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Reroute DIP Switch
Question from Jeffrey: Hi, I have a Pac Man I bought 17 years ago and I’ve had no problems with it, but I want to fix a few things such as replacing the joystick grommet. I have two questions. First, I have no experience working with circuit boards
1. It has a Multi-Pac that the guy had set up a reset menu switch behind one of the coin slots. I ordered a coin accepter and took apart the old switch and hooked it up to a push switch. I would like to mount it somewhere, maybe next to the speaker, and I heard once that you could reroute some of the dip switches and use a toggle switch so you could pause the game without going through the back. I thought doing both the Multi-Pac reset and pause switches at the same time made sense. Is that a good idea and how easy is that to do?
2. My board has the jumper pad difficulty modification and I would like to remove it. How would I do that without damaging anything? I attached a picture of it. It looks a bit melted to me.
Thanks, Jeffrey
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Jeffrey,
1.) Although we have never tried it ourselves, it shouldn’t be too hard to relocate a dip switch to a toggle switch. You’ll just need to solder some wires from the dip switch that you want to control to a toggle switch and you should be in business. Now, keep in mind that if you are using the freeze switch and have a regular CRT monitor in your Pac Man cabinet that you run the risk of screen burn. Screen burn happens when a still image sits on a CRT screen for so long that it actually “burns” the image into your monitor tube. There is no way to undo screen burn so please be careful with this option if you decide to install it.
2.) On the jumper pad difficulty modification, you’ll just need to remove the solder that’s connecting the two pads. You can use a soldering with some braid/wick or a desoldering iron to remove it. You may need to add some solder back after removing the “jumper” but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Of course, it will take some soldering skills to accomplish both of these tasks. If you’re not familiar with soldering, we highly recommend checking out the Soldering Tutorial video on our Volume 1 DVD which can be purchased from our online store. You can also purchase this video on YouTube if you would rather go that route.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your project.
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