Arcade Resources
Assessing the Professor Pac-man control panel artwork
I took a look at the artwork, and not only was it doable without too much trouble in Illustrator, I knew it would be a pretty simple piece overall. Just some simple pink borders, with three small Pac characters, and some fat lettering. The largest worry I knew would be the instructions text that is on the control panel itself.
Got photos of the artwork today from Richard. He sent me close ups of the cpanel in three segments, and one overall image. I straightened all of the images using rulers in Photoshop, and prepped the image to be traced in Illustrator. I got through a portion of the first Pac-man character, and the pink borders today before guests arrived.
Jr. Pac-man kickplate and sideart
Here it is! I am pretty pumped that they are both finished, and that they are in my possession.
I have obviously distorted the images, downsampled them quite a bit, and put a waterRichard of sorts. I don’t know how someone would retrace artwork from this file, I suppose it is possible and if they are able to go through the trouble of remaking it from this crappy file, I applaud them. You may not be sure about whether I made these or not, but that isn’t really important because I did. I just want to do my best to let people out there know I have this and they can contact me if they want a copy.
Tonight I finished up the kickplate artwork, pretty quick actually. Two days to redraw the whole thing was a ton of work, it felt like it was
just as complex as the sideart. I am sending them back to Richard with some further communication to start the process of color matching the
two pieces.
On a sidenote, I saw today that the Jr. Pac-man has been relisted on ebay in Marion at a discounted price from December. However, still out
of my price range, but getting closer.
Pengo Updates from July 2006 – March 2007
I did a couple of minor things to my Pengo after I got it in July of 2006. I cleaned the outside of the cabinet, gave it a pretty good scrubbing down and vacuumed out some of the junk in the back underneath the pcb shelf and behind the coin door before moving Pengo into the house.
I knew when I got Pengo that the monitor had a broken neck, let me tell you, it was a fun sight to see and hear when turned on. So, I swapped that out into one of the cabs I resold and for awhile it sat without a monitor.
I finally recapped the G07 that I had gotten from my first machine, the Pac-man and planned on putting that in the Pengo. Only problem, horizontal frame and horizontally oriented. So, I had the take the tube and chassis and swap them into the frame from another vertically oriented monitor. I also had to drill some new holes in the frame so the ground lines could have something to screw into. It was a chore, but I got it done.
Then, there was the remounting. It was a pain taking the old monitor out, but it was busted so I didn’t care. But putting in a working one, I did care very much. So, Sarah had to help me screw it in as I held it in place. But, we did get it put back together.
The connectors didn’t match, so I had to use a different connection and cut the wire on the G07 for the power. That bummed me out, but wanting a working game was a higher motivator.
So, that took me into March of 2007, when the game was working with the terrible sound.
Photos of Jr. Pac-man kickplate
Richard got right back to me today, told me that the Jr. Pac-man sideart looked really good, and had taken some photos of the kickplate for me to work on as well. He said he would also be more than willing to help me do any color matching I might need to do. That may be tough, but I am glad that he is willing, really nice guy. He is in PA, and not too far from Indy. I have started thinking about going out there to see his collection, maybe in late April.
Final vectorized image of Jr. Pac-man sideart
I emailed Richard with a small image of the final Jr. Pac-man sideart tonight and explained it a little bit. I asked him for some feedback, to look at it carefully and see what he thought. I also told him, that I thought I had a vector version of the kickplate art, or at least some larger images, but I didn’t and I asked if he could take some photos of that for me also.
Reworking parts of vector Jr. Pac-man sideart
Retraced Jr. Pac-man’s kite tonight in the hour or so worth of time that I had. I also adjusted the original sideart artwork that I had done for the Jr. Pac so tomorrow I can size in the more correctly drawn kite, and hopefully start to get some feedback on the colors and overall look of the traced piece from Richard.
More work on vectorizing Jr. Pac-man sideart
I got to work on my sideart some more tonight. I retraced some of the different shapes on the shoe region. I added in some hatching detail on the inside of the laces, tones up some shapes that I missed or miss viewed and didn’t draw correctly. I also fixed the bottom of the shoes, the circle sections. The photos Richard took are awesome and clear. I also started to retrace the kite before I had to get to bed.
