I built my wife a Ms. Pac-Man table for our anniversary

A wood-grain Ms. Pac-Man cocktail arcade table with a glass top, a coin door on its side and a control panel at one end, between two white chairs — The finished table.

When my wife was a kid, her friend had a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table in the playroom over the garage. That’s where she played Ms. Pac-Man.

So for our third anniversary, in 2014, I built her one. From scratch, and a total surprise. It’s still in our house.

What a cocktail arcade table is

It’s the sit-down kind of arcade game. The screen faces up under glass, and you play from either end, across the table from each other.

Mine runs a multi-game board on a 19-inch LCD. The whole thing came in under $500.

Keeping it a secret

All the parts shipped to my office instead of the house, so no boxes of arcade parts ever showed up at home. The glass top alone came in a box big enough to give the whole thing away.

Then I built the cabinet in the garage over a single weekend while she was away.

The real thing, mostly

I wasn’t building a lookalike. I found an old service manual from Midway, the company that made the original cocktail tables, and built to its dimensions. I bought new old stock parts from a few eBay sellers and retro arcade shops, like the graphic underlay that sits under the glass, on top of the screen surround.

Where I stopped was the electronics. Chasing a working original Midway board, and the speakers that went with it, would have been a gamble. So the cabinet’s dimensions and the underlay are as close to the original as I could get, and the guts are a mix of new old stock and new parts I knew would work.

Wires everywhere

It started as a pile of wires on the floor. I hooked up the harness, the control panel and the screen down there first.

A tangle of colored wires spread across a carpeted floor, with a Ms. Pac-Man control panel and a red ball-top joystick in the middle of it — Everything wired up on the floor.

A Ms. Pac-Man control panel with a red ball-top joystick, blue artwork, and the word MOVE printed under the stick — The control panel.

The wiring was the hardest part of the whole build, because of the multi-game board. Nothing went wrong. It was just hard. The board’s manual was mostly in Chinese, and this was long before you could ask an AI to translate it. So it was guess and check.

The board came loaded with extras: splash screens, screensavers, button combinations that switch to other games. I wanted all of it off. The table had to boot straight to Ms. Pac-Man and play nothing else. That mattered more to me than anything else in the build. I did it with a mix of DIP switches and the board’s on-screen service menus. No USB, no serial port, just button presses.

A bare LCD screen showing the Ms. Pac-Man maze with READY! in the middle — The game running on the bare LCD, before there was a table around it.

The harness had something like 40 wires, and I needed fewer than half of them. The wiring itself took about 3 hours. Apart from the sheer number of wires, there wasn’t much to any of it. It just took time.

Then the box

The cabinet is plywood. It’s a box with a control panel at each end and coin doors on the sides.

An unfinished plywood box with square cutouts on its sides, standing on a carpeted floor among boxes and tools — The plywood box.

The plywood cabinet with a black top printed with Ms. Pac-Man artwork, a control panel with a joystick at one end, black coin doors on the sides, and a cordless drill on the floor beside it — The top on, and a control panel in.

I stained it, but a real cabinet would have been a laminate applied to particle board.

The cabinet with a dark wood-grain finish on its sides and a coin door, with its black top and Ms. Pac-Man artwork — Stained.

By June 20 it was getting played.

Two women sitting at opposite ends of the arcade table, each at a control panel, playing Ms. Pac-Man on the screen between them — Head to head.

The top is glass, with the Ms. Pac-Man art under it.

The finished wood-grain table with its glass top, in a room with two clear acrylic chairs — Glass on.

If you want to build one

Five years later, in 2019, I drew it again in SketchUp. Same table, every part. Put together, it’s about 22 inches wide, 32 inches long and 29 inches tall.

A 3D model of the cocktail table with walnut-grain sides, a dark blue top with rounded corners, a control panel jutting out under one end, and openings in the side panels — The table, modeled.

Every panel is laid out flat in the model, and I exported cut files from it for a Shaper Origin, a handheld CNC router. The top is 22¼ by 32¼ inches, with rounded corners and a notch at each end where the control panels go.

The cabinet's panels laid out flat in the 3D model, seen from above, with their cutouts — Every part, flat.

Who plays it now

My wife holds the high score. Our kids play it with their friends. Her friend has never seen it.