Mr. Do!

It’s been about six weeks since I finally acquired my Mr. Do! arcade game in Chicago. Having looked for just over two years for this game only now can I laugh when I remember what Joe Magiera said when I first met him in the fall of 2006. (more…)

It was a crazy week, an exam and two papers and then the July 4th holiday weekend and a fun time with family. But at the end, I knew that I would be traveling to finally pick up my own, original, Universal Mr. Do! arcade game. (more…)

Got the game into the basement tonight, for it’s final resting place for awhile. The monitor was great in the garage until I moved it around, and then when we moved it into the basement it got better again. Was a ton of work though, figured out that we can’t have a game facing out with it’s back against the window. The back really has to be against the guest room closet wall. But it works.

Tonight I went over to a friend’s to use some of his tools, and have him help me cut up a board to use on the back side of the control panel. It was some composite wood from a shelf, that we cut down to size, drilled the holes for the joystick and the two buttons, and then did some holes for the bolts to hold the clips on. He had a cool drill bit with a counter sink, but the hole size was just a fraction too small. Plus, the holes we drilled with his wood blades were just a touch too small. So, now I need to see if I can possibly purchase some wood blades to make the holes bigger, and look again for small but longer carriage bolts. But things are very close.

Got out tonight and worked on the control panel. The control panel I am using is a rusted, beat up Pac-man with most of the chewed up overlay still on it. I had gradiose ideas of taking that off in one piece and keeping it, but sad to say, in the end it was anything but in one piece. I did some scraping to take away the outside plastic layer with a 5 in 1, and then started trying different chemicals to get it off.

I had read Acetone worked really good for getting Midway overlay’s off, but all that did was take off the painted artwork for the overlay, it did nothing for the 3M adhesive. I tried Goof Off, and that worked fairly good, but the best was the same remaining paint stripper I used on the cabinet (Stripeeze). That got me right down to the painted panel.

I got it sanded down fairly well. I thought briefly about leaving it as just the metal color, but I would have had to work that much harder on the details to get out all the small areas of paint left. I didn’t need to in painting it over, so I wiping it down, and gave it two coats of spray paint before the night was over. Looking pretty cool, amazing how nice it looks after you do that. I was pretty surprised when I sanded down the exposed panel on the Pac-man I have.

Next is setting up the wood for the backside, which a friend was going to help me but he may be busy for awhile now, I am not sure.

I finally made it back to the garage for a short period of time.

Went up in the attic and think I found a piece of composite board that I can use for the spacing on the backside of the control panel. I also installed the PCB holding brackets and secured that inside the cabinet.

It sounds like Tuesday I may be getting that piece of wood cut out at a friend’s house. I have the sander for the panel, so that would leave very little left to getting that done and out of the garage.

Today was the day, and a long one.

We got the belt sander from Wes and got to work in the early afternoon. I sanded one whole side of the Pac-man cab before I felt like I really needed to go and get some more belts. We went and got a two pack, and a plastic bristle brush to wipe off the wood particles if the belt got clogged.

I then sanded the remaining three sides of the cabinet. The hardest seemed to be the back up at the top, with the small area, all the holes and areas where stickers had been. We took a scraper to parts of it to get some of the paint off. In the end, the whole cab looked great, back down to the base plywood for a fresh start.

I took some citrus cleaner and cleaned the bottom of the cab and the top a little bit, without spending too much time on either. The top isn’t really clean, but I was in a bit of a rush and knew we wouldn’t finish everything today.

Then I took some CLR and mixed it into some warm water and wiped down the inside of the cabinet. It was a little damp, so I put it out in the driveway in the sun, and went inside for an hour or so to let it dry.

Then, later we came back out and got started. The cabinet didn’t have the monitor mounting rails in it when I got it, because there was no monitor, so fortunately I had the rails from my other Pac-man cabinet so we used those. I will just have to find myself a cheap second set of rails for the game.

We put the monitor in, mounted it, and then Justin got to putting in the other parts. He put in the switcher power supply, the isolation transformer, and redid the wiring. He had to hack apart the Vs. Golf power supply for the cord, and for the fuse mounting because the other one was completely fubar.

While he was doing this, I was taking apart the old control panel and figuring out to do with the controls. The Joystick was a rusted piece of junk that was mounted too low, so I took out a bat handled joystick from a Ms. Pac control panel to use instead. I took off the buttons and the control panel overlay was just pressed between some composite board and plexiglass, so I was able to save that. I then had to get all the wiring right, so I had some soldering to do for the new joystick.

Justin got everything hooked up, including putting the power switch back in, and getting the gameboard ready, turned on the game, and Bam!, it looked great. Only problem was the screen was upside down, and there didn’t seem to be a dip switch to flip it, so we took the monitor out and turned it around. When we did that I realized the way the frame was facing that this was the correct way to have it mounted based on the other Pac machines I have seen.

I made a little tag for the connector to signify the parts side, and then turned my attention to the control panel. I took the extended clip racks off the old vs. control panel and then drilled some holes in my Pac-man control panel to mount those. First try, the control panel snapped into place in the cabinet.

So the last thing we did was test the controls. The joystick had to have two wires swapped, but because I use easy connects, that wasn’t a problem, and the game was working fine. I wasn’t able to mount the buttons yet because there is no spacer with the metal control panel, no wood like there was in the original, so I have to figure out what to do there. I also have to add some screws to fasten the joystick, and I would like to sand the whole thing down and give it a new coat of paint before I am done.

It was a really solid day of work. The marquee bulbs don’t work right now, but they are getting power, so that is good. And because they are just regular bulbs, they are easy to replace.

Next step will be mounting the joystick, and then figuring out how to mount the buttons, if I put wood on the back or what my choice is. Quite and upgrade from where the cabinet was when we first got it.

Even though it was very sad, tonight we stripped the old Pac-man cabinet I had sitting in the garage. Justin was down and he brought with him all of the guts from the Mr. Do I had bought last November.

Now, this Mr. Do was the most hideous thing you had ever seen. It was in an old Space Duel cabinet with chewed up sides, the joystick was sunken in, the monitor didn’t even have a frame so the chassis was attached directly to the wood, etc. etc. I ended up finding a buyer for the thing, a mame guy, and for $15 I didn’t have to worry about it ever going in the basement.

So, I had some paint stripper, and although I went back and forth on what to do with the Pac-man cabinet, I decided a couple of things. I am tired of walking around it in the garage. It could be one of the most common cabinet, so to destroy the already partially destroyed artwork that had been painted over wouldn’t be as big of a deal. People were making new ones all the time. I also wanted the experience of how to strip one down, it should be a fun project, and I had already bought the stripping stuff.

Overall it took about two and half hours total to strip down to small bits of paint and primer.

Justin and I also got out the old monitor, and put it into a horizontal frame from another tube I had from the Robotron cabinet.