The monitor on my Ms. Pac is dying, senator

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 12:10 pm

The burn-in had been getting more noticeable, the thing had ghosting problems on all the graphics and during a party on Saturday I lost the green gun. So fuck this, I just ordered a 19" Vision Pro from Happ (they are having a sale until the end of March). A guy named Matt who you guys don't know switched out the monitor in my Spy Hunter over the summer, and seeing what he did gave me enough confidence to do this myself. (Switching a monitor in a Pac is apparently one of the easiest ones to do).

I'll note progress here.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 2:59 pm

Christ, Happ shipped it al-fucking-ready. This is some of the greatest customer service I have ever been party to. Wow.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 4:03 pm

how many properly bolstered racing seats did they charge you for the privilege?

i'm guessing around 2 + a pair of harnesses + mounting brackets, give or take.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 4:07 pm

The monitor is on sale this month for $135.

logged out Jack · Post by **logged out Jack** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 4:10 pm

dude, that sounds like a sweet deal.

for some reason, I thought that replacement arcade monitors cost more than the cabs did in the first place.

With this new knowledge, I will start actively seeking a Mr Do! of my own... a rampage, gauntlet, or TMNT would be like uber sweet d00d too.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 10:36 am

In some cases, the monitor can definitely become more expensive. There is a saying that a working game, no matter what it is, is worth $200. (Of course, people wanting the damn things out of their house sometimes ask for less than that.)

I would imagine that if you are able to put cars together and take them apart, that a monitor would hold little trouble for you. Just got to discharge 'em! Ms. Pac's monitor is going to show up on Thursday, so I'll either have it set this weekend or it will kill me. Either / or/

Rochester has healthy cab trading through craigslist. There is a Gauntlet II always for sale out here that I would love to have instead of Xeno, but I think it's too big to get down the stairs. (Ditto Rampage, which is another one a guy has been trying to get rid of for months.)

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 10:44 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Rochester has healthy cab trading through craigslist.

Awesome! Thanks for the heads up, yet another addition to my sad and controlling Internet addiction.
clickclick! (did i tell ya i picked up a model M - from ALASKA? wonderful keyboard, that model M)

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: I would imagine that if you are able to put cars together and take them apart, that a monitor would hold little trouble for you. Just got to discharge 'em!

Man, that discharging shit's for pussies. you just gotta watch where you're grabbing, there's nothing toiIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEBBBBBBBB
BBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
TTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NO CARRIER

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 10:04 pm

You know what, there is a company that is selling Model M "clones" that I can't recommend enough. If anyone is inteested in this company, let me know, I will look them up.

My problem was that I was constantly hitting my keyboard, thanks to Front Page Sports: Football Pro 98. My brother and I stopped playing it, but not until I went through three Model Ms. Christ, I am an idiot.

Luckily, I have never punched this keyboard. The new one. Er, the clone.

That being said! I discharged my first monitor tonight! It was the Ms. Pac one. Got the alligator clips, bought some wire from Lowes, and assembled the thing. I go to slide the screwdriver under the anode cap, and the fucking cap flips right off. LAH DEE DAH WHUT MISTER JONES, OH ITS ME, ANODE CAP, FALLING OFF! Good fucking thing I didn't try to fuck around in there. The cap could have come off at any time, and I wouldn't have noticed.

Anyway, my heart is still racing. I'm going to discharge it a few more times before I actually go to install the monitor. (Probably Saturday, as I am planning on going to the Milker's Haunted House studio tomorrow after work.)

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 11:19 pm

Well, I replaced the monitor today. I can't believe I got it to go. In less than a year I have gone from being psyched at soldering one diode into my Spy Hunter board and attaching a NiCad to replacing an entire frigging monitor while not getting killed in the process.

(And I know, I know, people do this all the time with their arcade games. But still.)

Ms. Pac has never looked better, and the other games on the kit that I play (Pac-Man, Pac-Plus, Pengo, Super Pac-Man and Space Invaders) look amazing as well.

They even include a little board wired into the monitor that has a cable on it, so you can adjust the screen picture while looking at it. Amazing! (With old monitors you needed another person or a mirror.)

At any rate. I'm psyched.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:28 pm

In case anyone out there is searching for information on upgrading their own monitor on a Pac - let me compile the info I found in one place.

(What I personally did was switch out the old 19" RCA monitor in a Ms. Pac with a 19" shelf-mount Vision Pro from Happ. The Vision Pro is rebranded in at least one other place, but with Happ's frequent sale price ($135) this was a good deal.)

The monitor showed up three days after I ordered it. I opened it up, and noticed that the connectors/wires coming out of the Vision Pro were as follows:

- 1 AC power cord for the monitor. You could plug this directly into the wall.
- 1 set of wires for such things as red, gree, blue, gnd, vertical sync, horizontal sync
- 1 little "board" that has knobs to adjust screen position, brightness and contrast, coming from the monitor. Some new monitors make this a remote control, but on the Vision Pro it was connected by wires to the monitor's board.

The old monitor got power from the Pac's power supply. It had two wires (black and white) - the AC power cord on the new monitor had three, as a green ground wire was included. Since I plugged the AC line directly into the wall (didn't want to cut anything on the new monitor in case there was a problem) I have the existing monitor plug just sitting in the cab. That reminds me, I should probably put some electrical tape over it, because it's otherwise active. I could have sent that green wire on the new monitor to ground elsewhere. and fed the black and white wires into the Pac itself. I guess a lot of people do that.

Okay, that leaves us with getting color and sync to the monitor. I am going to paste a reply I got from Gunbu on the KLOV forum.

Here goes the wiring:
First, clip off those old video connectors on the pac wiring harness. There should be one with 4 wires. And one with two. (NOTE: mine had three. -- ICJ )
Ok, here are the wire colors. They may be different on your harness, so I'll also give the pin location.

The four wire connector:
Video Ground: Green-Red ( color wire )Pin S ( wire location on the harness )
Video Red: Red-White Pin T
Video Blue: Yellow-Black Pin U
Video Green: White-brown Pin 16
The two pin connector:
Video Sync: Orange-red Pin 17

On the two pin connector, you will only need ONE of those wires. Doesn't matter which one, they both come from the same pin location.

Ok, now you're ready to start connecting those wires!

The Happ monitor comes with a new video harness, so you'll need to connect the wires to it.

Connect:
Video Red to the red wire
Video Green to the green wire
Video Blue to the blue wire
Video Ground to the black wire
Video Sync the yellow wire
The last white wire on the happ harness is not used.

Ok, got all those in?

Now, the power to the monitor.

Connecting the power is easy, the old pac monitor ac cable plugs right into the Happ cable. The Brown wire on the Pac harness side of the ac cable is the hot side. On the Happ connector, the neutral wire has the round end, and the positive one looks like a D. Slap those guys together, and you're ready to go! You'll probably have to mess around with those dials on the monitor for a while to get the picture to stop rolling/ centered.
Good luck!

And this was what I saw as well. The white wire coming from the Vision Pro was not used. For synch, I had three orange wires that were on their own molex connector - those three wires rolled back into a single wire that went to the Pac's PCB. Like so:

Now, the wires for color and sync on the Vision Pro do not have a molex connector. What I did was just shove them into the female end on the Pac, and then used electrical tape to hold them in place. This oughta be fine - a lot of guys have extra molex connectors around, so they can build their own.

At any rate! This should hopefully help out any newbie, like myself, trying to do this sort of thing. The part where I really struggled was in getting the old monitor off and the new one in: apparently, I could have removed the entire shelf. I only removed the monitor itself. I had to have the thing on its side, so I wasn't fighting gravity. Oh well, live and learn.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:28 pm

Oh, and I shall try to post pictures of how minty-fresh the screen looks now.