First things first, let’s take those awful floor destroyers off and put on some nice, friendly Teflon levelers from QuarterCade.
Identifying the power-cord molex type. This Pac-Man uses a Midway Type-2 mushroom-circle-mushroom molex.
Next up is to remove the Wells/Gardner K4600 and get the motherboard & daughterboards loose enough to clean them up before the cap replacing work begins. This gallery is all the reference photos I took to ensure everything is connected properly. A couple connections have a red twist-tie to identify proper alignment due to the two wires being the same color and the connector not having an orientation feature.
Wow is this thing dirty. Note the anode cable on the far right, you see a glimse of red on what otherwise appears to be a black cable…
Cleaned and Re-Capped
The cap kit for this was purchased from Arcade Parts And Repair, however several additional doodads were ordered as recommended by the folks on KLOV:
Since there was a lot to do on the mainboard and one daughter board (the second daughter board was very simple), I split the work up between two days. I first cleaned everything using 97% Isopropyl rubbing Alcohol. Used a hair dryer on low heat to ensure dryness.
Once finished, I triple checked all the positive & negative directions, and put everything back together. Placed the cage back inside the Pac-Man cabinet, connected up the fresh new power cable from Arcade Shop, hit the top switch and pushed in the back-door interlock…
Buzzz… Crackle… Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
That initial warm up crackle gave me a jump, thinking something exploded. But nothing did! The monitor flashed and a field of white came over it and faded… to nothing! Crap. The game wasn’t playing blind either. Did some searching on a white screen Pac-Man and found several results saying that a bad PCB Molex connection and poor fuse connections could be the cause of this. Well, those are easy enough to check.
Pulled the PCB Connector and sprayed some DeOxit into it. Pulled all the fuses from their crusty holders and used some 220 grit sandpaper on the contacts, checked each fuse for continuity and re-seated. Alright, let’s press that interlock again.
A slight crackle this time, a lot of static buildup on the tube, and we have a Pac-Man screen! Awesome!
And wow was the brightness a bit low. Turns out this black level pot (located in a completely fucking useless location) is incredibly fickle. It would go from total dark to super bright with a quarter of a turn. I did not adjust this while the game was on because of where I had to stick my hand in the cage, so a lot of turn the game off, nudge the pot a little, turn it back on.
Now that the game is on and nothing exploded, the real question is did this fix the initial problem of the display shutting off after 20 minutes. A half hour went by and thankfully the display was still going! My wife and I played a few rounds, well over an hour of it remaining on and things are still good.
Alright, time to order new fuse holders and recap the main board.