I’ve wanted a Pac-Man style cabinet for some time, so when Gary from Boston offered one up on RGVAC for $75, I jumped, since it came with a monitor.

It did came with this control panel, but without the joystick or a PCB. The idea was to have vertical games that used controls similar to Galaxian – IE Galaga, Space Invaders and the like. I even bought a slightly borked Galaxian control panel off eBay with this intention. The joystick assembly had broken, but a little J-B Weld fixed it up nicely.

I’m not sure if I’m still going to do this. It’s all set and ready to go, hardware-wise. I hacked a keyboard for the controls, and have a 486 running VAntAGE for the games.

I need to get a video amp from Ultimarc to drive the monitor, but I’ve been dragging my feet on that. I’ve been doing my tests passing the video thru a J-PAC (which works marvelously). The video amp, unfortunately, does not include the same circuit as the J-PAC to cut the VGA signal down, which can damage the monitor.

There are schematics for a circuit to turn the monitor on only when a 15KHz signal is reached. A little beyond my meager electronics skills. Thinking of asking my electrical engineer best friend Jason for some help on that front.

Andy from Ultimarc has said that possibly future video amps would have this circuit, which is the biggest reason I’ve dragged my feet on this. And since I have so many other projects, I’ve been working on them, if I work on anything at all.

This was how I got it. Filthy! Took the vacuum to it, and still really didn’t get it clean. It has some minor water damage around the very bottom.

The first idea was to strip back the black latex paint to get to the artwork underneath, but that proved fruitless. I could expose the artwork, but it would take all the black off with it.

Since it’s made of really nice birch plywood I’ve decided to strip the vinyl covering off, stain the wood and put a coat of shellac on.