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Well, it was a lot quicker than I expected. A little over a week ago, I took delivery on a Baby Pac Man arcade machine. Baby Pac Man was something of an oddity in the arcade world - half video game, half pinball machine. It was EXACTLY what I was looking for. I had room for one more game in our "arcade", and I wanted a classic like pacman, but also really wanted a pinball machine (and didn't have the room for one). Baby Pac puts both into what is a fairly standard sized arcade cabinet. However, because it's a cross between the two worlds, fixing it can be doubly hard.

I had purchased it on eBay for around $240. It was not in complete working order. The monitor would light up and run a color bar test, and the playfield would illuminate, but that was it. So, I started on my quest to find answers on Google and stumbled across something called the Ultimate MPU Board. Essentially, it is a replacement board for the brains of the computer. These old MPU boards used to have a battery soldered directly to them to store the high scores and such. Problem is, I guess the engineers didn't figure they would be around 20 or 30 years later... and the batteries would leak, corroding the board and the Vidiot (Video) board that was mounted directly below it. My guess was that the MPU was hosed, so I ordered the NEW replacement board.

In the meantime, I took to cleaning the thing up. As with my tron game, Baby Pac hadn't seen much love in that area and there was a ton of grime... but the playfield cleaned up very well. I also ordered about 100 type 555 lightbulbs to replace every light on the play field and coin door, rubber post caps to hold plastic pieces on the board down, and a brand new bumper kit to replace the existing ones that were crumbling away. Things were looking pretty nice, but the game still wasn't working - as I waited for the MPU.

Then two days ago, something wierd happened. A day before the MPU arrived, on a damp evening in the garage, I flicked the switch and the video portion of the game started working. It sort of freaked me out - but I enjoyed playing pac sans the pinball portion which I couldn't figure out.

Yesterday, the MPU came in the mail. After checking a few readings with a digital multimeter, I popped it in and fired the game up. Video came right up but still no pinball. Took a second and cleared the high scores and totals as they had been corrupted at some point, and set off to check connections and fuses on the pinball board. After a few hours, it still wasn't working, and I was a little frustrated but figured this was part of the process.

My eyes then fell to the power supply that has 5 fuses in it. It appeared one was dark. I thought to myself... it couldn't be that simple. I reached down, pulled out the fuse and sure enough... it was fried. So, I grabbed a new fuse, popped it in and fired the game up. Immediately, I knew something was different - as I could here the solenoids on the pinball board snap into place.

Baby Pac Man Was Alive!!

I spent the next few hours playing the game and being yelled at once by my wife for yelling too loud... as it was late at night and inky, blinky and clide killed my Pac. The cool part is I can move on to restoring the cabinet much quicker than I anticipated, and this thing might be complete by May. I'll keep you posted!