No, this is not a singles ad. I spent most of the day today replacing all these old crappy connectors from Baby Pac-Man…

with shiny new ones:

This took sooooo long. It seemed even longer because there is no heat in my garage and its pretty cold today. I can’t wait for the Spring!

If you are REALLY bored, here are before and after shots you can click on to see the old vs. new connectors:

One thing that I thought was strange was the factory placement of the polarizing key for connector J1 on the solenoid board. That is a 15 pin connector, and they put the polarizing key dead center on pin 8. Because of this, the connector could be flipped around and connected backwards. I didn’t want to replicate this, so I found an unused pin towards the end, snipped it off, and put another polarizing key in that spot:

Changing the first connector got the game up and running again (it stopped for no reason). In between changing each connector, I fired the game up to make sure everything was still OK. This gave me a chance to get used to playing the game. There were 20 connectors, so I played it at least 20 times. It’s incredibly hard, but I am just starting to get the hang of it.

Next on my list is a cap kit for the monitor. Then, I’ll probably put on the control panel overlay. After that, I want to sand down the new cabinet, patch any scratches and paint it. Unfortunately I’m going to have to wait for warmer weather to do that.