New harness

After some research I figured the most likely cause of the screen problems the Ms Pacman was experiencing. These are known as "hum bars" and generally can be traced back to poor power/grounding. The easiest solution is to replace all the fuse holder blocks to clean up connections. The second solution is to replace the edge connections.

I swapped out the fuse blocks and the problem remained, so I moved on to the more difficult task of rewiring the edge connector. Once again with another order to "The Real Bob Roberts" and I had two options in hand. One was a "hum bar fixup kit" that provided a new 22/44 pin molex connector. The second option was a completely new wiring harness.

The parts arrived 2 days later and started with the easier of the two fixes, swapping the molex edge connector. One by one I removed wires from the old edge connector and connected them to the new edge connector. For the power connectors I beefed up the wiring (to 18ga) and soldered the connectors to ensure a better connection. I cleaned up areas of the wiring where the previous owner had cut into wires to get access to ground.

This did the trick, the hum bars are gone. Based on my dialog with Bob, the harness my game has is not a standard Pacman/Midway harness, it's pretty clear someone retrofitted a Pacman upright into this cocktail cabinet.

So I'm almost ready to button up the game. I added a fan (there's a mounting for one, it had been removed) and rewired the A/C internals as noted in my earlier blog. My next task is to neatly install the wiring and install the new cocktail table glass with the new underlay. I'll include some pictures in a future post.