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Games Entertainment

Build Your own Ms. Pac-Man machine from Scratch 86

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-it-yourselfer dept.
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?
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Build Your own Ms. Pac-Man machine from Scratch More

Build Your own Ms. Pac-Man machine from Scratch

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  • 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.

    --
  • 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?

  • 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'.

  • [I was quick to actually see the pages]

    The first page deals mostly with the enclosure cabinet and *the second* deals with the wiring. So he did wire it up after all.

    __________________________________________

  • 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.
  • Scramble was one of my favorite video games. I'd love to see how to make one of those.


  • On that site about making your own controls, there's a whole collection of links to sites people have put up to document their own cabinet construction projects... there's a hell of a lot of successful efforts
    out there [arcadecontrols.com]!



    Seth
  • LOL

    Google must not have found the updated wiring page then ;)

    Just goes to show you, don't believe everything you see.

    -inq

  • Re:A carpentry project... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30, 2000 @06:24AM (#591869)
    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

    --------
  • 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.
  • All these comments and none about a Cluster



    Shame on you Anonymous Cowards

  • Re:This guy's experience (Score:3)

    by gorilla ( 36491 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @08:15AM (#591875)
    In this machine, all the cloth insulation is the same color, which makes tracing the wires from source to destination almost impossible.

    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...

  • 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.

    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.htm --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.

    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.ht 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.

    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_jud 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..

    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 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.
  • 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?

  • Right-Click... Grrrr! (Score:4)

    by CritterNYC ( 190163 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @05:11AM (#591880) Homepage
    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.

    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 .plan.
  • 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...

    --
  • 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.
  • You know, considering the nature of this site the Google cache is pretty useless without all the pictures to go along with the site. We at /. should really start a mirroring program of sorts. Seeing as I (and probably many others) don't refresh as fast as some of you, many times I don't get to see the cool/interesting website before it goes down, and frankly this perturbs me. If somebody were to start to offer a mirroring program here at /. (I would but I don't have enough time to properly do a program such as this) I would gladly donate some of my webspace to such a project, and I'm guessing that many others out there would too.


    --------------------------------------

  • There was Super Pac-Man which was lame, and a Baby Pac-Man, which I think was a video game/pinball combo.
  • I just moved in a Pinball Machine [widomaker.com] - 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.

  • Re:A carpentry project... (Score:3)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @06:27AM (#591886) Homepage

    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.

  • That's because one of the monsters moves randomly, while the rest still follow a set path. You can still use a "pattern", but the yellow one may jump in front of you. There's also four different boards and moving fruit, while Pac-Man had only one boring board and stationary fruit.

  • 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...

  • Re:This guy's experience (Score:3)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @08:23AM (#591889) Homepage

    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.)

  • Re:A carpentry project... (Score:3)

    by dillon_rinker ( 17944 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @06:32AM (#591890) Homepage
    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.

  • Where do you sleep? Where is the can? Do you ever have company?

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • then you probably already know rec.games.pinball is a great group.

  • I stumbled across mame in '97 and have been re-living those old arcade memories every day since. I have been collecting arcade and computer parts for about a year now and last week I found a galaga cabinet tucked away in somebodys garage for $150.00. This machine housed a family of sqirrels for about 5 years and had about 4 inches of dirt, nuts, and hair in the bottom. I gutted it completely (it's a classic so it was hard) and when done I could not beleive how good the cabinet looked. It is in great shape other than the guts. Last night I hooked the monitor up to my PC and to my amazement it worked wonderfully. You can do all sorts of things with it too, like getting the actual coin slots to register a quarter for the game. I have had a blast with my project and will be done in about a week. I can't wait to play the 1200 or so 80's games I have loaded on the PC dedicated to this Cabinet. If you are interested in doing your own conversion check out these links below.

    Build your own arcade controls [arcadecontrols.com]

    Arcade OS frontend for cabinets [arcadeos.com]

  • Voila... instant right-click menu.

    AWESOME. Thanks for the tip. :D

  • 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.
    --------------------------------------
  • I think I saw this on an episode of Norm Wilkins' Yankee Workshop - or was it The Furniture Guys?

    Wakawaka.

    www.ridiculopathy.com [ridiculopathy.com]

  • Geeks of the world be happy....yet another person with no life...

  • Wow... (Score:3)

    by Electric Angst ( 138229 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:51AM (#591902)
    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...
    --

  • lazy web admin (Score:3)

    by magnum32 ( 171166 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:56AM (#591903) Homepage
    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
  • 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.
  • Linus built his own BABY from scratch.
  • Has anyone ever tried to figure out a "build-it-yourself" for one of the original upright games - a la Pole Position? I would love to put that together if anyone knows how

    1. humor for the clinically insane [mikegallay.com]
  • The real Pac Man is much better IMO
  • You can get these things for £40 if you look around! Unless they have seriously gone up in the last 5 years!
  • Arcadeathome [efront.com] I'll make one someday!

  • A carpentry project... (Score:4)

    by slim ( 1652 ) <john@@@hartnup...net> on Thursday November 30, 2000 @05:00AM (#591910) Homepage
    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.
    --
  • $400 for something like this is pretty cheap. Ms.PacMan cocktails run in the neighborhood of $1200US. Ms. PacMan is still one of the top earning games today, even when put next to the most hi-tech games around.

    Why? Because its simple and fun to play and it appeals to both sexs.

    The other reason the price of Ms. PacMan (and games like Galaga) are through the roof is because of eBay. eBay provides the seller with a much larger audience with more $$ to burn than the average person.

    Building games from scratch is cool, and I've even consdidered doing it, but I prefer to restore them. It can be more work at times, but its a lot more satisfying to bring something back from the dead, then it is to create it from scratch. I'm biased though :-)

    If you look around the net, you'll find that there are A LOT of people who have built games from scratch, or just built cabinets from MAME.

    Its a cool hobby, but once you start down that path, forever will you be doomed! I started with Defender, now I have 21 games!

    What that guy did was fantastic and required a lot of skill. To that I say congratulations! The cool thing about this story though, is it wasn't a MAME cabinet! I have nothing against MAME, I've used it and use it every once in awhile (why use MAME when you have the real thing?)

    Anyway... Visit my site, and you'll get a lot more info on this hobby than you ever wanted.

    Arcade Restoration Workshop [arcaderestoration.com]

    Brien

  • 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.
  • 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.

    And yes, Virginia, there is still such a thing as a 74138.

    --

  • Mirror with pictures (Score:3)

    by sheckard ( 91376 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @06:42AM (#591916) Homepage
    I have a fast mirror, complete with all pictures (except for a few that still seem to be broken) here:

    http://www.heckard.com/mspacman/pacproj.htm [heckard.com]

    And yes, he has done the wiring -- all the good stuff's on the next page. Those pictures should be complete also.

  • Re:This guy's experience (Score:3)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @06:56AM (#591917) Homepage

    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.

  • It's not like you can't load the image directly... http://enet2.enetis.net/~wandk/pacproj/assembly.jp g [enetis.net]
  • 1) in a bed
    2) in the john
    3) yes, it's a 4 player machine - more fun w/ friends.
  • Sure, the real thing is better, but with an emulator I can get ~75% of the arcade experience, and play your 30+ classics and hundreds more with a single cabinet. For folks with unlimited space real machines are great; for folks who aren't so lucky, emulators are an acceptable tradeoff.
  • Or just use wget.
  • 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!


  • I followed it and it contained another link to this site for a company that's selling fully-configured arcade cabinets for installing computers in and running MAME. Check it
    out [hanaho.com]. Looks identical to an asteroids stand-up cabinet.



    Seth
  • Using IE 5.5 with Javascript activated, and I don't see anything off that which you describe..has it been changed?
  • You are correct... it appears the offending JavaScript was removed sometime between 11am and 5pm.

    Some day I hope to have a .plan.


  • 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..

  • Google links (The site is mostly pics though) (Score:5)

    by inquis ( 143542 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @05:02AM (#591928)

    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 [google.com] for the first page, and here [google.com] for the second.

    It only looks like this guy has the cabinet built... no wiring has been done yet.

    Still, it looks cool!

    -inq

  • GameDoc [gamedoc.com], one of the sources listed in this article, lists a Ms. Pac Man tabletop game at ~ $2,000. Too bad...this would be a cool thing to have in my living room.

  • The guy who built this machine is obviously a big proponent of feminism.

    And how do you even know it was a guy? Can you proof that?

    Note to male macho pigs: WARNING!!Feministic flamewar approaching. Read threaded, ignore this one.

    Thank you.
  • 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

  • Arcade Stuff... (Score:3)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @05:36AM (#591933)
    I've got an arcade hobby... or does it have me? I've finally reduced my apartment to only seven uprights. I've got one JAMMA compatible Japanese sit-down arcade game with a 29" screen The Taito Egret 29 [gameshop.com] which I got for a great price on eBay (and shipping from California to the central US was $200). Picking up a generic JAMMA cabinet is a *great* way to get into the hobby, and the sit-at Japanese cabinets are pretty light and very cool looking.

    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.

  • I think the "Ms" prefix indicates that she's been married and is now divorced. Maybe she's PacMan's sister or something. His mother maybe?

    Wait just a minute here - were there any more PacMan games produced after Ms. PacMan arrived? Uh-oh, I think Ms. PacMan is just a gelding version of the original PacMan. There goes my childhood.

    ---

  • Cut the guy a break (Score:3)

    by JohnCub ( 56178 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @05:38AM (#591935)
    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 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. ...and what's worse is that most of these people are proud to be associated with that guy. :(
  • How about a cabinet that has hundreds of games? Check this [russprince.com] 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!


    --
  • 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
  • ...has the best FAQ (welllll- Anti-FAQ) I've ever read. definitely one of the funnier documents out there.

    read it here [shavings.net]

    it's worth your time if you are a carpentry geek (old-skool tech).

  • Gather around, boys and girls, for a story how Dasunt was really dumb. This is a great story, btw, I want to kick myself in the arse every time I recall it.

    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. 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 [litton.com]. 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) [flightinfo.net] - 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.


  • 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.

    Triplett Fox and Hound set. Yeah, I've got one, it's wonderful when you're trying to figure out which piece of Cat-5 running though the suspended ceiling in the office is the one that you wish to drop to your boss' office. But in the confines of a pinball machine, mine doesn't work: the sensitivity is too great.

    (On the other hand, I can trace a wire on the other side of a cinderblock wall, which comes in handy more often than less sensitivity.)

  • It's not about who has a better project. It's about having an idea and bringing it to life yourself, instead of paying someone else to do it. It's like saying "Kernighan and Ritchie created C...big freaking whoop, Neal Armstrong walked on the moon!"
  • For those of you who don't want to go through the trouble of building an arcade cabinet, but still want one - I highly recommend Video Game auctions. You can get some cool stuff pretty cheap.

    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?

  • This site just happens to be slashdotted at the moment... but I got at least the start of a mirror going.

    http://www.heckard.com/mspacman/pacproj.htm [heckard.com]

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