Thans GoRetro......in these days of über-rare Nintendo machines, huge Japanese machines and container loads full of games a Ms.Pac seems to have become a rather "boring" machine....,
It's weird, because when I started out in this hobby, a Ms.Pac was extremely rare in Europe (AFAIK they were never officially imported here) and I never dreamed I would own one...
Of course it took me insanely long to restore it but that's how it is for me.....doing other electronics repairs on arcade hardware, co-organizing Eurocade/RGE, my other hobby and of course Real Life make me probably one of the slowest restorers here.
But I love the result. I played Ms.Pac SO much back in the 80s...and It still love the game. Been playing it quite a bit yesterday and it is simply awesome. I love the intermissions, especially the music....the set-up of the speaker gives it such a great bass-sound.
I adjusted the mounting of the CRT in the frame yesterday so that the picture is now perfectly straight. During the process, I had removed the tinted plexi and when I looked at the picture it was SO fantastically bright.....I was thinking....why would I actually re-install it ? The thing is, I have installed one of the NIB WG monitors that we got from Ireland and this had a dark tinted tube. The reason why there is a dark tinted plexi over the screen from the factory is to "hide" the fact that there is a CRT there....but in a dark gameroom like mine you will never see that anyway combined with the dark CRT. Also the colors are much richer without the plexi.
That plexi also makes that you turn up the brightness on the monitor (too) high. The result is pretty clear, look at how burnt my original CRT was, and most Ms.Pacs suffer from it.
So I decided to leave it off. Of course I'll keep it around but I will run the cab without it for sure.
I also played Eyes, what a great and challenging game. Pengo is cool too but DAMN what a hard game it is !!! I guess I'll be setting that up on the easiest setting to make it a bit more fun to play. It's pretty amazing how the sound hardware of the Pac board handles the Pengo music and sound by the way. There are differences for sure but they are not annoying and the music actually sounds correct.
I really like the high score saving of the kit....this always makes for a nice challenge and is sorely missing on the original hardware. It's often seen as a "small" feature but it is probably one of the most useful ones of a kit like this.
The one thing that still puzzles me is where those yellow ground straps all go to. The one for the coin-door is obvoius enough, but the longest one, where does it go ? I don't see any use for it to go to the PCB, there are not metal parts that need to be connected there.....and IIRC from that largest strap there is another one running towards the top of the cab, probably to the marquee but where to hook it up ?
If anyone has a Ms.Pac with these straps correctly connected still please let me know
