Ms Pac Man Upright Arcade Machine Restoration

It all started one day when coming home I noticed a Ms Pacman arcade machine stranded on the side of the road. Why anyone would throw this out, I don't know. Since I did not have a proper place to store it, the machine lived under a tarp for a while. The time finally came when we moved Ms. Pacman to a safer dryer place (and for the record it was able to fit in an old Subaru station wagon with the trunk closed). With a quick rewire of a new plug needed on the back of the cabinet, Ms Pacman was lit up and working, after a couple months of play we cleaned up, and moved Ms. Pacman. It didn't want to boot into the intro screen after the machine was moved.

The screen displayed a bunch of garbage, and nothing was done until.... Ms. Pacman got moved once again to our apartment, where with some jiggling of connectors and a run in test mode, everything worked again.

I wanted to start restoring some of the features of Ms. Pacman including the attraction light on the front but with the replacement of a new light the machine would not turn on, so here we are a totally dead machine and the start of a restoration article.

I have cold soldered a new wire on the back for a 3rd time and tested the on/off switch with my volt meter, so far everything is working fine. In the transformer there was some dust that got burned off the top fuse of the 2x fuse mount shown in the photo, and with some testing of the fuse, it was confirmed blown.

Time to get a fuse to see if this is the problem. this also gave me the urge to take a vacuum quickly through the bottom of the cabinet (a more thorough cleaning is definitely needed)

It worked!!! A new fuse (2 amp 250 volt slow blow fuse) and the machine turned on, i had replaced the old burnt light back into the cabinet so that it didn't blow any new fuses. The fuses i got were 2 for $4.99 from "The Source" which i find kind of pricey, so i will have to search out a cheaper supplier for some of the electronic parts. Until then time to take a break and play some Ms. Pacman, I'm going to go back over the schematics before i go poking around in the back of the machine.

(to be continued)

Things I still need to restore