| Introduction |
| Welcome to my project. I made this page for a couple reasons. First, I wanted to chronicle my progress while building a replica Pac-Man cocktail arcade cabinet. Second, I wanted to provide some info and help to those who want to do the same, or something similar. |
| If you're here because you want to try building your own cab, be sure to check out the "Build Your Own" timeline I put together. Also, the "Costs" page is a good place to start if you're weighing your options. If you're here just to check it out, glad ya stopped by! Please feel free to with any questions or give any feedback you might have. Enjoy your visit! |
| I apologize in advance for the "wordiness" of these pages. I tried to include as much visual information as possible, but in some cases I got a bit carried away with the descriptions. Read or don't read as much as you'd like, but be forewarned - there's a lot here, and I never get tired of rambling. Also, since I've got so many pictures on the pages - those of you who are cursed with dialup connections may experience slow load-times. Sorry about that! |
| Background |
| This whole obsession started over Thanksgiving 2002. My wife and I were hanging out in a little mountain lodge, and in the bar they had both Pac-Man and Galaga cocktail machines. In our spare time, we must have pumped about $10 in quarters into that thing. We never got tired of playing it, and we even started talking about how cool it would be to have one at home. |
| Well, when we got back I decided to actually check into it. I started at Ebay, and wasn't disappointed. There were several machines listed, of varying quality. But the prices stopped me in my tracks. I didn't want to pay between $1500 and $2000 for a 20 year old machine. However, rather than giving up - I started researching other options. That's how I stumbled on my current plan. |
| So, feel free to browse the links below to learn more (probably more than you wanted to) know about my project. I've tried to arrange them in the most logical order, which ended up being some kinda quasi-chronological thing. |
| Latest News |
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Well, the cabinet is still working great. There are, however, some updates coming soon to the pages. As I type this, work is progressing on version 2.0 of my beloved cocktail cabinet. That's right - I'm doing a complete overhaul. Maybe a little explanation is necessary. On the day of Halloween, the cabinet decided it didn't want to boot. I opened her up, poked around, swapped power supplies, did everything I could think of. Finally, out of desperation, I swapped in a completely different motherboard that a friend had in his "surplus." Anyway, long story short - something was flaky with the voltage regulator on the old motherboard... and the new board did the trick. However, working inside the cabinet rekindled my desire to do some long-thought-about upgrades.
First off, I'm adding a 3rd control panel for horizontal gameplay. It will run the length of the coindoor side, and include two sets of controls so two people can sit side-by-side and play classic scrollers or fighting games. I'm excited to be working with www.arcadedepot.com again during the design phase of the 3rd panel - as they are basically handling all the design and parts acquisition (under direction from me). I'm also excited to be using some new joysticks which are 4- and 8-way configurable on-the-fly (man how I wish I could have had these the first time around). New hardware, new OS, new frontend, new games, new experience!! Aside from the description of the v2.0 "upgrade" process, I hope to take the opportunity to add some other content to the site: a list of helpful links, some more FAQ entries based on visitor e-mail, and some other odds and ends I've always wanted to do. Also, little things have been happening to the site over the past months that may have gone unnoticed. Perhaps a cause for disappointment with some visitors, I took down the reproduction marquee art that Ohara kindly offered to let me host. You can read about why here. I added some links to other helpful websites, and cleaned up some errors here and there. Well, that's it until v2.0 launch - which I envision happening sometime before summer '05. Hopefully you can find what you're looking for here. Don't forget to with any comments or questions you may have, that kind of feedback helps change the site to be more useful for everyone. Thanks for stopping by! |