Did it take a pandemic to slow things down a little and find time to polish off the Pac-man project? Nah, I’m sure it is a coincidence. The final part of the build was getting the control panels designed with custom vinyl graphics and mounted the way I wanted (easy to remove). The very last thingI had trouble deciding on this small panel if I wanted to keep the “player 1” and “player 2” buttons on the one side or split them. I decided to just design a graphic that could do either and ordered it. The custom design is really modeled after the original, but with some tweaks to allow for extra buttons. The number of buttons was the last thing I wondered about. Even if you look at all the potential games out there, very few use more than two buttons—and most of what I wanted to play was two or less—so of course I picked three! It’s been a long journey from buying the two original arcade boards and a large CRT monitor to the final solution of a Raspberry Pi with an LCD panel. I’m pretty happy with the results. Below is a summary of the build and some of the “fun items.”
- Easy to remove top, no swing out hinge.
- Custom design but very close to the original (read as “figured it out as I went”).
- All furniture grade plywood stained and finished with wipe-on poly
- LCD bezel is paired with faux screen curvature and scan lines to emulate a CRT.
- Custom system image for Raspberry 3b, compiled and configured components I wanted. Using Mame emulator and hyperspin front end.
- All buttons/joysticks wired into iPac2 interface allowing simultaneous play.
- Custom graphics on control panels (thanks to help from my youngest son who is pictured in another build picture when was far younger!)
- 3D Design and Printed Items
- Slim hidden volume control knob
- Base plate joystick restrictor to switch 4/8 way from below panel
- Custom glass clips
- Interior clips and mounts
- Speaker covers
It was a lot of fun. It probably didn’t need to take more than a year or two, but I collected things little by little and went down a lot of rabbit holes. If I had just done a replica and ordered most of the parts (like those darn control panels), it would have been easy, but it’s nice to have something you created on your own. Now I just need COVID to go away so I can have friends over to do head-to-head pac-man! Next project will probably be a Defender cabinet or a Virtual Pinball
Check out other build posts tagged “pac-man” for pics of the journey.
