Petko's Capcom Impress

[Petkorazzi]

Part 1: Introduction and General Noobness.

So I made a little introduction post a couple days ago as I'm new around here, but as I've got some photos together and have things to talk about I figured it's time to make a thread documenting my adventures with my Capcom Impress candy cabinet.

As I'd mentioned in my introduction post, I'd long wanted a candy cabinet of my own (mainly an Aero City) but never thought I'd get the chance to own one. However, a fortunate encounter with a Facebook Marketplace listing led me to discover a Capcom Impress (listed as a Ms. Pac-Man machine) for $500. Knowing that was likely the best chance I'd ever have to own a machine of my own, I landed on the opportunity. Literal dream come true:



As an amusing side-note, I bought this cabinet from the husband of a congresswoman who'd bought the machine for her because she loved to play Ms. Pac-Man. I won't name her here or anything, but it was pretty amusing to see who I'd bought the machine from when I pulled up to the house (the listing was through a 3rd party).

After getting it home and into my (admittedly messy) workshop it was time to see exactly what I'd bought. I plugged it up and sure enough, it's a working Ms. Pac-Man machine. The former owner included a slightly-battered and faded Midway/Bally marquee:



What the former owner hadn't included were any keys, but we'll get to that a bit later. You can also see that the cabinet is installed onto some kind of coated MDF riser. The FO said that he'd gotten it this way from a local vending/arcade machine company and didn't know it was originally intended to be a sit-down cabinet; he definitely had no idea what he really had. Whoever did the riser installation did so extremely securely as well - it's solid. There's some height-adjustable feet on the bottom of it but no visible attachment mechanism; I'm guessing it's bolted onto the cabinet from the inside.

Now is as good a time as any to freely admit that despite spending most of my spare times in arcades in my youth - and spending some time over the last few years lurking this forum - I know nothing about owning an arcade machine. One thing I do know is that fragile electronics tend to dislike freezing-cold temperatures, so since my workshop isn't heated I went ahead and brought the machine into my office for now:




Aside from some typical scuffs and plastic yellowing it looks to be in good shape. I love that the Impress logo lights up and that all the original Japanese stickers are still on it. That's obviously not the original control panel - or really any control panel. Looks and feels like a thick piece of jigsawed Lexan with the vinyl layer from a Midway Ms. Pac-Man control panel sandwiched underneath it. The control stick has an octagonal gate which seems odd. It's also very annoying for playing Ms. Pac-Man. It's functional though, so it's fine for now. The congresswoman must've been a real pro too - the board is set to give an extra life every 20,000 points instead of the factory-standard 10,000 points. The game is set to free-play, but I tossed a quarter into the mech to see what would happen. It fell into the slot but didn't sound like it even made it to the mech, and the coin return button feels like it's not attached to anything.

At this point I put together a list of short-to-medium-term goals for the cabinet:

1. Pick the locks open with an impressioning tool and see what we've got going on in there; either have keys made or put new locks in.
2. Flip the jumper on the Ms. Pac-Man board to the factory setting of 10,000 points per extra life.
3. Find an original Impress 2-player control panel and put that in there.
4. Fix the coin mech and have it take 100-yen coins for that "authentic" feel.
5. Rotate the monitor (which terrifies me, as I'm afraid I'll break something) and convert to ARpiCADE/some sort of emulated arcade environment.

Item #1 is the most immediately important at this point, though - and that's where I'll begin the next post.

[Petkorazzi]

Part 2: Making an Impress-ion (heh)

So at this point I've got a cabinet but no keys to get inside to see what I'm really working with. A local vending company offered to rekey the machine for ~$80 or so, but me being the arrogant (and cheap) sod I am and having watched many a YouTube video by LockPickingLawyer, I instead ordered myself a set of tubular lock impressioning tools from Banggood:



I'm not a lock-picker though; just someone with a passing interest in security. I bought these with no real expectation that I'd actually get into the machine. I figured they'd be fun to mess around with and in the process I'd learn more about tubular lock mechanisms and such, and then I'd pay a dude to come open the machine and I'd make a decision from there. I mean, surely these locks can't be easily picked with $20 worth of tools by someone with next to no lockpicking experience, right?



Welp, so much for that thought. Literally 20 seconds.

Ok, I better fess up here - I only picked the coin-bin door. It's a good thing I randomly decided to pick that lock first since it had the damn keys inside the coin bin:



It also contained the original manual, coin stickers, a printout of jumper settings for the Ms. Pac-Man board, an unused wire loom clip, a security Torx wrench, and a couple of security Torx screws with nuts. Unfortunately I can't read Japanese so the manual isn't practically useful. Do English-translated versions exist?

Anyway, back to the cabinet. I wasn't expecting it to be this clean. Then again it looks like it was never used for its intended purpose as the coin counter is at 2 and the coin return mechanism was never connected:



If you look closely you can see some quarters jammed in the mech; I got a dollar back so the cabinet only cost me $499 in the end. Looks like the mech is already set up for 100-yen coins too so that's one less thing I'll have to take care of. I connected the coin return lever to the mechanism and it works perfectly (as well it should, as the entire mech looks brand new).

Now the heart of the beast:



I'm not sure if anything can be learned from the serial number but I figured I'd post the picture of it just in case one of you has some information on it. All the wiring looks super-clean, and the...sound amplifier?...looks clean too. The board was the real surprise to me:



Ms. Pac-Man predates JAMMA standardization so going into this I was concerned that the original wiring would've been hacked and spliced horribly to work with the early-80s Midway board. I thought the best-case scenario was that some sort of JAMMA adapter was used to connect the old board to the JAMMA connector. I stupidly never considered the fact that the machine may have a bootleg board - which is exactly what this is. That's actually a huge relief to me. I figure one of the best ways to discourage an arcade noob is to hand them a machine with janky wiring and I'm glad that doesn't appear to be the case here. I do notice that the JAMMA connector seems to have some pins with no wires going to them, and there's a couple RCA connectors not connected to anything, but I'm not assuming these things are "bad" at the moment. A simple DIP switch flip got the game on the correct 10,000-points-per-1up setting and that's the end of that for now. The "Test" and "Service" buttons don't seem to do anything, but the volume adjustment pot is functional (albeit a bit sketchy; probably just has some dirty contacts).

Unfortunately, the control area isn't quite as nice:



It's not exactly bad or anything, but there are quite a few cheap and crappy crimp connectors. I'm pretty meticulous with my electrical work so that kind of thing really drives me crazy. Looks like there's a couple harnesses missing based on the empty plug as well - safe to assume those are for a 2nd player and/or the "kick harness" I've read about?

The control stick appears to be a Seimitsu LS-56; the buttons are...I don't know:



You can also see the light shining through the crappy Lexan control panel. That'll have to go eventually.

The "remote" monitor controls definitely work though. The score portion of Ms. Pac-Man was a bit cut off, and a quick adjustment of the H-Position trimmer fixed it right up. For now I'm going to leave it as it is and just enjoy playing some Ms. Pac-Man, but next on the list is going to be replacing the control panel with a 2L12B panel. Ideally I want an actual Capcom Impress control panel, but my initial forays into trying to find one for sale have not been going well. Apparently some Sega control panels will fit (Astro City onward, anyway) and also Egret II/Egret III panels? I've not looked into it a ton because I really want an actual Impress panel (or a well-made reproduction if those exist). I'll also have to look into this control wiring situation, but I'm hoping that wherever I find the control panel can also provide the accompanying wiring harnesses. Sticks and buttons are a non-issue.

The only thing left to mention for now is that the coin mech door doesn't fit particularly well:



It doesn't come across very well in the photo but the door seems misaligned and is difficult to open or close. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way to adjust the door alignment, and it's pretty trivial (once I'm done setting up the machine the way I want it I should almost never have to open this door), but it's there.

With these new discoveries, my current short-term plans are now:

1. See how to remove the riser?
2. Find and buy a control panel - ideally an actual Capcom Impress one.
3. Educate myself on these control wiring harnesses (and what I'll actually need).

I'm probably not going to do any major work on the cabinet until I've got a replacement control panel, but we'll see!

[Sunder]

That is the cleanest insides of a cab Ive ever seen.

Boy, have we got stories to tell you.

[Sunder]

Riser wise, you're probably looking for 4 M10 bolts at the bottom floor there.

[Petkorazzi]

That is the cleanest insides of a cab Ive ever seen.

Boy, have we got stories to tell you.

Oh, I can imagine. I count myself as being extremely lucky in this respect. My other main areas of interest are guitar equipment and vintage cars, and I've found my fair share of surprises in each.

Riser wise, you're probably looking for 4 M10 bolts at the bottom floor there.

Yeah, I think I see two of them on the board-side. Not sure how to get to the ones on the coin-side; looks like I'll have to remove the coin bin storage apparatus. Might peruse some of the pictures in the manual and go from there.

[ChrisBEANS]

Looks like you’ve had an absolute steal here! Congrats!!

I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

[cools]

Home use only candy. Not many of those about, nice find.

[markedkiller78]

Congrats, that looks in lovely condition.

[geotrig]

That's one impress ive find

[MDK]

That is rather clean, nice find.

If you do decided to rotate the monitor back to hori just be careful and make sure you have another set of hands to help as the yoke board is awfully close to the psu in these cabs.

[FrancoB]

So clean! Really Impressive

[Petkorazzi]

Thank you all for the kind words and congratulations, everyone. I'm definitely beyond stoked about this thing. I'm sure something about it will **** me off eventually (what project doesn't have its anger-inducing moments?) but for now it's tough to wipe the smile off my face, that's for sure!

I also joined the AO Discord and saw Radiantsvgun's Taito Canary restoration project - so now I understand why it's such a big deal that mine is so clean. I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with 30-ish years of cigarette ashes and spilled drinks in mine. I also have enormous amounts of respect for those of you who save those cabinets from the graveyard.

If you do decided to rotate the monitor back to hori just be careful and make sure you have another set of hands to help as the I yoke board is awfully close to the psu in these cabs.

Oh yeah, I'm friggin' terrified of necking the tube in this thing. So far the image on it appears to be perfect with no burn-in or jitter that I can notice, and I will shed many tears if I accidentally ruin it. My initial foray into scouring the interwebz for information on this procedure hasn't turned up much, but there has been mention of removing the PSU entirely to give as much room as possible for the operation. I'm definitely going to have a buddy help out with this one.

Come to mention it, there doesn't seem to be a ton of information on the Capcom Impress at all that I've found. Granted I've only been searching the English-language side of the internet, but this makes me wonder if these cabinets aren't that common. I can find tons of stuff on the various Sega "City"-series cabs and Taito stuff and the like but next to nothing on this one. I've got a feeling finding wiring harnesses and control panels is going to be challenging (there's some wiring stuff on eBay but it's all from France and seems pretty pricey for what it is; I haven't seen a single control panel for sale anywhere).

No photos or anything but I spent this morning messing around with the coin mech to get it to accept US quarters just to test coin functionality. This took longer than expected; there's another diameter adjustment stop behind the thickness limiter/magnet holder that's not mentioned on the AD-81p wiki page and it took me a surprisingly long amount of time to figure out that you can just pull the mag holder and it'll swing away from the main body and give access to the screw (I might offer some suggestions and more photos to improve that wiki page if that's OK). Once I'd finished everything seems to work fine aside from the coin counter in the coin bin area - it's stayed on 000002. I'm not sure if I'm just misunderstanding how it works or if there's something actually wrong with it, but it's something to note just the same.

I'm also taking some close looks at the metal coin bin housing to try to find out how to remove it (to get to the riser mounting bolt I'm sure is underneath it) but I'm not coming up with anything. I'm wondering if I should remove the entire JAMMA board holder as a starting point and go from there.

[nem]

Yeah, that's a crazy clean cab. Congrats.

Once I'd finished everything seems to work fine aside from the coin counter in the coin bin area - it's stayed on 000002. I'm not sure if I'm just misunderstanding how it works or if there's something actually wrong with it, but it's something to note just the same.

It's not a straight connection to the coin switch. The game PCB will pulse the coin counter. Either it hasn't been connected to the bootleg board or the feature isn't there to begin with.

Throw any regular jamma board in and it should work.

https://wiki.arcadeotaku.com/w/JAMMA#Ja ... tor_pinout

Pin 8 on the component side of the jamma connector is Coin meter 1.

[MDK]

There are a few pictures on here that might be of help -



The cab splits into 5 main sections - steel base, font / back lower & front / back upper. You won't be able to fully remove the coin box housing until you strip it down as it's held in place by the pcb holder and a series of flange nuts - see this pic - https://i.imgur.com/EYOnuVv.jpg

The cab is a bit of an odd ball design as there are no hinges on the monitor cover and to remove it you need to lift it straight up as one piece. First you will have to remove the screws from the back of the cab holding the speak box in place, you can lift the cover towards you a little to dislodge it. The fabrication around how the cover fits to the cab is not the best, the plastic (abs???) is very thin and brittle so is easily damaged.

[Petkorazzi]

\

Once I'd finished everything seems to work fine aside from the coin counter in the coin bin area - it's stayed on 000002. I'm not sure if I'm just misunderstanding how it works or if there's something actually wrong with it, but it's something to note just the same.

It's not a straight connection to the coin switch. The game PCB will pulse the coin counter. Either it hasn't been connected to the bootleg board or the feature isn't there to begin with.

Throw any regular jamma board in and it should work.

https://wiki.arcadeotaku.com/w/JAMMA#Ja ... tor_pinout

Pin 8 on the component side of the jamma connector is Coin meter 1.

That is ludicrously helpful; thank you for the info. It's not something I'm too concerned about at the moment but it'll definitely factor in my future decisions. I want everything in the cabinet to be 100% functional. My original plan was to set up a RaspberryJAMMA/ARpiCADE emulation environment instead of shelling out tons of money for legit boards/CPS2 hardware and having to swap stuff frequently - but I'm not sure if this setup can send these coin meter pulses. I'll have to look into it.

There are a few pictures on here that might be of help -



The cab splits into 5 main sections - steel base, font / back lower & front / back upper. You won't be able to fully remove the coin box housing until you strip it down as it's held in place by the pcb holder and a series of flange nuts - see this pic - https://i.imgur.com/EYOnuVv.jpg

This is also ludicrously helpful, and thank you for the images and information as well. It's tough to tell from the pics but it looks like my current plan may work - remove the PCB board, undo the flange nuts holding the PCB holder to the floor/coin box housing and shift it aside, then loosen the coin box housing and shove it aside to get at whatever mounting bolt is holding the riser on. It's been my experience with basically everything (especially things made of plastic and containing fragile parts!) that the less you have to disassemble, the less likely you are to break something (and you've mentioned the plastic tends to be easy to break on this thing so that aligns pretty well to my philosophy here).

The cab is a bit of an odd ball design as there are no hinges on the monitor cover and to remove it you need to lift it straight up as one piece. First you will have to remove the screws from the back of the cab holding the speak box in place, you can lift the cover towards you a little to dislodge it.

Yeah, that's what I'm seeing in the manual (page 23):



Maybe I'm just being optimistic but it doesn't seem that bad. My plan for rotating the monitor (which I'm probably going to save for last on my to-do list) is to remove the PSU, pop this cover off, then lay the cabinet down on its back. Then I'll undo whatever bolts are holding the monitor in, lift it however far I need to to clear whatever I need to, spin it 90 degrees clockwise, and lower it back into its mounting location. Then (as they always annoyingly say in automotive service manuals) "installation is the reverse of removal."

No real work done on the cabinet today, but I'm planning a more complete breakdown/analysis/write-up of the AD-81p coin mech for other noobs like myself in the future. I'm also having issues with US quarter dollar coins catching on the coin switch, but considering I'm going to be using Japanese coins in the end it's probably not worth spending a lot of time on. My wife has decided she likes the look of 50-yen coins better than 100-yen ones (DAT HOLE) so I may end up going with that.

I've also put up a wanted post for a control panel; if anyone has any leads on one hit me up.

[Petkorazzi]

Part 3: Rise(er) and Fall

Oh boy...it's been a long three months and I've got a lot to cover. I got in the habit of just posting pictures and asking questions in the AO Discord and forgot to document the process in this thread as I was doing it, which is...not ideal. That said, the people there have been extremely helpful and I've learned a ton so hopefully my posts will be more informative and less Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory ("What does this button do?") moving forward. I'll be handling this in installments over the next few days.

Also a lot of this happened weeks in the past but I'm writing in the present, so my writing may jump tenses a bit as my brain gets confused as to whether I should present things in past tense or present tense. Just bear with me until we're all caught up, ok?

Another sidenote here (though this doesn't fit in the Impress project chronology) - I just finished an English translation of the Capcom Impress manual and it can now be found on the respective Arcade Otaku Wiki Page. It's made using scans of the original Japanese manual with English text replacing the original Japanese, so the images/diagrams are the exact same. However, note that it is very much an amateur translation - I am not fluent in Japanese and make no claim to be, and if any of you have suggestions for improvements please let me know and I will make that happen. Now, back to the action!

We start off with removing the riser the previous owner had had made/installed. I'm not interested in a "standing candy" so it'll have to go. Fortunately, one of you had already helped me out with where to begin:

Riser wise, you're probably looking for 4 M10 bolts at the bottom floor there.

Yeah, I think I see two of them on the board-side. Not sure how to get to the ones on the coin-side; looks like I'll have to remove the coin bin storage apparatus.

So, out comes the PCB board and board holder:



Piece of cake, no big issues there. But wait...looks like there's some more change in here...



The previous owner must've spent their first week of ownership just cramming quarters into the machine despite the coin mech not accepting them, and eventually they just exploded outward into wherever. I'm up to about $3.25 in quarter finds now, bringing my net purchase price down to $496.75.

So now the coin box receptacle/apparatus thing. Though it looks like it would be relatively straightforward, this sucked. You've got about 3/4" of room to work with to get the two screws on the right-hand side and you can't see anything, so it's all by touch. Eventually it comes out with some moderate swearing (note the connection for the coin counter; the wiring to it is pretty tight so you have to remember to disconnect it):



And now we've got an extremely clean, mostly-empty bottom section (there's no need to remove the QSound amplifier) with all four riser bolt heads visible/accessible:



At this point it's time to lay the machine on its back to remove the riser. I pull the machine out from its temporary home in my office and take a few pictures of the back (and the pristine original Japanese labels) because I didn't really have many:



Of note here are the places where the OEM casters should have gone. From how clean everything looks there I don't think they were ever installed - or if they were, they were removed very shortly after the machine was purchased. This makes me think that the riser was built/installed when the machine was new, and is much older than it looks.

I also make the mistake here of not measuring the caster bolt pattern in the event I ever want to install casters here myself. It's not on the horizon for reasons that will become apparent later, but it would've been a nice piece of information for the Wiki at least so others could get that information easily.

Now for a big do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-did moment: DO NOT LAY YOUR CABINET DOWN BY YOURSELF. Well, maybe if you're some super-jacked swolebro who regularly dead-lifts neutron stars or something, but my pandemic-weakened chicken wings were not ideal for the task. Not only are these things heavy but all of the weight is in the top of the cabinet, meaning the apparent/"felt" weight increases with lean angle. I managed to do so safely without injury, but do yourself a favor and get a buddy to help. It would've been very easy to damage either the cabinet or myself while doing this, it was a very stupid thing to attempt solo, and I won't be making that mistake again.

Some ratchet-spinning and bashed knuckles later, and off comes the riser:



This riser is one of the most overbuilt things I've ever seen. I mean, that's good and all - the last thing you want is for it to collapse under the weight of your machine - but holy crap, it's built like a ****' truck. In fact I'm reasonably confident I could jack up my car, place this under one of the wheels, and lower the car onto it and it wouldn't collapse. Then again I drive a Mini, so maybe that's not the boast it appears to be.

The big takeaway for me is just how flimsy the base panel of this cabinet is. Yeah, it's a solid piece of (what appears to be) ABS plastic designed to be as rigid as possible, but there's no place where the plastic is more than a couple millimetres thick. I suppose under normal use/load the base panel isn't handling that much force (it's all in the sides) but this definitely seems disturbingly weak to me. I know the Impress has a general reputation for being flimsy, but I didn't realize how high that potential really is until now. I plan to address that in the future to try to ensure this cab lasts my lifetime.

Anyway, "installation is the reverse of removal" so here's the final result of the riser-ectomy:



A fun(ny) coincidence is that the bolt holes for the original Bally/Midway marquee line up perfectly with the holes for the Impress marquee holder. I'm not sure if that's intentional or standardized, but as I don't have an actual Impress marquee holder and have a Ms. Pac-Man board in the machine at the time this felt appropriate.

A not-so-funny thing is that I once again did not think things through. These cabinets were designed and built in Japan and intended for use in Japanese arcades by young Japanese people. The average height of a Japanese 17-year-old male is about 5'6". I'm 6'3". With no riser on this machine, I can barely fit my legs under the control panel. It is not comfortable to play.

So my next plan is to disassemble the riser and use the top board of it (since it's already cut to fit the shape of the cabinet and has mounting hardware installed) as a supplemental base, and attach some heavy-duty 3" casters to it. This will help reinforce the flimsy base, make the machine significantly easier to move about, and lift the cabinet about 4" total to provide some much-needed legroom.

However, all of that will have to wait for a bit as I've got other projects going on and it's cold as balls in my workshop (at the time I was doing this anyway). I'm getting tired of Ms. Pac-Man so it's time for some new game hardware. However, Nostalgia Tax is hitting arcade hardware hard (I had a local arcade shop quote me $1,150 for a working Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo B-board!) and I want to be able to play lots of games on a budget. I also need more than a single joystick and two Player buttons.

Up next: Control Panel, wiring harness, and gaming goodness!

[thomj]

What are you sitting on to play? The stools oriignally used in Japan for these are 43cm tall. I'm 6'4" and find the CP height fine when using a 43cm stool, they are lower than your average office chair or whatever.

[Petkorazzi]

What are you sitting on to play? The stools oriignally used in Japan for these are 43cm tall. I'm 6'4" and find the CP height fine when using a 43cm stool, they are lower than your average office chair or whatever.

I don't have a dedicated seat for the machine yet. So far I've tried a drum throne and an adjustable-height office chair with the height bottomed out but neither really works. Well, they "work" in that I can get my arms at a comfortable level for the machine, but I end up having to angle my legs outward or cross them in front of me to keep my knees from bashing the underneath of the control panel. If i play too long either my legs or my **** fall asleep.

I'd like some kind of small height-adjustable bench that's long enough for two people and has a backrest. I have done zero looking so far, but if there's not something out there like what I want I'll probably just make one myself - I need an excuse to teach myself upholstery and accurate tube-bending.

[gozaimas]

What is the congresswoman’s hi-score for Ms PAC-Man???

[thchardcore]

Sorry for the bump, but does anyone know what the bulb size for the marque light is?