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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 work my wood three times a day.
(oh, all right, just mod this down...)
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.
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 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.
Electro-Mechanical machines are very interesting...
Indeed! And they make the coolest noises when they're running. Ya know, like a Tandon 5.25" SSSD full-height disk drive to one of today's mute and impotent 3.5" drives. Even if they're only capable of storing 90k/disk, they're still a lot of fun to fire up every now and then.
Or a 20-year-old VCR, compared to today's. Cool.
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.As in, the varnish on the copper is deteriorating, shorting the windings, and causing them to draw more current than they should? It sounds like that might be the problem; I do have a few that are looking a little blackened, but when I've swapped in the solenoids off another pinball machine, that doesn't cause the problem to go away. I think I've already been suckered into rewinding a few of them for my roommate anyway...
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.Cool. Yeah, it's been hard to know where the high-current areas of the circuit are, since all the wiring is the same color and same gauge. Even so, I'm sure 20 AWG can carry enough current to pop the fuses no matter where in the circuit they're going.
It strikes me that the flipper solenoids are probably the highest current devices on the game, if they're controlled by those relays you mentioned earlier, maybe one of those is sticking.
The problem manifests itself in that when the flipper reaches the end of its travel, the switch which is supposed to turn it off doesn't work. Now, the switch appears to be properly aligned with the cam on the flipper shaft, and the switch appears good. It just seems that it should be turning off a relay that controls the flipper, perhaps - that's not happening. The flipper stays on, the laminates in the power transformer rattle with the current load of the flipper staying on too long, and suddenly pop, dead game with pretty backlights. When the power goes out, the flipper retracts, so the mechanical linkage between the solenoid and the flipper's shaft is free. Happens to either flipper.
<grin> I'll get to it one of these days. Like, shortly after Mike gets his welder out of the kitchen. (It's been there for months.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
it's news for woodworkers.
Don't knock woodworkers They can handle a routing table better than most people here.
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...
--
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
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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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.
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.
Oh my god, you're not kidding...
My roommate has a 1971 or '72 Williams Fantastic. Note that this is not a sought-after "Captain Fantastic" based on Elton John's album, it's just a "Fantastic".
It's a four-player pinball machine, with a great playfied and a really psychedelic back glass. It's a gorgeous machine.
And it's all electromechanical. Hell, even the rectifiers in the power supply aren't silicon, they're selenium!
There's a sophisticated cam-switch assembly that takes care of the state of the game at all times. It's clocked - believe it or not - by another cam and motor mechanism. Basically, with a big pile of relays, this thing has shift registers, binary adders, simple 4-bit memory and a whopping 5Hz CPU clock. It's the most complicated thing that I have ever seen where plywood is a major structural element, and the wiring is cloth insulated. In this machine, all the cloth insulation is the same color, which makes tracing the wires from source to destination almost impossible.
Of course, it doesn't quite work. I tried to count all the relay contacts in it, and I had to stop at 300 pairs. One of those pairs somewhere sticks in some game modes, jams either flipper solenoid on, and blows the 24V power supply's fuse, leaving you with backlights and a dead game.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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
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? =-