing the design because it's FAA-approved and works well in *high* RF fields, and we don't have time to prototype and test a new design.)
At least I can "make" the 10 watt 10 volt zener (1N2974) by wiring two 5V 5W zeners in series. Modern triacs to replace the 2N5755 either burn up with the gate current that I feed this thing, or are so overrated that they handle the gate current but don't latch with the load that we're running at it. And the UJT? Feh. No one has used a UJT in a new circuit in 20 years.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I've always wanted to build one of these, but with a full time job and full time school, I find it impossible to find the time. Does anyone know about arcade cabinets for mame or Jamma that can be bought outright. The one on at http://www.arcadepc.com looks interesting, but I don't think I would send some $1k plus for something I can't see and try out. Anyone buy something similar or know of a good place to get one? Thanks!
I remember talking with my girlfriend last year about how she could design the shell and I could do the computer work to make a homemade arcade machice using MAME. But of course it's already been done! Oh well, such as life. Its not like I don't already have enough projects to keep me busy. Who knows, maybe I will still proceed with a homemade acrade machine after all.
Build your own arcade controls
Arcade OS frontend for cabinets
Hey, if you do start to manage to mirror some of these sites, let me know and I'll mirror them too. My school has arse loads of bandwitdh, too. Not to mention, I have access to webspace on two seperate servers.
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If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Wakawaka.
www.ridiculopathy.com
Geeks of the world be happy....yet another person with no life...
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I must admit, some of the fondest memories of my childhood were of the Ms. PacMan table in the local mexican fast food place. You could order your food, set it on top of the table, eat and play arcade all at the same time. I had so much fun, I'd go there whenever I could for Ms PacMan and mexican food.
Of course, that might explain why I weigh 300 pounds now...
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Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
there aren't enough hours in the day to tackle a project like this. Oh wait, I forgot that programmers only work 48 days a year. They should have plenty of time to build one of the these babies. I knew I should have went inot programming instead of networking
www.droppingdimes.com
Maybe this person has a thing about red bows, but if I was going to build an old game, I'd go for 'Scramble', as a large number of the early videogame machines ran on (slightly modded) scramble boards. Oh, and this guy cheats a bit, there is a lot of parts in the cabient list which he sources from a 'stripped cab' or a 'Wizard of Wor' cabinet.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Linus built his own BABY from scratch.
Yum
humor for the clinically insane
great comedy company.
The real Pac Man is much better IMO
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
You can get these things for £40 if you look around! Unless they have seriously gone up in the last 5 years!
Arcadeathome I'll make one someday!
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
When I read the /. post, I assumed this would be more exciting than it actually turned out to be.
The guy starts off with a monitor and a Ms Pacman boardset. All he does is make a cabinet, and wire it up. This is basically nothing but a carpentry project with a little electrical wiring (no electronics as such). Now, building a replica cabinet is a cool thing in itself; I just don't think of it as "News for Nerds" -- it's news for woodworkers.
I encourage people to look in an arcade cabinet: you'd be surprised at just how little there is in there: speakers, monitor, controls, all wired up to a single interface connector.
What I thought I was going to see, and something that would have been incredibly cool, was instructions on building a Ms Pacman board from scratch: using off the shelf chips and home-burnt PROMs (naughty!). Wake me up when we see that.
It *is* a cool project though. Well done to the guy and everything.
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Well, here at school I have arseloads of bandwidth, so it wouldn't be a problem for me... HOWEVER, the guy that made the site has one of those damn right-clck protection Javascript things installed so no one steals his images... those are SO annoying.
But yea, if I manage to catch a site before it becomes unavailaboe next time, I'll make a copy so that the original site has some time to recover.
-inq
All that MAME/emu/DIY classic game stuff is just gross. Classic games are more than just the program code, they're the real controls, real monitor and even the particular acoustic quality of the original arcade cabinet. People who think they can DIY and get anything approaching the true arcade experience of the original miss the point with an epic lack of clue. The very idea of "emulating" such games is absurd- is a photograph an "emulation" of an actual painting? If you want classic games, get the actual classic games, period. And don't whine about the impracticality; I have 30+ classics from the mid-70's to early-80's, and despite the inevitable maintenance and space issues, I can't imagine a more fun hobby.
Build your own controls FYI
http://www.heckard.com/mspacman/pacproj.htm
And yes, he has done the wiring -- all the good stuff's on the next page. Those pictures should be complete also.
It's not like you can't load the image directly... http://enet2.enetis.net/~wandk/pacproj/assembly.jp g
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
Okay folks... it's clear that this dispute isn't going to be settled any time soon (at least not until all the votes are counted ;), so let's compromise. I propose that we devote our spare time to Pac Man Jr. He has genetic code from both of the beloved dot-gobblers.
You get the best of both worlds, and a nifty beanie cap to boot!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If you wait a month or so, Namco's "20 year anniversary" kits will be out.
For around $1200-$1500, you'll get a *brand new* arcade PCB capable of running Ms Pac Man, Pac Man, or Galaga (each with speedup/rapidfire selectable).
This can be hooked up via JAMMA to a standard res arcade monitor and you're in business.
Assuming you can FIND one, dedicated versions are for sale right now (tabletops come out end of month) for around $2600.
Ms Pac is very very hot right now -- my employer's sales on the Ms Pac/Galaga reissue are expected to top out somewhere around 700-1200 units.
While the nostalgia factor is really kinda cool, and certainly one a groovy application of the technology in these homemade cabinets, its not the only possibility.
For some time I've been considering building an upright cabinet for more modern games such as Quake 3, Midtown Madness, and Call to Power. The primary difficulty is finding a good interface to the games as they all seem to require many more control inputs these days than the standard 8-way stick and 6 fire buttons offered by the newest jamma cabinets. Track balls seem good, but I've yet to work out a good configuration of buttons that equate to the inverted T of a keyboard direction control. The best so far has been a keyboard number pad.
I reckon a bunch of linked Quake 3 cabinets would be one of the coolest things ever..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The reason this site went down so fast is because it is mostly pictures of the work this gentleman has done. However, Google has all the text, so go here for the first page, and here for the second.
It only looks like this guy has the cabinet built... no wiring has been done yet.
Still, it looks cool!
-inq
This reminds me... offtopic I know, but funny none-the-less... My girlfriend and I took a good friend to an 'adult entertainment' store one evening after he turned 21. The whole time he was there he played a 15 year old Ms. Pac-Man machine that had probably been sitting in the corner for as long unused. Funniest thing I've ever seen.
ALG
You'll see in my tag line that I've taken a generic Sega sit-at cabinet (Aero City) and removed all the guts from it. I replaced the control panel with a keyboard and mouse area. I placed a pedestal within the cabinet to set the normal computer monitor on top of. The marquee is lit on top, and it makes for one heck of a computer workstation.
This hobby is addictive, the barrier to entry is low, and as long as you don't destroy things, you're actually collecting electronics that regularly increase in value! Few tech hobbies can claim that.
It doesn't seem to me that the gentleman who made the game table and / or web site was begging for your comments. So he has javascript that keeps newbies from stealing his pictures and we all know the way around. For a large part of the population that javascript box scares them to death and they don't steal his pictures.
...and what's worse is that most of these people are proud to be associated with that guy. :(
And so it was a woodworking project... That can't be interesting? There aren't different levels of technical ability?
geez, people. Give the guy a little slack. He had some initiative. He got something working. He was proud. That's all.
Sometimes everybody in the computer community reminds me of that guy on the simpsons that owns the comic book store.
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
How about a cabinet that has hundreds of games? Check this out. It explains how to make the cabinet, how to wire everything (including the controls, and a coin-op if you want), even how to add Jamma support. And a price list too!
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I saw some of the pictures for a bit... but then upon refreshing the page not only is it not there but it looks like they've removed that page... hehehe
read it here
it's worth your time if you are a carpentry geek (old-skool tech).
[|]
About 5 years ago, one of my friends was at a police auction, and there were 10 upright arcade machines there, all in working order. They had been siezed, since they were modified to run illegal gambling. Since my friend has $10 on him at the time, he made the only bid, and got all the machines for the lowly price of $1/machine.
A year later he was moving out, and he offered to sell me the machines at $10/machine. I said no, since I didn't want to have a big hulking machine that only could play one game (I believe it was poker, blackjack, etc on the machines). The machines had great monitors and all the controls worked.
Then, about 2 years ago I got into console and arcade emulation heavily. I found out that a lowly K6-2 stuck in a machine with a special adapter/driver could run plenty of games and use the original monitor. *Sigh* I looked up prices on Ebay. Conservatively, since the machines did have a slot in the front to dispense money and thus weren't exactly mint, each machine could have been sold for $250.
D'oh, I am dumb.
My friend was happy, he bought them for the remote controlled relays in the machines that were used to "flip" the machine over to a non-gambling game whenever the cops came around. So, he got a ton of relays. I, in my naive state, got shafted. I believe he sold all his remaining machines (5) for $50.
Since I researched a bit on emulation and arcade cabinents in hopes of building a cocktail style machine, here's some useful links I found.
- A list of links for arcade cabinents, especially about building your own.
- A M.A.M.E cocktale project, looks closely like the machine I want.
- Another build-your-own cabinet page (using consoles, not M.A.M.E)
- A great faq on how to build an arcade console, a must read for anyone thinking about it. Includes stuff like the problem of keyboard ghosting and encoders.
- Another build-a-cabinet page, with pics and diagrams
- Diagrams for a dual keyboard circuit and automatic joystick switch + other fun stuff. Another must read.
- Keyboard Matrix Help
- Happ Controls, the source of arcade quality joysticks, buttons, and other controls. They also sell keyboard encoders and other neat stuff. If you look around on the web page, you can find a place to order a free catalog, which can give you an idea of prices. (Please though, only ask for a catalog if you're interested, I hate to see the
/. effect decend on this nice company)
- A source for emulators, and emulator news.
- An emulator front-end.
- English translations for NES & SNES. The reason why I became interested in emulation in the first place.
That is my list of resources, if you have any, please put them in a reply to this comment, or mail me at dasunt@hotmail.com. I'm especially interested in cocktail-style cabinents, hacks for controls, and translation sites (so many nice games never made it out of Japan).This guy built a Defender upright cabinet:
http://plaza.powersurfr.com/kevin/arcade/
This company sells an upright cabinet for home use that's modeled after the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cabinet (scroll down to "Mini Ms. Pac-Man 1"):
http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-local/show.cgi?SERIA L= 2395&LANG=en_US
This guy plans to make a Ms. Pac-Man upright cabinet from scratch. He has pictures of measurements taken from a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, which others can use to try to make this, too:
http://retro.co.za/arcade/cabinet.html
Enjoy!
well, now i'm really curious about your job... what do you do?
That's not really easy to describe.
I work for a division of Litton. Primarily, we design and build radar, navigation, communications, closed-circuit TV and engine management systems for ships.
The navigation product line used to include Very Low Frequency (VLF) navigation systems, and in the 1970s, Decca Radar bought out a company that built RF insulators that were used by the Decca Navigator system.
Decca Radar was bought up by Racal Electronics, which then finally sold Racal-Decca Radar to Litton, who merged it with Sperry Marine and C-Plath.
And, alongside everything, is this little insulator manufacturing facility. Even though the Decca Navigator is long obsolete - like, as obsolete as calling up Apple and asking their help desk for Apple IIe assistance - the Insulators division continues to make insulators and associated tower parts for big AM radio broadcasters, defence submarine communications, shortwave broadcasters, etc.
A lot of low-frequency (AM band and lower) radio transmitting towers are live. Unlike a TV tower, or a cellular tower, or an FM broadcasting tower - which simply supports an antenna - the output of the transmitter is actually hard wired to the steel structure of the tower. It usually *is* the antenna. Given that many thousands of watts of RF energy is on the tower, it must be insulated from ground. When the tower is 1,500 feet tall, the base insulator and all the guy wire insulators involved become rather formidable.
And you can imagine the problems when you have FAA-mandated obstruction lights that have to be powered, even though the lights will be operating at a potential of 250,000+ volts higher than the powerline supplying them. So, we make huge oil-filled isolating transformers with sufficient ratings to couple 525 volt 200+ amp power for the lights across across to the tower. And when half the lights blink and the other half don't - and when the transformers are inefficient because of the distant coupling required in order to make them work with that potential difference between the windings - you need a regulator.
Therein lies the problem. Redesigning it is even less practical than building something that requires semiconductors that were discontinued 20 years ago.
Further, my boss likes to keep his fingers in every pie, and Litton allows this, because it was allowed under Racal-Decca. So not only is there Marine and Insulators, we also have a small flight information system on the side - which I administer (really crappy quickly-designed website here) - and (get this) because our insulators manufacturing plant will soon be quiet (not a booming industry), the boss is ramping up for us to start making small quantities of specialized car parts.
Not only that, but I also administer the office LAN, webserver, mail server, file server, etc. And I write technical documentation for a large number of items in our product line, including a radar video processing system that I designed.
It's incredibly convoluted. But it all seems to work somehow.
Sorta. I'm not someone who likes to badmouth my boss - I do like the guy, and this is nothing against Litton - but he's a bit of a bumbler and not well liked by our head office; so, frankly, there's nowhere to go within this division of Litton.
So, if you know anyone who is hiring, and looking for a diverse and eclectic mix of skills, send an e-mail. Please. Resume and references are available upon request.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I went to one earlier this year, and they had *lots* of stuff. I bought myself a Mortal Kombat II arcade cabinet in excellent shape for $120, and it works fine. The only thing I needed to do to it to make it perfect was replace one of the joystick microswitches. The game works great, and it's currently in my apartment's living room.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
http://www.heckard.com/mspacman/pacproj.htm