There aren’t many original Pacman cocktails in the UK, possibly not even in double digits – and yet despite all my other weird n wonderfull cabs, I don’t have a Pacman Cocktail. So when I came across a knackered looking one for sale at an auction in the USA I jumped at the chance of giving it a good home and restoring it to its former glory. After all, Pacman is one of the top most recognisable arcade games of all time and the brand is huge all over the world 26 yrs on.
So, after a bit of a haggle, I bought it, and a USA friend of mine was kind enough to allow me dump it in his garage and crate it up onto a small wooden pallet. In the past I have loaded up and shipped entire containers full of cabs to build up my collection, but this was the first time I had shipped just one machine by air freight. So I called my usual shipper and found out it was not much more difficult than sending a parcel back home. They do all the paperwork and simply collect and handle everything. Now here’s the amazing thing, the mini crate got picked up on a Friday morning in the USA, and I flew back on the Saturday arriving Sunday. By the time I’d had a good nights sleep it was Monday and to my utter amazement I got a call from the air freight people to say it had already arrived in the UK. They delivered on the Tuesday morning. That’s faster than a first class airmail letter ! And what’s more the total cost was approx £350 plus some VAT and some minimal admin charges.
Anyway, first inspection showed it to be scratched and dented all over, and full of 25 yrs worth of crud, dust , dead flies, ripped playing cards etc. And on top of that a lot of the electrical connections looked typically crusty, and the monitors’ electrostatic charge had attracted about 5mm thick of grease and dust all over it including the screen surface.
After a basic electrical pre-check, I disconnected the game electronics and converted the power supply to 240volts, which is only a couple of wires to change on the transformer. Checking it with a scope showed all the voltages under load were behaving as expected. Next up, I plugged the loom in to see if the cabinet lived … nothing, not even a munching sound.
The arrival of the cab from America
Turned out not to be all bad because the monitor came up eventually, and displayed a screen full of graphic garbage, so the board was semi dead/semi working but nothing unusual based on experience. The monitor was shot because even after a warm up the picture was waving about, was irreversibly blurred, and showed all the signs of needing a full cap-kit and probably other fixes, and besides it was filthy and I wanted this machine to look mint inside and out. I have a few spare brand-new old-spec monitors so I decided to fit one along the way. I plugged in a spare working Pacman board to double check, but the monitor really was fairly dud. It also had real bad screen burn for being 25 yrs old.
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