The wrong way to approach Arcade Wiring For n00bs (like me)

Here's the first of two wiring tutorials I promised. It's a quick summary of what I did first (aka what not to do!!). Read if you want to learn what sort of mistakes can be made so you don't do the same thing.

What NOT to have for supplies

So after getting all excited about starting the project I ordered my parts and assembled the control panel and finally reached the point of wiring the PCCP up for use. What did I have for supplies? A soldering gun, some heatshrink, some electrical tape, and a needlenose wirecutter/stripper. I also had a ton of tie-wraps and telephone crimpable scotch-lok connectors. And finally, since I knew the Ultimarc Mini-PAC harness wouldn't probably reach all my switches, I had some cat5e I could strip into its component strands to extend any given wire I needed to. To mount the board to the CP, i had my home-grown chunk of aluminum with the Mini-PAC attached.

How NOT to wire your CP

I began (far too late one night) by clumping the harness wires as per their Mini-PAC wiring diagram and plugging in the harness into the Mini-PAC. So far so good! I then glanced at the instructions and puzzled out that the diagram labels each wire that you need for your various switches is numbered so you can follow along. Rather than having a ground/common wire for every switch, you instead do a lap around the control panel using the ground loop that came with the Mini-PAC. Easy, right?

I quickly connected a the switch closest to the Mini-PAC. As for the switches themselves, there's three prongs on them, all the same size. Two are hanging out next to one another, the other is on the side of the switch opposite the button. I really had no idea which ones went where but knew there couldn't be too many possible combinations of 2 with 3 connectors (3 combinations, to be exact). So I guessed and it worked! I didn't know why it worked but I was ok with that. However, the quick-disconnect plugs were super loose on the prongs which sort of puzzled me. I realized that since I was impatient and ordered all my buttons from SlikStik (while the Mini-PAC came from Ultimarc who was then out of stock of buttons as well as closed for the holidays), the quick disconnects that came with the harness were 1/4" whereas the SlikStik switches had 3/8" prongs. Nothing a bit of squeezing with the pliers couldn't fix. Now it's super tight to the point of barely coming off? OK then!


I went to do a joystick which was further away. Hrm. already needing longer reach for these quick disconnects! I start cutting apart the harness and putting two splices in the line so that it's harness->splice->extender wire->splice->quick Disconnect. This seemed to get the job done. I kept plugging away with this approach using the telephone crimp scotch-loks (eventually remembering that the scotchloks didn't require stripping the wires!). So I had a system. An ugly system. A system which decimated my beautiful wiring harness and ground wires. A system I recommend no one adhere to. Did it work? Mostly. However, sometimes I'd muscle a connector back off (after having squeezed it snug) and accidently yank a nearby wire clean out of its quick-disconnect. Oops. It happens a few more times. I also notice that one of the joysticks was placed SO close to the 2x4 I'm using underneath for the side legs to the CP that I have to bend one of the joystick's Microswitches. No big deal - until I dumbly used a pliers to bend it but didn't hold a needlenose at the spot where I wanted the crease. This put force on the side of the plastic microswitch case enclosure and cracks it. OK, that's the last dumbass thing overtired me is doing. It's 2am and I'm accepting that I need to be done for the night. Clearly I'm only making things worse at this point even though I had a number of successes.

The next day I continued doing the splice extendo method and get as far as possible, given that there are a number of wrecked quick disconnects and one direction on a joystick not working. By then end of another hour or so of wiring I had P1, Coin1, 4 menu buttons, Joystick1 and P1B1-P1B3 working. Yay! I can play games and see that yes, it will soon work! By the end of that day, it became clear I needed a trip to radioshack to get some more quick disconnects and a crimper now that I had wrecked enough such that I couldn't possibly wire all the switches.


After the trip(s) to Radioshack, I finally learned my lesson and now have a significantly simpler and cleaner way that I highly recommend to all you idiots like me who have never done this before and aren't electronics geeks who actually know what they're doing.