Archive for January, 2008

On my long to do list of small arcade maintenance activites, here is a photo of my Pengo.

I think the previous owner of this Sega Pengo also couldn’t figure out how to tone down the sound on the game, so they tapes something over the speaker and left it for quite some time. You can see the thick resilient masking tape residue.

Here is what you will need, pretty simple actually.

I started out with a rag and soaked it with Goo Gone, dabbing it on the residue. But I wasn’t able to apply it as thick as I wanted.

Then I figured out to soak the Scotch Brite pad and then apply it to the underside of the cabinet to start to break down the masking tape remnants.

Then, carefully after a few minutes, I scrubbed carefully in a circular motion (not pressing too hard so I didn’t make tiny scratches in the paint) until most of the residue was gone. Here is the underside of the Pengo cabinet under the marquee after I was finished. It isn’t perfect, but it is a lot better and satisfactory for me.

Took me over a month to finish installing Mark Spaeth’s Jr. Pac-man speed up kit, but I can finally rest easy know that my switch is no longer hanging out of my coin door. There was a couple page thread about the kit on the klov forums, mostly people looking to make their Jr. Pac-man gameplay faster. But, towards the end of the thread, there were some good photos and some advice as people started to get the chip replacements in the mail.

After I read about the different ways that people installed their kits, and how they mounted them in their cabinets, I had a hard time trying to figure out how to mount mine. The one set of photos I saw, was of an individual who has a Jr. Pac-man conversion in a Pac-man cabinet. 2PacMan also had wisely bought a switch from K-Mart that was threaded and this made it fairly simple to mount his switch on a shim right inside the coin door. But, after asking questions about what type of simple switch to buy from Radio Shack, I still managed to buy one that made my life harder.

So, here are the installation and mounting steps I went through to ready my Jr. Pac-man speed up kit for use.

1. The Kit Arrives

As you can see, there is plenty of slack in the wires coming off the speed up chip to run to your switch on the front of the Jr. Pac-man cabinet, wherever you want. And the brilliant part for guys like me and for a better way of explaining it, the wires are double wrapped around the bottom of the chip’s frame to prevent someone from pulling the wires off and breaking the solder connection.

Here’s a photo of the Jr. Pac-man chip with the simple toggle switch soldered and ready to go. For those of you who are really interested, the part number of the toggle switch that I got at Radio Shack is;

Toggle Switch
DPDT Micromini
275-626A
Contacts rated 3A at 125VAC/1A at 250VAC

Now, it’s time to install the switch on the Jr. Pac-man PCB.

2. Pry the old chip off the PCB board.

There is a row of 5 RAM chips marked at “8D” on the PCB including 8E, 8H, 8J etc. etc. You are going to be replacing the 8D chip, if you haven’t found this bank of chips yet, one of these two photos should help you locate them on either the Jr. Pac-man field board or the original PCB.

Take a small screwdriver, or a chip puller, and slowly pry or pull that Jr. Pac-man 8D chip out of there. I won’t cover the details in this tutorial on how to careful extract a chip without bending the pins. There are many sites out there that talk about this, and all you really need are a pair and some practice.

Now, take the new Jr. Pac-man Speed Up chip, and press it firmly into the socket. Always remember to match the orientation and don’t insert it backwards. A couple of ways to check chip orientation, make sure that the half circle insert on the chip matches the insert on the socket. Or, you can look at the orientation (usually) of the other chips.

This is what your kit should look like once it is installed;

This is where I got hung up. I put the board back in the game, powered it up, and the game played fine, but the toggle switch wasn’t working the way I had it soldered. I soldered the wires to the first two connections, there were three pairs, six connections in all on this toggle switch. I had read somewhere that maybe the connection had to be open, so I unsoldered one of the wires to test that theory. Nothing.

Here is the blurry photo that 2PacMan took of his nice, two connection, threaded slide switch he got from K-Mart.

This doesn’t help me choose which leads to solder to on my toggle switch, and taking an accurate ohm reading on the connections is also giving me fits. It wasn’t until I posted again on the groups just before I left for Michigan that DogP was able to help me out. He said I needed to solder one wire to the first connection, and then one wire to one of the middle connections, which are a little bit taller.

Made the solder changes, fired up the game, and my switch was working! Now, onto mounting it in the Jr. Pac-man cabinet.

Mark Spaeth had suggested making a shin, (a small rectangular piece of wood) drilling a hole, mounting the switch and then mounting the shim on the inside of the coinbox. But, I wasn’t crazy about this idea for a couple of reasons;

1. I could get a thicker piece of wood, but this idea didn’t seem too sturdy to me since it was really only fastened on one end.
2. I wasn’t sure how to mount my unthreaded toggle switch in the shim

I had this idea for a different wooden structure, with a hole in the middle for the switch with no idea how to mount the switch.I had a friend down after Christmas who is much better with tools, fabrication and working with her hands. She suggested getting some sort of rubber O-ring or grommet from the hardware or auto parts store. Good idea, let’s build the housing and then I find something to work for the toggle switch.

3. Build the toggle switch housing

I had one of those thin separator boards that you found in Midway cabs, like the Pac-man’s, between the coin box and the PCB and Power Supply. As you can see, I had used it when I stripped the paint from my old Pac-man cab earlier this year. Since I didn’t have a saw that I could get a nice cut, I decided to use an exacto knife and cut the board into thin pieces.

I measured in 3/4″ for the thickness of the strips. The wood isn’t that strong, and I have to put screws through it, so I didn’t want it too thin and then splitting under pressure. I cut three of those strips. I figured I would be cutting a 5 x 4″ face piece where the toggle switch would actually mount. That meant that each of my little strips would be five inches, and I planned on stacking them four tall.

Each thin cut strip was 16″, so I got (3) 5″ pieces out of each, a total of 9 with one left over.

Here’s what I had after everything was cut, my 5″ strips, and my face plate to mount the toggle switch;

And here is what I am envisioning the housing to look like once it is glued. It gives me a little lift for the back side connections of the toggle switch.

Time to glue the pieces. I didn’t score them, the one side of the wood had a smooth finish, but I figured I would be letting the glue sit for a couple of days, so I should be fine. Titebond II Premium Wood Glue is strong and hasn’t failed me yet.

The final elevated strips glued together. I would have liked to have everything look nice, even though it is going inside the machine. But I was limited on my tools, and didn’t want to draw things out by borrowing some to do the job “perfect” Besides, these are on the underside of the faceplate, so if their edges are uneven and rough with glue and pencil markings on them, it’s no big deal.

I don’t plan on gluing these with the Titebond to the faceplate, I think the screws will be good enough to hold everything in place and it gives me more options for starting over if I did something wrong, even on this simple project.

I looked at Lowe’s, they didn’t have anything but metal grommets. I needed an opening of 3/8″ for the base of the toggle switch to slide through, give or take. So, I asked a buddy who does auto repair to see what he had, and after looking through a plastic box of different parts and pieces, I found just what I needed.

Here is the rubber grommet / gasket I found that perfectly fit the toggle switch, 3/8″, and the hole I drilled in the faceplate to fit it. My buddy told me later, that he thinks this is a rubber gasket grommet for a Volvo or BMW. If I find a part number or some other identifier, I will post it here

And the rubber grommet hot glued to the board. This didn’t end up holding after I tried to push in the toggle switch. I had to reglue it with super glue.

I bought 1″ sheet metal screws from Lowe’s to hold everything together.

The final photos of the switch mounted on the inside of the Jr. Pac-man. Originally, I thought I was going to mount the toggle switch and housing the the exact board I made the mount out of, the separator board between the coin door and power supply. But after I started to screw everything together, I realized that this wasn’t going to hold, and I had a much thicker board to work with right below behind the coin box.

Granted, the switch is a little low for how I was originally picturing it. I don’t think anyone else would know when they open the coin door that this was anything but my intention, but everything worked out ok. I would have probably used 1 1/4″ screws if I had to do it again since that bottom composite board is thicker and that size would hold everything together better. I just liked out it turned out, almost looks like it is factory, if it wasn’t so rough, but it blends right in minus the loose wire.

The whole process for a lot of people is probably overkill for mounting the Speed Up Kit in the Jr. Pac-man. Overkill in the way I mounted it, and that I wrote this long tutorial on it. But, if this is at all helpful to one other person, someone else like me, then it was all worth it.

Changing the permalink structure of my posts had been on my to do list for my Wordpress based Rotheblog for quite some time, if not a month after I launched the redesign. I knew my apache server was configured with mod_rewrite available, so I didn’t have to worry about my server not supporting permalinking.

I had tried setting permalinks up once before, updating my permalink structure in the admin control panel interface, but unsure what to do next as my website links were broken. I thought maybe I had to give my .htaccess certain permissions to allow the system to write the rules to it, but I didn’t make time to explore it in depth. Wordpress should update that .htaccess file for you when you change the structure, but double check. Download the file yourself and look.

Turned out today, I tried again without exploring much more in depth, and got permalinking to work. I was nervous, not completely understanding the mod_rewrite engine, that any dynamic links pointing to my site would now be broken. But, the rewrite works on those links, no matter where they are.

Originally, my links were the default, and looked like this;

http://www.rotheblog.com/?p=1606

I added these rules to my Options > Permalinks > Custom Field

/%post_id%/%postname%

This will use the unique post id and then add it to the slug name of the post, which is dynamically generated from the title of the post. (Or it can be entered manually) My links will now look something like this;

www.rotheblog.com/1611/enabling-setup-permalinks-structure-wordpress

Then, all I did was download my empty .htaccess file from the server, and add these rules to it, and publish;

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

I found that these two sites were all I needed to setup my permalinking structure

1. Wordpress Codex
2. Perishable Press

Now, I can have those keyword rich search engine friendly link titles available to use to my advantage.

For those of you who zoned out in the first sentence and are asking, “How does this affect me?” It doesn’t. It just means that my blog should be a touch easier to find in Google now that the link structure isn’t a variable name anymore.

Questions? Having issues yourself on how to setup your own permalinking structure? Leave a comment and I will help you out as best I can. If I can do it, so can anyone else.

Posted a new photo gallery showing the beginning of Sarah and Kate re-upholstering the old “Yellow Chair”. Who knows if and when it will get done, but it’s started.

Oh yeah, and four new photos of Nokes in the “Nokes - Our Dog” gallery. Just visit the Photo Galleries section to check out the new additions.

After my post yesterday on “Artwork Bleed for Screen Printing Reproduction Arcade Artwork” I got some awesome feedback from industry experts like Rich at This Old Game, and Brian at Oleszak Creative. As I still grasp at understand some of the ideas in screening arcade game marquees, I thought it might be best to draw up a little illustration to show how I am picturing how a typical marquee would be printed in an exploded view.

Putting accuracy of the artwork found on Local Arcade aside (view my breakdown of the Midway Pac-man sideart artwork inaccuracies), I went out and grabbed the Defender marquee for demonstration purposes.

Defender marquee vector file at Local Arcade - (http://www.localarcade.com/arcade_art/r29.search.htm).

Assuming the colors in this file are correct, and taking each color of Defender marquee artwork and separating them into layers, I would have six layers total, a black, a blue, a yellow, and orange and a red.

As you can see from the illustration above, this is my understanding and how I picture the screen printing order, with the black being printed first (to trap all of the other colors below it, and to hide the bleed) , the blue second, the orange third, the yellow fourth and the finally the red with a white sealing coat over the back. In the illustration, I have shown the Defender artwork in a fashion so you would be able to recognize it, but in reality, the films would be printed in reverse, and if you looked straight down at the marquee, you would also see the printing in reverse. In fact, the Defender marquee artwork might looks something like this;

Plus, this isn’t a really good illustration to show bleed amounts, but I wanted to check to make sure I had the bigger screen printing concepts correct. (I don’t know the detailed history of my games enough to know if the Williams Defender marquee was on glass, or plexi. Probably glass.)

Some good resources that are written simply and helped me get a better understanding on this topic.

• eHow : How to Design a Multiple-Color Stencil for Silk Screen Printing
• YouTube - Screen printing multiple color print video 1
• YouTube - Screen printing multiple color print video 2

Worth a note, I am not starting from scratch on my experience and knowledge base on this topic. I silk screened a couple of shirts way back in 8th grade. How much that counts, not a lot. But it does give me some familiarity with inks, and frames for the screens. But we never “burned” our films, and we never messed with more than one color or registration. These are the areas where I am shaky. A quick (10 minute) search didn’t bring up any visual tutorials on bleeds in screen printing. I didn’t think there would be resources specifically for arcade reproduction artwork screen printing, but thought there would be something else. I must not have searched with the right terms.

So, I need feedback. Is my thinking wrong? Is there a white sealing layer, and what is that actually called? Do you have any good links, or even better yet, and great visual image based tutorials on screen printing that focus specifically on multiple colors, registrations, and bleeds? Leave a comment.

Want a copy of the Illustrator (CS) file I worked on above? Download it here (.zip - 2MB). Edit it and send it back to me if you want, show me where I am wrong. (I just whipped this up quickly, not wanting to spend hours doing accurate separations for artwork I never intended to have printed, so remember this file is for illustrative purposes to help me understand screen printing and films.)

If you have been following my blog, I have slowly been working on vectorizing every piece of the original Pengo artwork to have reproductions made for sale. I have another contact that is doing some vectorizing of a couple pieces of artwork, and he asked me if the Illustrator artwork pieces had to have any bleed on them for registration coverage when taking the pieces to the Screen Printing stage. I knew from working with Brian at Oleszak, that there needed to be some offset bleed on the shapes when making stencils, but I figured this was more for the home arcade game collector, who generally wouldn’t know much about registration for different colors of artwork. A “CYOA” kind of nicety.

So, I emailed Rich at This Old Game. I asked how much of a bleed he would add to individual shapes. 1/8″ bleed seemed too much to me for finer details, but for the larger details, only adding 1/16″ - 1/32″ didn’t seem hardly enough to make a difference. This is what he said;

Basically, to allow the color laps about center of the Black detail that it would cover. Also white is usually full coverage on the back of 2nd surface prints. On fine detail, I go in and just split the difference in specific spots where the thickness of the black may vary. But to answer your question, I do tend to add approx 1/8″ bleed unless that bleed doesn’t fit the artwork then I have to manually go in and split that difference. Any text I usually outline 5 to 10 pts.

I got a file from him, demonstrating some of this, but I don’t completely understand all of the concepts for screen printing reproductions yet. If you don’t have any idea what I am talking about, here is a photo of my Pengo marquee. You can see the bleed for the “TM” text showing through, as well as some of the halftone patterns and other pieces of artwork that overlap to make sure there is enough coverage.

The main idea I got from the information he sent was, yes, add bleed to the artwork to help with registration of colors, and it is a judgement call based on the detail of the artwork. The finer details of the reproduction arcade artwork add 1/16″ to 1/32″ of an inch bleed, and on some of the bigger, thicker details add 1/8″. (Not to mention, even though I didn’t ask this, I am sure that I need to start separating my artwork in colored layers) I know that both Brian and Darin read what I write here when they have time, and I figured they could lend their expertise in the information, or even Rich if he stops by. My main question remaining is what Rich said above;

Also white is usually full coverage on the back of 2nd surface prints.

Rich is the absolute best in terms of response time, although his emails are sometimes hard to understand because of the way they are worded. Here is a tight crop of the final prepped file he used reproduce the Professor Pac-man overlays from my vector artwork.

This looks exactly like the “TM” above, except, if the text is yellow, why have the color “white”. Wouldn’t that bled color be yellow there, showing really fat lettering?

So, there is a lot of work to do, added work to the final vectorizing Pengo files that I thought I had finished. But, they need to be right. I haven’t added bleed to any of them, so I will have to go back through and do that. Here are some close up details of my start to adding bleed to the Pengo artwork. There is a before vector trace (Purple Outline), and an after vector trace with the additional bleed (Light Blue Outline). (And after I got into the file and tried it for myself, I found that even 1/32″ bleed would overlay some of the surrounding pieces of artwork, and that I had to go down as small as 1/64″ (.016 of an inch rounded) bleed to prevent overlap.)

I had never had this happen before today, but today it happened twice when I was playing my Pengo arcade game.

The first time, a sno-bee got stuck at the top of the screen between two ice blocks, and just kept bouncing there. I didn’t mind, because that meant I could go around the playing field and match up the diamond blocks for my bonus points. I was able to break one of the ice blocks that Sno-Bee was wedged against, and then I smashed him with another block.

But the second time in less than 10 minutes, I was trying to match up the diamond blocks, so I decided I would guide Pengo up next to the dormant Sno-Bee. Well, some of the game code stick executed, Pengo died when he touched the Sno-Bee, but then, the game just sat there, playing the music. Check it out;

I had to turn the upright machine off and back on again. I hadn’t even seen this error in Pengo that causes it to lock up, or freeze. I know sometimes I can run through some of the ghosts in Ms. Pac-man, and even in Pengo, it seems like I get lucky either touching a Sno-Bee without dying or running through one. But not in this case.

Anyone else have this issue with their Pengo PCB board? Is it just mine? If you have issues, does the Sno-Bee only get stuck at the upper right of the play field? Or is it only one board configuration? Or maybe this is just this revision of the PCB, since I know there are a couple. Voice your thoughts.

When we got back to Indy a week from yesterday, we had a relaxing couple of days. I had a college friend, Jen, down for those three days and we had a good time catching up, it had been too long. But that also meant I didn’t have time to post here.

I also knew that the day I got back to work, I’d probably be working 10 hour days plus to make sure a lot of work got done by Friday. Doing business in China means we have to plan ahead, and since we’re going to Las Vegas in February of 2008, we really needed to have all artwork to China the Wednesday I got back. The more time they had, the better.

I got the artwork finished in some state, minus final approvals on Wednesday night after 11 hours of work. But the artwork didn’t actually make it to China until Friday, as originally planned, after two more 10 hour days.

On top of that, my boss left this morning for a whirlwind week sales trip down south to start selling our awesome product. He needed two fully stocked graphic catalogs of our designs before he left. One was 9 pages and was designed completely from scratch, and the other one was 20 pages, and that might as well have been designed from scratch. Over 200 mocked up product illustrations later, and 13 hours on Saturday and 13.5 on Sunday and we are finished (57 hours total over 5 days).

I haven’t had time to post here, or do anything else. In a time when my wife has needed me most, I haven’t been able to be there. Chalk it up to timing, something you can never control. But this is a really big exciting moment for the business, and I am confident we are going to see some results next week when he returns. Not to mention my boss is really good to me, giving me some time off to make up for the weekend time, and he got us a couple of lunches while we were working…

So, to any of you who have emailed me and read this, sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you. Sorry to my wife. I feel like things will be a little more normal until the 19th. We’ll see. I may have some more things that need to be done before I can pick up and leave, but with the show in Vegas in the third week of Feb, maybe I’ll have time to do all of that in early February.

Oh, and on a final note, I squeezed in one meeting this week at the business school. My first two classes are Economics and Business Law and those start on the 14th, so I am pretty excited and nervous. I have different motivations this time around, but I had trouble with a simple Econ 101 course in college. I blame that on the Russian prof. I had thought I wanted to take it then to get some “business” knowledge, but truth was I wasn’t mature enough to be truly motivated to excel. It’s a different story this time around, I couldn’t be more serious.

Hopefully there will be more to come.