My Special Day

Started the morning off with my first “Run” outside probably since we went on vacation this summer. It felt good to have new shoes and to be able to do that. I opened a couple of presents, I got a Transformers calendar and a book about Tony Dungy from her parents, and Sarah got me a Garmin GPS. Pretty awesome present, and expensive. But she did a good job of researching it some and getting it here without me knowing what it was. I was very happy.

We went to morning bible study, and met Christine before hand. She gave me a cool present, a Batman Jersey from the now defunct Warner Brothers store. Very cool, now I have something to wear on the other six days the Colts aren’t playing:)

The plan was to go to Bob Evans after church. The Durkin’s were there when I arrived, which I didn’t think too much of, but then Kate showed up and I knew something was going on. Sarah had planned a surprise lunch since the birthday party for Wes and Brian went south. Very awesome. 11 of my closest friends showed up, including John and Keri, who I hadn’t seen for about a year and a half.

Afterwards, Dave, Paula, John and Keri came over. Sarah made poke cake for my birthday desert, and we all had some and watched the Colts vs. the Chiefs. The Colts barely won, 13-10, it was really bad, Peyton Manning looked terrible for a second week in a row. But we have a ton of injured players and lost a couple more this game including Aaron Moorehead.

After the game, I got a quick game of Jr. Pac-man in with John, and then everyone took off.

The rest of the night was pretty much spent on the phone. I talked with my parents, my sister, her parents, and my aunt Janet. I also just started a huge, new, really time consuming project, kind of inadvertently. It’s a secret, and it is going to be hard to balance with my test stuff too. I haven’t figured out how I am going to be able to accomplish both with success, but we will see.


Wizard of Wor, Dig Dug and Tetris Sold!

For a month or so I had been responding to the common Craigslist ad looking to “buy” games. Usually people put out these ads looking for freebies, but I knew it couldn’t harm me any to try to sell some of my non working games. I wanted to try to reduce as many distractions as possible to focus on studying, and fixing up the Midway Wizard of Wor, Atari Dig Dug, and Dynamo cabinet Tetris were time suckers to say the least.

The Tetris was the only one I was seriously considering keeping in my game room, but the black cabinet was so ugly. The original intention was to resell these once they were working to help pay for gas, or take down the paid cost on one of my other games. But the motivation for selling a game to make a small amount of money waned for me. I got my holy grail, the Jr. Pac-man. I had originally wanted to use the money I made to help pay for my trip out to PA to pick it up. But thanks to DanOfEarth, that wasn’t an issue anymore.

Finally, last Tuesday I found some people who weren’t looking for free games, and were interested in the three I had to sell. I just wanted my itemized costs back in total for the games, and the price was more than fair, great if you intended to keep one of the games. Dig Dug is too slow of a pace for me, Wizard of Wor holds no interest for me other than the fact that it is a two player game, and Tetris, again, ugly cabinet with no sideart.

Here are some photos of the games being taken away.

Sold the Dig Dug, Wizard of Wor and Tetris 1Sold the Dig Dug, Wizard of Wor and Tetris 2

I made a whopping $10 on my sale after all of my costs were added up, but I learned a lot. I originally bought the Dig Dug as a Land Sea and Air Squad, painted solid black on the sides. It was my first game that I brought back from the brink of oblivion, and restored in some sense of the word. It was a lot of fun, bargaining for the deals, but it was a lot of work, and without knowing much about electronics, it was hard work for me to constantly figure out all of the problems I was having with any given game.

In the end things worked out great. I didn’t lose anything but time, and that is debatable when compared to what I learned and the contacts I made hunting down the arcade parts. The games found a good home where they should be reused in a family fun center, and I can park in my garage again:) Just in time for winter. Not to mention I can keep the other two cabs in case I need a fix, my empty Atari Food Fight and Atari Xevious.


Purchased a 96 in 1 Multi Pac Kit

96 in 1 Multi Pac Kit Photo
There was a reason, that I can’t disclose right now, that I wanted to get Mike Doyle’s 96 in 1 Multi Pac kit for my Ms. Pac-man. I have been wanting this for a number of months because although I love Ms. Pac-man, it was always been one of my favorite arcade games, I need to breathe some new life into the gameplay.

The 96 in 1 Multi Pac Kit is just the way to do it. A lot of collectors get multi-kits for their coin-op games because it gives you some variety in gameplay. Most arcade game collectors don’t seem to like MAME either, and this is a way to get around having a MAME machine.

This particular kit comes with every darn possible variety of the Pac-man maze style arcade game you can imagine. Most are variations on the originals, Ms. Pac-man, Pac-man, etc. etc. But there are some video games on the kit that you wouldn’t expect and are completely unrelated.

  • Ms Pac
  • Ms Pac Plus
  • Ms Pac Attack
  • Piranha
  • Mr. & Mrs. Pacman (new!)
  • Pengo
  • Pac Junior1-4
  • Pac Baby1-2

And the game list goes on and on. 96 total variations and games. But probably the coolest part are the features of the multi pac kit. I will list the kit features I am most interested in;

  • High Score save in NVRAM
  • Selectable Speed
  • Start on any level
  • Difficulty
  • Screen Saver

I love the high score feature, and I can’t wait to use the start on any level feature on some of the games, especially Jr. Pac-man. I have only beaten level 6 in my dedicated Jr. Pac-man once, and could use the practice on the last three levels.

Plus, I know a lot of people who play the games will want to set the difficulty and change the speed of gameplay.

The 96 in 1 Multi Pac kit should arrive hopefully sometime on Thursday or Friday and I hope to get it installed in my Ms. Pac-man right away. Thanks Mike Doyle.


Colts vs. Panthers and Study Study

After church I got in a half hour of studying. Sarah made up some cookies, and we headed off the Christy’s house to watch the Colts game. We had been invited before, but hadn’t been able to attend. Lori and Kenny were going to be there, we’d have great snack food, and it would be a good time all around. They have a huge tv, something like 60″, so it was quite the upgrade from our house.

Colts won by quite a bit after a touch of a slow start.

When we got back, I did a small meeting with a freecycle person, played a little Jr. Pac-man, then got to studying. I studied right through until about 8:30 when I finally was finished with my two and a half hours for the day.

Didn’t do anything else for the rest of the night other than watch the second disc of Season 4 of Scrubs so I could return that as my last outstanding Blockbuster disc.


Friday’s are for relaxing

Sarah and I went to the gym right after work, for only the second time this week meaning we’ll have to go sometime this weekend.

When we got back, we both just chilled out. I made a quick post on the blog, and then I got to take a bath, it’s been awhile. I think I knew I had plenty to do, and had one of those overwhelming segments of time. I just tried to focus on what absolutely “had” to be done for tomorrow.

Sarah slept on the couch for most of the night. I played a little bit of Jr. Pac-man, but I also reviewed my online IUPUI app and figured out some things. Also canceled the Blockbuster account for a little while to help me focus and have one less distraction.

Then, it was out to the garage to dimension out the board we’d be cutting in the morning. This was the only necessary thing I had to have done by the morning. Paul was coming over fairly early and we were going to cut down that piece of plywood to fit in the Tetris cabinet and to mount the monitor in there. It took me over an hour to think through all of the cuts, it seemed like it too me too long for how complex it actually was.

I studied for only a half hour tonight, it was so late that I knew if I started before I went to bed it would be useless. Tomorrow I will be better.


Jr. Pac-man marquee vectoring started!

The Jr. Pac-man marquee is much more than started, I am about three days worth of work in (Visit KLOV for my forum topic). I did the little ground hog first with the bird, then the paint cans and then the grass. I feel like I have done some of the more complicated stuff on the marquee first, or at least I hope so. This Jr. Pac-man piece of vector artwork has been a lot of work so far.

Jr. Pac-man Marquee Vector Artwork Progress

(This is the oversize marquee for the original game, like I have, not the condensed version that was in the conversion kits.)

The parts that have been a challenge so far has been, the color variations in the grass and the faded red on the paint bucket. My red was so faded that I could barely seen the manilla color differentiations on the white can. I did a best guess for now, and will check my work later. It is easy enough to change in this format.

I hope to do a little more later this week, but we’ll see. The end of the week is shaping up to be busy for a change.


Tennis, Rotheblog launch & Candlelight

After church today I got to talk with Jim a little bit about his experience with the GMAT. He went to U of I, and he had the good fortune of having Cummins help with his education. He did really awesome on his exam, and I got some good information that helped me focus my direct that much more and my plan of attack.

When we got back from church, we ate lunch with my parents quickly, and then they had to leave. It is always sad when visitors go, I know both Sarah and I always visit slumpsville for about the hour following their departure.

Eventually I went and played the Jr. Pac-man for about an hour. Sarah stayed upstairs and continued to read her Harry Potter book.

I got back to work, and started finishing up the final details to launch Rotheblog. I didn’t finalize everything before Dave and I got in touch. We were going to play tennis today, the second and last time this year before it got really cold. Sarah headed out to go to a candle light party at Paula’s, and I met him at the tennis courts. We played until about 6:30, the wind was really bad today but my outcome was favorable in general.

Right after I got back I finished up final details and launched Rotheblog and sent out an announcement to friends. Man, my bulk mailing list is really outdated and I had forgotten that it was really difficult to manage that in Gmail. Sarah got back and we took the dog on a walk.

We talked with her parents at about 8, tonight was game 7 of the baseball ALCS series between Boston and Cleveland so there were no cartoons.

At about 9:30 I sat down and talked with a freelance client, trying to finish that up and have one less distraction while I am studying. I didn’t do much for the rest of the night, ending up passing out in front of the game downstairs, I was beat. Red Sox won 11-2 and advanced to the 2007 World Series.