Arcade1up Pac-Man Mod

RetroRalph·video·22m 8s·analyzed·Dec 29, 2018

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.025

TL;DR

Arcade1Up Pac-Man control panel mod to vertical board with wiring and integration guide.

Summary

Retro Ralph demonstrates how to modify an Arcade1Up Pac-Man cabinet by converting the control panel to support a vertical game board (Game Elf) with three buttons and a joystick, providing detailed guidance on drilling, button/joystick installation, Jamma harness wiring, and cabinet integration. The modification enables access to 412 different games on the system.

Key Claims

Game Elf is one option for vertical board conversions; other options exist and will be reviewed on the channel
high confidence · Direct statement about review plans for alternative boards
The specific drill bit used produces cleaner holes than step bits because it has a center spike for starter holes
high confidence · Detailed technical comparison provided during drilling demonstration
No aftermarket joystick mounting holes line up perfectly with factory pre-drilled holes on Arcade1Up cabinets
high confidence · Retro Ralph states 'I haven't found one yet, an aftermarket joystick that lines up perfectly with the holes that were pre-drilled from the factory'
Double-sided tape on joystick mounting does not affect joystick performance and improves alignment stability
high confidence · Detailed explanation of tape-based alignment technique with statement 'It doesn't affect the performance of it in any way'
Game Elf board does not require a dedicated arcade power supply for basic operation
high confidence · Direct statement: 'It doesn't need one of these' and explanation that simple Molex power connection is sufficient

Notable Quotes

“One pro tip is that this thing will let go and you'll basically fall through the table. Happens every time.”
Retro Ralph@ 2:07 — Practical safety warning about drill bit behavior during wood penetration
“I haven't found one yet, an aftermarket joystick that lines up perfectly with the holes that were pre-drilled from the factory.”
Retro Ralph@ 6:52 — Key technical insight about universal compatibility issues in Arcade1Up modifications
“So Papa Duke simple and straightforward. If you look at all of the connections I started here with the ground...”
Retro Ralph@ 13:11 — Simplification of complex wiring task; repeated phrase suggests catchphrase in his content
“I would suggest doing it the way I'm gonna show you in the video. But what I do suggest is, let's say you need help. I'm gonna put a Dave Link to this in the comment section.”
Retro Ralph@ 12:39 — Demonstrates content creator practice of providing supplementary resources in comments/description
“This is what's kind of cool about the game elf in general. It doesn't need one of these. So you can certainly do an arcade power supply if you want. I think it's gonna complicate things, to be honest.”
Retro Ralph@ 16:56 — Product recommendation with reasoning; positions Game Elf as accessible entry-level option

Entities

Retro Ralphperson Arcade1UpcompanyGame ElfproductJammaproductPress Your Buttons Arcade PartscompanySanwacompanyETA PrimepersonZippycompanyPac-Mangame

Signals

?
community_signal: Content creator establishes ongoing review plan for alternative vertical board options and provides supplementary resources (links, FAQs) in comment sections
high · Retro Ralph states 'we'll probably end up reviewing different ones on the channel' and repeatedly references providing 'Dave Links' in description and comments
?
product_strategy: Arcade1Up Pac-Man cabinet converted from single-game system to multi-game vertical board system supporting 412 games via Game Elf board swap
high · Retro Ralph demonstrates successful modification adding '412 to be exact' additional games to original Pac-Man cabinet
?
technology_signal: Game Elf represents accessible entry-level approach to arcade board swaps, positioned as alternative to traditional arcade power supply installations
medium · Retro Ralph explains Game Elf 'doesn't need' arcade power supply and positions it as 'simple install' compared to more complex alternatives

Topics

Arcade1Up cabinet modification techniquesprimaryControl panel drilling and button installationprimaryJamma harness wiring and connector configurationprimaryJoystick mounting and alignmentprimaryGame Elf vertical board system integrationprimaryArcade cabinet power supply optionssecondaryAudio amplification for arcade systemssecondaryArcade parts sourcing and compatibilitysecondary

Sentiment

positive(0.85)— Content is instructional and encouraging; Retro Ralph maintains upbeat, helpful tone throughout with frequent positive affirmations of the modification's success. Minor frustrations expressed about tape removal process and wiring complexity are framed as learning opportunities rather than negatives.

Transcript

youtube_auto_sub · $0.000

hey guys this is retro Ralph welcome back thank you so much for the support in this episode we're gonna mod your pac-man so stay tuned and let's do this [Music] today we're gonna modify this pac-man control panel so my plan was to use the original panel and I'm going to turn it into a vertically playing machine that's got a multi board in it which is the game elf vertical board so game elves just one option you can use others as well and we'll probably end up reviewing different ones on the channel but my plane here was to keep this all stock so instead of redoing the board I want to keep the original board graphics so I'm gonna drill holes for three buttons and one joystick so I'm using the Street Fighter overlay as my guide I haven't taken the protective film off of it remember there's protective film on that I haven't taken the protective film off of it yet so hopefully this allows me to create some clean holes I can line things up nicely and the spacing should work out okay so anyways I'm gonna get to drilling into this and I will film it so you guys can see what I'm doing and which bits I'm using for my drill and yeah we'll get to it okay so I'm back and I have my drill this is the bit I'm gonna be using I will have a link down below the video what exact drill bit this is I noticed this is probably best one I've used I've tried step bits and things like that I like this one because it's got a spike in the middle to start a starter hole this seems to work really well it produces nice clean holes the majority of the time so let's let's drill a joystick button out one privet tip is that uh this thing will let go and you'll basically fall through the table happens every time okay so I think we're done we ended up with looks pretty good so how I want this board to be is controller a B C and then we'll have coin and start because it's gonna be a one player board so I don't like the way it came out little pro tip is in the time elapsed footage I'm not sure if John Youssi this but when you're drilling through when you're drilling the holes through there'll be a breaking point where it will push through and sometimes it's hard to tell when that's gonna happen and your drill will absolutely slip down so I actually have a pretty bad back so I just felt it on that one because it just rammed right through I thought I was about about close but little close than I thought and I ran through so anyways pro tip is don't hurt your back kind of ease through it you'll see sometimes I'll drill in vacuum drill it actually makes quite a bit of mess for a small hole so anyway I guess we're onto buttons and wiring now okay so I mounted the buttons you got your ABC player one coin something you may not like this because this is where the joystick used to go I'm okay with it so this is tricky alright if any of you guys have done any of the other modifications you know when it comes to the joystick it's a little bit of a pain in the ass I have a little pro tip you may or may not like this but you know what you're trying to do is get that to be centered right and to do that by eye and it can be difficult because nothing's holding this you're kind of moving this round and then it's not in the middle and god forbid you get it over here all night race thing won't work so or won't work right so here's what I do and I'm not gonna show you this whole thing but because it's painful watching me - that's - I don't know guys double back this double back sticky tape to get the layer off like I use tweezers this is my daughter's tweezers bye though that's what I think I use tweezers this is a nightmare for me sometimes my projects will take ten minutes longer because it's me fiddling with getting this top layer off total pain in the ass I don't know why it's so hard at least for me so I'm not gonna show you that because I'm going to spare you the aggravation but so basically I put two layers down I need to put a layer on it I put a layer on the joystick and that way it keeps it in place it doesn't affect the performance of it if anything it just helps it become a little bit more secure then I drill a little four holes for the screws this way I know it's a hundred percent align the sticky tape holds it in place while I you know screw it down so to me it's much easier it doesn't affect the performance of it in any way and all it is is really some double back sticky tape to keep it in place so little pro tip for what it's worth okay I got it off so that's such a pain okay so now I'm gonna flip the board around the beautiful thing is is now I've got those two pieces it's double back tape on there so it should be really easy for me to perfectly align the hole and then keep it in place while I drill the guide holes so I'm gonna tilt the camera down so you can see what I'm doing didn't take that scissor out of the way so this is we got got a hole right there so I'm just gonna stick this in from behind that's what she said then I'm gonna I'm gonna make it perfectly aligned as best I can so see it's perfectly in place and now it's ready for my screws and now I don't need to worry about you know this thing popping off and me potentially you know not having not giving you the finger I just happened to be holding my mouth at it now it's perfectly in place so hopefully that tip helps so I'm about ready to mount the joystick and here's the thing you need to remember this this is important so when you take off the stop joystick the mounting holes are never gonna line up perfectly with on with the joystick you choose I haven't found one yet and aftermarket joystick that lines up perfectly with the holes that were pre-drilled from the factory so what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to drill guide holes be careful doing this so the first time I did this that's my drill bit right there the first time I did this I actually slipped and drilled all the way through the board so luckily I'm pretty good with putty and I filled it and you can't really tell but that was on my Neo Geo so I think that wasn't the first time is actually the second first time I didn't I didn't drill through so drill guide holes would be really careful don't drill too far and you can reuse the screws so if you're if your one-up scheme like-minded someone went absolutely apeshit in the factory and put so much damn glue on the control on the joystick that there's glue all over the screws - you can reuse these screws there's no reason why you can't this is my art cable integrate the art of screws I keep on kind of as I mod these just throw it extras and stuff like that the cool thing is is arcade one up has extra parts and most of their systems which I thought was a good touch on their part so so you can oftentimes find a screw just be careful here's the thing this this control panel isn't that deep so you want to be careful for one when you're drilling the guide holes be careful let's move all the way through because I will suck and the other thing is make sure your screws on too deep because if they're too deep it's gonna go through too so just be careful when you're doing this no need to drill a super long super crazy deep kinda hole just something up line it up with so you make sure that it's nice and straight and the screw goes a nice so one more tip I'm sure you guys have experienced that if you've already done modifications if you're new to it then hopefully that helps okay so there it is you got my joystick mounted I used a zippy joystick I like it in orem Amazon I'll give you the link in the description you've got your ABC play at one point and I put the I put the power and volume back on you know another mod I actually bondo'd it and covered it I'm the I'll reuse those I'm probably just gonna use a TP link or whatever that company is a camera - TP link got bought by someone else but anyways I'm gonna use one of those Alexa enabled power connectors and just have everything go to a power strip and then just have it all be controlled by by Amazon just cuz it's easier that way I don't know I mean some people want to reuse the on and off I really care so that's it alright I think I said this earlier but I am using a jam aboard this is actually gonna use the game elf vertical so that being said that means I gotta mess with this Jam harness however there's a guy out there he runs a website called press your button press your buttons Arcade parts the website is pyb - arcade calm I'll put a link in the description what he does is he labels it in English so much easier to work with this is my least favorite part but um but anyway I'll kind of give you a little bit of guidance here so you're gonna need buttons and you need micro switches so typically buttons are sold without micro switches so if you want clicky and we all love clicky listen to this very clicky right uh the guy that the guy that does the harness to press your buttons arcade parts he's got he's got micro switches on his site these are the ones he uses a company is actually sand star but they pretty reliable I put them in lots of my different systems and I've never any problems with so again these are super cheap if for some reason one breaks you can always you know if you use quick connects on these in and out pop it in got a new one so anyway as you can see that's the microswitch box so we have many more modifications we can do so all right I'm gonna get this thing wired up and and I'll be back in a minute okay so we're ready to get to the wiring but before start I want to give you a simple crash course this seems overwhelming it's actually really simple so when you look at your push button your micro switch there's really gonna be two leads on it that you're gonna care about you're gonna care about this single lead that's by itself that's always going to be the ground and then the one closest to ground is the one that's gonna go from that micro switch to whatever button it needs to be so this one that's farthest away from the ground don't worry about that one so basically you'll see as I go through it what you're gonna do is identify you know if it's button player 1 button 1 and this was the micro switch connected to the button you want to be player 1 button 1 your gonna wire the ground right and those are all gonna connect together so that's gonna be the same no matter what you're doing and then you're gonna put that that lead from the Jama harness to this lead right here always so it's always gonna be on normally open basically what that means is that that micro switches in its open position and when you push the D press the button it pushes the push button down on the micro switch and now that that will register as a button press so super simple there's an example here we're showing you someone wiring it with just twisting the wires around the leads I wouldn't suggest that I would suggest doing it the way I'm gonna show you in the video but what I do suggest is let's say you need help I'm gonna put a link to this in the comment section this is a great little sort of tutorial FAQ that kind of walks through how to wire these switches but if you follow my lead on it you'll you'll get it every time it's pretty simple and straightforward I just want to make sure I covered that briefly because I'm not gonna go into it it deep detail all right guys now we'll jump back to the board itself we're back I flipped the board around so you could see it from the other side so pretty simple and straightforward if you look at all of the connections I started here with the ground you can see this is actually thick player one so you can see a start here the great thing is is these loops these ground connections are actually all supplied with the harness so it's super easy to do and they already have the quick connectors on here so like I said remember that top lead is always gonna be your ground that flat top one so so as you can see it just goes from button to button and all the way around the joysticks and then your last connection just goes into a ground wire from the harness right and there's a couple different ground wires on here so you can feel free to use any one that you that you want but basically what you're gonna do is you're just gonna follow the lead for the button back to the actual button itself the cool thing is is every single one of these wires coming off this harness have a connector on it it has a quick connector on it so actually the only one that doesn't is gonna be coin so he's got coin off the harness going to an actual coin receptor or whatever you call it a coin door so you need to cut that one but that's it other than that they all have connectors but look look what I said about where they belong on the on the microswitch ground and the closest to ground is going to be the one that goes to that particular wire back to the harness so it's really easy you just follow you follow the harness now what it says back to the buttons keep in mind these harnesses can get really messy so what I do just because I knew I'm this board is gonna stay dedicated to this I'm not gonna put other games on it so I cut all the player to this isn't gonna have a player to option for me so I cut all the player two off you could cut it off you can pull them off you can wrap them up I just wanted the harness to look a little bit cleaner than it did before so if you've ever weighed that big ball of wires I kind of tied it all up and zip-tied it nice so that when I put it in the cabinet it's not a total mess but that's as deep detail I'm going to get into the wiring piece if you have questions you can throw them in the comments and I'll try to help help out an answer if this is the first time you're doing a Jayamma board I actually real quick since a lot of people talk about audio this is a you know it's a vertical game the audio on the games aren't necessarily amazing so but but this speakers does a pretty decent job so you will need an amplifier in this setup and I'll go over that when we get into the cabinet which we're gonna do right now so we're gonna put this all in there and get it going but this be Rs 40 I like this speaker it sounds pretty decent you get a cheaper amp on Amazon and it does a pretty good job so these games aren't known for their amazing audio so hopefully that does the job for you alright we're gonna go put this all in the cabinet and fire it up then we're over by the back of the cabinet now I wanted to give you guys a good glimpse as to what's inside now and how easy it is to set this all up okay so I'm not going to cover that but we all know that you need a video controller board I would suggest going with the one that ETA prime recommends I'll have a link in the description for that so let's not focus on that we're gonna focus on is the wiring we just did right from the bottom of the cabinet there it is and that's gonna go back to the wire harness which is right here and I didn't have time to clean this all up so I apologize we'll make it look nice later okay so now we've got our wire harness and we've got our game elf so how you gonna get power to the game elf this is what's kind of cool about the game elf in general it doesn't need one of these so you can certainly do an arcade power supply if you want I think it's gonna complicate things to be honest I will throw this caveat on it though if you do an arcade power supply it will open up your possibilities for modifications later but if you don't do it right now you can always add it later so it's not like you're missing out on anything for right now if you decide not to do this so for right now we're gonna make this a simple install so we're not going to do that no arcade power supply required however we gonna need I believe these it's called the molex power supply I believe you give me one of these it's got a connection that looks like that I'm gonna actually put a link to that in the description too but because this has that kind of power connector right on the side of it that's all you'll need so kind of nice sorry for the close-up but we're gonna get that connected there okay so now that's connected that's all good we've got power to the game elf you'll need a VGA cable so if you don't have one you just need to get a VGA cable that goes from here to your controller board up on the monitor from there you're really just ready to plug in your Jemma harness you're gonna plug your Jama harness into the game elf I'm using this adapter on the game elf I'll put a link to the description for that too you don't necessarily need it for this build this fixes their weird ground issue that they have on the boards but don't don't worry about that right now but anyways so you're just gonna put the Jama harness onto the game elf make sure your powers on you know your power not powers on but your your power is connected trying to keep everything all powered off right now B while working on it we don't want power on while working on it I'm simply gonna have this as an on/off switch for right now what I typically do with these is I wire them into I wire them into a tp-link Amazon enabled outlet and I just voice command on and off for this kinds of stuff so that's it we're really ready to power it on see simple there's not a whole lot in here it's kind of a clean install the only thing I'm not going to cover on here and this this has been covered in other videos is you will need an audio amplifier so that speaker that we had coming off of the speaker leads we have coming off of the bottom of the John Youssi the speaker right there see it right there on the right-hand side the speaker that's gonna need to come to an amplifier so one that I typically use I'll put a link to the description it's just a basic amp is this pile amp right here so basically what you're gonna do is there's an mp3 or an aux input on a lot of these right there if John Youssi that on the left hand inside you're gonna go from there um so you're going to use a connection like this link to the description of that to to the side of the game elf if you can see on the side there's a connection right there for it I'm gonna try to get a zoom in close-up of it but you would go right here into the side of the game elf that will go from that to your amplifier and then you hook up your speaker and then you've got audio that's pretty much it guys it's not a whole lot and if you were gonna do a trackball there is a trackball connector on here I'm not gonna cover that I don't have any I don't know not a big trackball guy so I'm not gonna do that so anyways we're ready to power it up and hopefully see if this thing all works all right guys so moment of truth let's power it up and see what happens alright so it is a I don't know it is a vertically oriented board I don't know why it does the game elf logo sideways it just does that's the test button menu so if you want to go into test mode you do that to change some of the settings but looks like we're gonna be in business here in a second alright there it is it's all booted up so so it worked guys it's great we did our first pac-man modification as far as our channel goes if you want to get into a game you select the game press player one start and we're often going so that's um that's it for this modification I'm gonna you know do some gameplay videos at a later date but as you can see we're we're good to go so kind of a fun modification with a lot more games now available to us on the pac-man system 412 to be exact there you have it guys we have single-handedly modified the pac-man so with this many more games to choose from I don't know how you could get bored but I've always kind of said this arcade one up stuff is kind of like a gateway drug so I do expect that if you do this it's gonna lead to another modification and another modification as long as you guys are having fun with it that's all it matters but I appreciate you tuning in please subscribe to the channel please like the video if you if it helped you and as always thank you for watching and happy [Music]