So, it's been almost a year since I realized I love Ms. Pac-Man.
Growing up, I played TMNT and the Simpsons all the time in the two small local arcades that we had back then, along with various pizza places around town. After all, you were making a poor business move if you were a pizza place in the early 90s without a TMNT machine. Seriously- think about it! Eventually, all the arcades closed, Chuck'e'Cheeses got rid of their Turtles and Simpsons machines, other pizza places closed or changed out their machines for pinball or hunting games, and I resorted to emulators and my old 8 and 16 bit systems to keep my childhood memories fresh. Over the last 10 years I had thought on and off about buying a TMNT machine, until prices got high enough on them that I stopped thinking about it quite as hard. A couple years ago, a close friend snagged a Konami Alien's machine that rekindled my love with arcade machines, and I spent a few days scraping the surface of the DIY arcade community until I decided it was just too costly to justify building a cabinet.
A little over a year ago, I met a new friend who had a deep love for Pac and Ms. Pac-Man that I didn't fully understand. Around that time I had rekindled my love for Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and was fighting hard to find an Xbox controller that felt more like the controllers I used growing up. Also around that time, Fox aired an episode of Bob's Burgers titled "Burger Boss," about a fictional game that Bob had loved when he was younger and now had in his restaurant. They actually animated the game with 8-bit graphics and it looked like a lot of fun... The combination of all of this prompted me to drop a quarter in a Ms. Pac-Man machine at a bar in Chicago that I was visiting with my band before we took the stage. I had a ton of fun and played several more games; It was a machine with the speedup hack, and I did considerably better than I was expecting to do since I had never played the fast version of the game before. I thought about this for the next several days, until I started looking for a Pac-Man Plug and Play. I bought several, all of them leaving something to be desired. I started digging for an arcade stick controller for the original Xbox (mine is modded and loaded with emulators, of course. And Pac-Man can't be played with a D-pad, dammit.) until I decided the only logical way to go was an X-Arcade. I bought one.
I don't remember how long it was after getting the X-Arcade that I decided I needed to build a whole cabinet, but I'd put it in the 1-2 month range. I initially thought about building a bartop that could later be converted into a full size cabinet, and after that decided that an Aussie lowboy cabinet would be non-imposing enough to go ahead and just put in my basement. I posted a Craigslist add to see if anyone had a cabinet for sale, and not an hour later I got a reply. It was a huge imposing Stern cabinet that started its life with a Scramble game in it that was later converted to Roc'n'Rope. He was only asking $40, it came with the coin door and mechanism, marquee light, original glass and marquee, and the original CP minus the joystick- But with 4 leaf buttons! It was a tilt-back screen but not a particularly small format machine... But the price was too good to be true, so in early June (it's December now, for anyone who's reading this way after the fact) we took the seats out of a friend's minivan and drove out to pick it up. Man oh man was it hot that day. We slide it on its back down the stairs into the basement with zero regard for how incredibly difficult it's going to be to get this out of here in 4 months when my girlfriend and I move. Yuck. Anyway: Here's what it looked like when I got it.
I had a rack mountable computer that was originally a server that was given to me for free some time ago that never had a use until this project started.
In pretty short order, I figured out what I needed out of a TV. Thanks to a tremendous amount of help from member
rCadeGaming I learned why I should do things the right way video-wise and bought a transcoder, a video card that worked with the limited expandability of my rack mount computer, and a great Sony CRT TV that would allow things to be displayed at the correct resolutions. I spent months working on it, but finally got my video to a point where I was happy. Huge huge huge thanks again and again to
rCadeGaming!
In the meantime I had taken care of a few little things on my cabinet. I had a powered studio monitor speaker given to me for free a few years ago because it had an incessant buzz. I was about ready to throw it out when I did a little more research and found out $8 worth of capacitors would fix this buzz. I did it, and now I have a monophonic speaker system. I took the speaker out of the enclosure and mounted it where the speaker was originally on this machine, and attached the enclosure (which also has the amplifier portion) to the inside of my machine's cabinet. There's a potentiometer on the back of the enclosure to control the volume, which I relocated to the end of some wires with the intention of eventually mounting this to the machine somewhere so I have quick access to a volume control while playing.
I also decided to wire up some new lights to the "Quarter" signs on the coin door. I got a 3-LED tap light from the dollar store that I opened up and hacked apart, and mounted the LEDs in some plastic Coke bottle tops with a lot of hot glue. Still running off batteries, I wired the on-off switch to be activated when I flipped on the master switch for my cabinet.
This proved an extremely flimsy design and the tap light has since broken just from being moved around, so this idea has been nixed, but will be re-implemented in a smarter way. I think I'm gonna grab a string of those LED christmas lights when they're on clearance in a few weeks; they're as bright as the sun, are already wired into AC power, and would also be an alright way to light the inside of my cabinet along with my QUARTER signs. It'd be nice to be able to see if I had to poke around inside to fix something, and having lights going in there would let me keep both hands free to work instead of having to hold a flash light!
I also spent some time trying out a few different CP layouts, using a pizza box as an easy place to test-mount stuff. My plan for this machine was/is to have interchangeable control panels, so I don't have to try to squeeze EVERYTHING into one CP. I can have a perfect 4-way stick for my new Ms. Pac-Man obsession and other good old stuff, a two player 8-way panel for my beloved Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, TMNT, and everything else that needs a full range of motion and 2 simultaneous players, a track ball and spinner panel, etc. I tried a handful of 4-way sticks that I wasn't happy with, and finally got Leaf Pro stick, made by GGG, and sold barely-used in the buy and sell forum here by another member. I quickly decided to use the Leaf Pro'd restrictor plate as a template for a sturdier one that I made out of a large washer.
This still isn't the end-all stick for me, I need a harder 4-way feel than this is able to provide, but it's a nice stick and will suit me well until I find THE perfect stick.
I also re-painted the cab. That STERN logo is ugly and crappy looking, so I figured I couldn't make it any worse! I thought for quite a while about what to paint the cabinet like; I didn't want it to say Multicade or something similar that would immediately acknowledge that its an emulator machine. I also didn't want to decorate the cabinet as if it were a singular game... It didn't feel right to have a Pac Man cabinet playing Mortal Kombat or something. Upon the suggestion of a friend, I decided to pay homage to the fictional BurgerBoss and paint the cabinet with the graphics from the cartoon!
I got a bajillion screen shots taken and will be making a slightly better-looking marquee graphic for it, while my artist girlfriend paints the picture on the side. The colors of that cartoon cabinet are awful so it won't be exactly the same, but the big graphic on the side will be there. I painted the sides blue for now. They will either remain blue with the circle graphic in the middle, or I've considered expanding that graphic to live outside of just a circle so that the sky and ground extend to the entire side of the cabinet. I'm waiting to paint graphics until all the construction is done.
After finally getting my graphics issues worked out, it was time to put the TV in the cabinet. I didn't want to mount the tube to a frame, so that it was easier to take out and move in the future. Remember how I said I'm moving in a few months? I'd love to be able to just lift the TV out to move the cabinet more easily, and having it in its case still would make it exponentially easier to just sit down in a moving truck. The set had speakers on the side of the screen, and I needed to remove them and cut the sides off in order to make this 24" screen fit in this cabinet. Here's how the TV started out:
I took the tube out and disconnected the speakers, and after much thought and creative measuring I cut the sides of the case off.
I spray painted the front black before putting it back together. There will still be a bezel covering the plastic casing of the TV, but I figured this couldn't hurt as long as I already had everything torn up.
Here's the computer hanging out in the bottom of the cabinet with my interface and other various computer guts. I'm just using 1 interface and having the CPs connect via a 25-pin printer cable. The Player 1 and 2 start buttons will be mounted to the cabinet so I don't need to include them on every CP. The coin door will be hooked up and functioning. No free play man! I'll provide the quarters, I just really feel like dropping that coin in the slot is an essential part to the arcade experience.
Underside of my 4-way panel:
Topside:
I plan on wrapping the CPs with a pretty generic black wrap. I'd love it to feel just like the top of the X-Arcade, that's perfect for me. I need to find a material that is rigid enough to cover the T-Nuts and make that area feel smooth while still being flexible enough to wrap around the curved front of the panel. I started a thread about this really prematurely several months back that I figure I'll re-open after I'm a little further along.
The beginnings of my UMK3 panel:
Wowie Zowie, it works!
I took a night off from working on it last night to play games for a few hours. It feels great! Now to get back to work... I'll finally be keeping people updated via this thread. I know how much I love reading about other people's projects, I felt like it would be wrong of me if I didn't share my progress with all the people who've helped me along the way and who appreciate all of this as much as I do! Thanks to everyone, and stay tuned...
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
Send this topic
Print
Topic: Ian's BurgerBoss project thread (Read 11525 times)
