Right... back to it.
I've been off this fun project for almost three months working on real life projects that pay bills and stuff. It's been really annoying because I've known it only required another few days to complete and I've had to just look at it whilst giving every spare hour I have to other things.
First things first, I had to figure some way to distribute power. The screen works on 12v, the game board and sound use 6v each and the LED for the marquee uses 3v. I found the solution was to build a little power board using a 12v supply, and a 6v voltage chip to regulate.
I was all proud of my little power board, but in a moment of utter stupidity when testing it, I accidentally ran 12v through the 6v game board. Twenty seconds later and the game was ruined.
However, there was a brilliant silver lining to this cloud.
I bought another second hand game unit and discovered that there are at least two versions of the game. In this picture, the broken old board (on the left) would have required soldering wires directly onto the PCB contacts and holding them with hot-glue. I did this with the
7 Inch Pac-Man and it's a really miserable and time consuming job.
The good news is the new board (on the right) has all of it's switches wired through easy to use ribbon cables. I was so glad I broke the first one, it probably saved five or six hours of bad language and misery.
Now it was largely down to squeezing things inside and making all of the connections from the control panel to the game board.
First up, get the sound and power board into the cabinet.
The sound is coming through a hole in the base of the cabinet. I was a little fearful it would sound too muffled but it surprisingly sounds quite good.
After a good two hours of careful soldering and testing, the whole thing is connected. All the buttons, the joystick, the video and sound feed. Everything is in place. Now I've got to do the impossible "ship in a bottle" trick and squeeze it all in.
I've since discovered that the power still isn't quite right. I don't think the 600mA powerpack has the oomph to run everything and after a minute or so the unit starts to suffer from power drain, even shorter with the volume high. The good news is I can test it and play a game to make sure everything is working fine.
This picture disguises all the guts that are still hanging out of the back, but it's all working and very nearly complete. Just a new powerpack, some careful fitting and a few final finishing touches (a chrome dust collar for the joystick) and it's done.