Lighting Up Your Pac Buttons

Button Illumination

by Bob Roberts

Quite a few people have asked for help in lighting up their start buttons, most notably on the Ms Pac-Man CP & since they were pleased with the results, I've decided to offer it as a kit to save time & make it easier to do.... maybe less intrusive, as well. Red translucent buttons seemed to be the choice for most, so that's what I used for the kit. Of course, you can adapt the kit to other games, also.

Note: For you puristic collectors, please stop reading at this point :-()

Basicly, this is just a couple of complete new button assemblies with lamp holders & lamps attached, plus the lamp wiring to tap into a power source.

I've added the 12 volt wedge type lamps that will operate from either 12VDC on the DC Pac harness or on 12VAC from an original AC Pac harness. You could use 555 lamps & wire into a 5VDC power source in the cab if you wanted, but Ive always chosen the 12 volt option to keep lamps off the logic bus supply.

Although polarity is not a factor here, I've color coded the wiring to standard black for ground & orange for 12 volts & added a couple inline splice connectors to make it easy to tap into your source voltage. If you are more advanced in wiring you might want to combine this feed with the feed to the coin door connector. The coin door lamps are fed through the 9 position Amp connector, used as a line break, at positions 5 (blue-yellow) & 7 (yellow-green), so you could extract those 2 Amp sockets from the board side of the connector & add one of the lamp feeds with each one.... new socket... and pop'em back in. I would add a 2 position connector in the feed going up to the lamps, so that it could be disconnected when removing the CP from the cab. For the real wiring ace, a couple Amp pins & sockets would allow you to use the existing CP break connector by utilizing a couple of the empty positions. Just one neat break plug & the CP is removable.

If you are using the inline splicers you can tap into the two wires as described above... blue-yellow & yellow-green for your lamp power. You'll have to transfer your switch lines over to the new leaf switch, too. The old switch wires are soldered on & now would be a good time to add quick disconnects to those lines making for a neater & more practical way to attach them.

They really glow at 4:00 AM in the morning :-)

I'll bet they look a lot better on a freshly covered CP....

Happy Gaming...