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Arcade help
Question from Brent: I much enjoy your educational video postings. I am very new to this if you are able to help me out that would be great.
Few questions to ask after my story.
On the weekend I had bought a Super Pacman cabinet which had being converted to Jamma with Twin Eagle with player one and two controllers and two firing buttons each. It plugs in with no picture on monitor. Accepts quarters you can hear sound (plays blind) . I had opened the back to look for loose stuff. Saw two wires from coin mechanism hanging from the harness and thought they might be for power supply and when touched SPARKS flew and now the coin mechanism does not work either.
I still can hear the power flowing when turned on. When powered off a quick glow on the monitor appears. Monitor has a burn mark in it. And no lights come on behind coin door or marque. This cabinet has the old transformers on the bottom with the fuses. 6 buss fuses to the left and 2 with turn knobs to the right.
(1) Is the power supply dead now that I made it spark? It smelt burnt
blown fuses ?
So I plan on getting a 60 in 1 with that
(2) Should I remove the power supply transformer and fuss box on the bottom of the unit would it still be nessicary to have if you install the 60 in 1 ?
(3) Should I get the 60 in 1 board only because with the existing jamma wire up inside my cabinet ?
(4) Or should I get the 60 in 1 kit which comes with new power supply and new wire harness controller buttons. Could always use an extra wiring harness. Or may need to rewire.
I plan on using a Lcd monitor for lightness and $ plus easy vga hook up.
Does power supply board come with a plug.
(5) Do you have to hard wire your power cord into the power supply board ? a/c a/c g
What is your opinion and I have no plans on restoring this cabinet back to its orginal state.
Thank you Brent
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Brent,
Let’s take your questions one at a time, shall we?
(1) Is the power supply dead now that I made it spark? It smelt like burnt blown fuses.
It could be. The best way to tell is to use a multimeter to check the voltages coming out of it. Check out our posts on Checking And Replacing A Power Supply and Checking A Classic Power Supply for more information. If the voltages are good, the power supply is good.
(2) Should I remove the power supply transformer and fuse box on the bottom of the unit? Would it still be necessary to have if you install the 60 in 1?
If you were using the original arcade monitor, you would need to leave these items in the bottom of the cabinet as the isolation transformer would be required to run the monitor. Since you are using an LCD monitor, you could remove them and it should work fine. We recommend leaving these in the cabinet just in case you or someone else ever wanted to take it back to a Super Pac Man. Plus, it’s not that hard to wire around them.
(3) Should I get the 60 in 1 board only because with the existing jamma wire up inside my cabinet?
(4) Should I get the 60 in 1 kit which comes with new power supply, new wire harness and controller buttons. I could always use an extra wiring harness or may need to rewire.
You could just buy the 60-in-1 board but it sounds like the wiring in the cabinet is pretty bad and the power supply could be shot. We would probably order the kit and rewire the whole cabinet. It’s not that difficult and it would be a great learning experience for someone like yourself who is new to working with arcade cabinets.
I plan on using a LCD monitor for lightness and $ plus easy VGA hook up.
To be honest with you, it would probably be cheaper to use the monitor that is currently in your cabinet. The hook up would probably be easy too especially if you plan on rewiring the cabinet like we talked about earlier. Also, CRT monitors give you a more authentic arcade experience as that’s what these games were designed to run on. We always recommend fixing what you currently have over purchasing something new.
We have a post on Troubleshooting Games That Are Playing Blind that you can check out for more information on repairing monitors that are playing blind. The extended cut on our Volume 4 DVD (which you can purchase from our online store) actually shows you step by step how to repair this issue. Even if you don’t feel confident in your monitor repair skills, you could always ship your chassis off to one of the guys on our resources page and have them repair if for you. Of course, the choice is yours. We just want to make sure you make an informed one.
(5) Does power supply board come with a plug?
I’m not sure if you’re talking about the LCD monitor or the power supply itself. The answer is yes if you’re talking about the LCD monitor. It does come with a plug that you can plug directly in to a standard power socket. The power supply, however, does not come with a power cord and you’ll either need to tap into the current power cord or wire up a new power cord.
(6) Do you have to hard wire your power cord into the power supply board ? a/c a/c g
Yes, this is one way you can do it. You could also just put a power strip in the game and plug all of the parts that require power into that. We usually wire up a plug inside the game so that we can plug in different things inside the cabinet with only one, main plug for everything.
What is your opinion and I have no plans on restoring this cabinet back to its original state.
Overall, this is probably the best option for your cabinet. It sounds like it would be a lot more work to take the cabinet back to a Super Pac Man. Of course, we always think it’s a good idea to leave that option open which is why we recommend leaving the fuse block and transformers in there. We would also keep the CRT in there as previously stated. Sounds like once you put the work in to this cabinet you’ll have a game that you’ll be able to enjoy for years to come.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your questions and good luck with your repair.
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