As most of you know, I’m a humble man.
You can stop laughing any time you like.
I truly am. There is a considerable difference between pride in your skills and accomplishments, and bragging to build yourself up, or just to show off. Nonetheless, this is a conversation for another day.
*ahem*
As most of you know, I’m a humble man. Just this once I’m going to step aside from that and say "Check this shit out, bitches. Lookie what I built that you don’t got. Try not to drool on the paint."
Ok, this project is no big surprise to most of you out there, but I’ve finally reached a point where I can say that it is complete. Not to say there isn’t work I’m currently doing on it and will be doing in the future.
Meet PAC.
PAC started life as a Bally/Midway Pac-Man cabinet manufactured in 1984, signed, sealed and serial numbered. By the time I got my mitts on him, he had seen seventeen years of hard use and had been stripped of all parts not wooden or insignificant – basically an empty cabinet.
Why did I acquire this empty shell of a once great and mighty arcade game, one of the classic arcade games that defined the genre?
Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator – the program that takes the original programming from the ROMs used in arcade games and emulates everything else using your PC: mainboard, sound, display, controls, etc. The upshot is that you’re playing the original games you enjoyed in the arcade, using your computer. Currently MAME supports 3936 ROM sets, 2254 being unique games. Lots of you have heard of it and no doubt installed and played with it on your own PC. It always lacked something. That one of a kind tactile feel and the clickity-click of the buttons and joysticks that you only get from standing and playing on true arcade games.
I stumbled across a whole society of people we never knew existed. Folks who live in the space between dimensions. Clever individuals who figured out that you can build a set of controls using genuine arcade parts and interface them with a computer.
Now, by the time I got on the scene, this community had already evolved through several stages:
- In the beginning there was the the "keyboard hack". Essentially, you dismantle a computer keyboard, trace out the contacts to map the keys, solder wires to the control board and connect them to the switch contacts of arcade buttons and joysticks. Take this whole rig, bang it into a box of some sort and whammo – you have an arcade control panel. While this is still a popular way of interfacing the controls, it has some drawbacks. The first is ghosting, which is the fact that all the keys on your keyboard share a common connection with some other keys, and pressing two of those keys at the same time can cause some unpredictable results… not good in the middle of a game. The second is keyscanning. There is a set interval – usually 16 times a second – that your keyboard scans for key presses and relays them to the computer. While that sounds pretty quick, it isn’t in the grand scheme of things. It’s not an instantaneous response to an input and can cause lag, and in some cases loss of input as the keyboard buffer floods.
- Not long after, someone also developed the "mouse hack". They figured out how to interface the optical sensors of a good old fashioned ball mouse to arcade trackballs and spinners, allowing them to plug straight into the PC. No real drawbacks to this except it’s a pain-in-the-ass to do, and the PC mouse is a lot more sensitive than a trackball and has a tendency to freak out when you give the ball a good, fast spin.
- It didn’t take long for people to fall in love with the idea of using real arcade controls. They grooved on it so much that they quickly made the next logical leap: "If I can make the control panel, why not put the whole shebang into an arcade cabinet and get the full experience?" And so it goes. Folks started modifying cabinets, and even building their own cabinets from scratch to give their arcade capable PCs a home.
- Later on, as the hobby started catching on, some exceptionally clever and enterprising guys who were pretty darned good with designing electronics developed keyboard emulators. Basically, several companies designed interfaces that the computer accepted as a keyboard and you could wire your buttons and sticks directly to without tearing up a keyboard – they even included little labeled terminal blocks you could run your wires to. The big advantages were ease of installation and no ghosting or keyscanning. Response times are faster and there is no key buffer to worry about.
- These same guys also developed optical interfaces for arcade trackballs and spinners that you could tie into the serial or USB ports of your computer. No more pain-in-the-ass hacking.
- There are some arcade equipment manufacturers who are now offering products that are specifically built with the MAME gamer in mind. Direct to PC arcade controls. How’s that for acceptance?
Evolution is a good thing. Now there are more sites you can go to for homework, research, tips, tricks, how-to etc. than you can shake a stick at. Controls are easy and cheap to get. Public forums are jammed to the rafters with friendly folks who are more than willing to help feed your habit. And it is a habit. It’s a mind-bending monkey that staples itself to your back and fills your thoughts to the brink of overflowing! Ain’t it grand?
So, fueled with this knowledge, the scales falling from my eyes as I discover this "hidden in plain sight" society of arcade-gamers-on-the-next-level, I set off to start my project.
Long story short – too late – I acquired my Pac-Man cabinet from a local ex coin-op technician named Bob Roberts who is still in the market of selling controls and replacement parts to the emulation and restoration communities. He’s a nice old grizzled guy, who is genuinely interested in helping the folks who are pursuing these hobbies. He has a wealth of knowledge and gives freely of it. He sold me the cabinet, all of my controls, an original Bally/Midway coin-door and an original Pac-Man marquee. Oh, and replacement monitor parts for my Nintendo Play-Choice 10 system – but that’s a different story.
The cabinet was in good structural shape, but was pretty shabby in the appearance department. The yellow coloring was fading, and the artwork had rubbed off near the front where years of leaning and playing had taken its toll. Hey, whadda ya’ expect for seventeen years of use? Still, it was a classic and I could have used it as was – it didn’t look that bad. Yeah, y’all know me well enough to know that I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I restored the exterior of the cabinet. I patched a few spots where the wood was bad, I filled in some holes, had the yellow, blue and red color-matched from a spot that had never seen the light of day and re-painted the entire cabinet and it’s artwork by hand. I also restored the coin-door and added working coin mechs to it so it will accept coins to trigger a credit in addition to my "coin-up" buttons (which I can disable, forcing people to pay-to-play if I so choose) and replaced the old T-molding with some fresh, bright orange new material. A lot of work, but fun.
I then proceeded to layout my control panel. I wanted a four-player control panel, with as many buttons as I could spare for each player. I had to have a trackball, and a spinner was a necessity as I am a Tempest player from way back. Due to evolution, I added a dedicated 4-way ball-top Pac-Man style joystick to the panel for games like, well, Pac-man and Q-bert, etc. where the common 8-way joystick would cause problems when you hit a diagonal direction. The big problem I had to face was the sheer size of a four-player control panel. How do I balance it on a cabinet originally designed for one player, and how do I get this beast through doors when I need to?
I eventually designed a decent layout, and beat the size problem to boot. I then commenced to build the removeable control panel. I ended up with a very satisfactory layout. It’s a lot of wiring, so I used Cat-5 cable to wire all the switches from the buttons and joysticks to the control boards. The trackball is a PC "Crystal Trackball", and the spinner was custom made for me by my friend Jeff out of solid stainless steel, with a Microsoft Optical mouse employed for tracking. In the bottom of the control panel I have two Ultimarc IPAC (no, not the Apple device) keyboard emulators in tandem to take all the button and stick inputs and translate them to keypresses and send them along to the PC.
I built a PC from spare parts, and is currently a P-III 600 with 384MB of RAM, a 15GB hard drive (7GB of which are just MAME ROMs) and an ATI Rage II video card with TV-out capabilities. Originally I had a 17" monitor in there that was rigged to rotate 90° so that games like Tempest and Pac-Man could be played in portrait mode, and games like Joust and Marvel Super Heroes could be played in landscape mode. It was a complex arrangement that I never had time to finish (i.e. it rotated by hand, but I was going to motorize it eventually). I’ve just recently put a 25" television stripped from its plastic housing into the cabinet, hooked it into the ATI video card and never looked back. Operating in Windows is a little fuzzy, but I’m not in this for Windows – the games look spectacular. Here are one or two examples of the games as they appear on the new display. Photos don’t do it justice.
The next item on the list of things I’m going to be doing to PAC stems from ideas I had in mind from the start of the project. I’d like to install other emulators like the Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Playstation, etc. Recently, after I got the TV installed, I had intended to hook-up my real SNES to it and stick it in the cabinet and trail the controllers through the coin-door. Gonzo recently reminded me that I should just run the emulator and use the nice arcade control panel to play the games. Doh! I had forgotten that’s what I set out to do 18 months ago when I started this project.
Yeah, I babbled on this time around – no big shock there – but I’m really proud of this project. I’ve even infected a few folks with the desire to build their own (and you know who you are). Those who won’t build will still come and mooch play-time on PAC. It’s a good thing.