Ms. Pac-Tron (I made a Tron cabaret out of a Ms. Pac-Man cabaret)
- Cassie
- 13 hours ago
- 9 min read
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about Tron. This brain drain was kickstarted last year when I bought a neat little custom made Tron bar-top arcade game. Then things really took off when I was lucky enough to buy the original concept artwork for the Midway arcade game marquee. This artwork probably belongs in a museum so I feel particularly grateful to have such an important piece of arcade history in my collection.
I have always loved Tron, the movie was released when I was about 9-years-old. I didn’t originally get to see it in a movie theatre, but it was one of many sci-fi films I became obsessed with in the early days of videocassette. Tron was the first pre recorded VHS movie I ever owned, my parents bought me a copy one Christmas. This was pretty early on in the VHS/Beta era of VCR’s and pre-recorded movies were not cheap. I guess my parents figured out it was one of my favorites.
It makes sense that I dig Tron so much, in the early 1980’s I was obsessed with home computers, video games, and animation. I am pretty much still obsessed with these things today to some extent. It is almost like Tron was made for my exact nerd demographics. Tron was part of a new wave of sci-fi films in the wake of that super popular one that came out in 1977 which made all the money… you know with the guy and the robots and the Muppets. Film studios all wanted their own huge sci-fi blockbuster with toys and sequels to line their wallets with fat cash.
Some of these movies were great, and have stood the test of time. Others not so much. While some lucky films although maybe not a huge success when released would find their audience and gain appreciation over time. Tron I feel definitely falls into that category. Despite some bylines you might read, Tron did make a profit. It just failed to make “Star Wars” mega money.
Tron’s cult status was strong enough that in 2010 Disney released a sequel, not a reboot but a legit sequel to a 22 year old film. In my humble opinion Tron Legacy is pretty good. Like the original it has a kick ass sound track, innovative visuals, retained most of the OG cast (despite the lack of Cindy Morgan which I am pretty bitter about), and continued the story from the original. Is it perfect? No way. There are a few plot holes you could drive a truck through, even though it is a Tron movie Tron the character is almost an afterthought in the film, I hate they seemed to have retconned that Kevin Flynn created the system to go into the digital world… since you know, he pretty much fumbled into it in the first movie and that was actually Cindy Morgan’s character… never mind, back to the original purpose of this post.
The sequel movie was a hit and there were plans for other Tron sequels and it seemed Disney was on it’s way to turn Tron into a legit franchise at last in this era of franchise movie making. But soon after Legacy’s release Disney bought another fancier franchise and kind of forgot about Tron I guess. Eventually they did get around to making another Tron movie… wish was…well.. let’s move on.
All this time thinking about Tron made me curious why over the 30+ years of collecting arcade games I have never bought a Tron. The game was very popular upon release so Midway made a ton of them, making decent surviving examples fairly easy to find. When I first started collecting arcade games Tron’s could command pretty good money from collectors and I just didn’t have the funds “back in the day” (being the mid 90’s - early 2000’s). But now that I am more financially flush I kind of wanted a legit Tron. Like many of the games in my collection I dug it as a kid when it first came out and would play it throughout the years whenever I would happen to come cross one.
If you have never played Tron, the game is divided into four mini games which get progressively harder. These games include a tank battle in a maze which is similar to the Namco game Tank Battalion, Two mini-games were you shoot items to escape (Grid-Bugs and the MCP cone which doesn’t really look like the MCP from the movie), and light-cycles which is probably the most famous sequence from the movie. The planned fifth game wouldn’t fit in the memory constraints of the system so that would become it’s own game Discs of Tron.
The game has music cues and elements from the film and does a pretty good job recreating the movie’s overall vibe. Tron was the first game developed in parallel with the film property in which it was licensed from. Today this is standard fare in media production with games coming out in sync with a film or movie or other property but in 1982 this was cutting edge stuff. This is especially interesting when you consider commercial arcade video games were only about 10 years old at the time of its release. Home Tron games were also released for various consoles but were very different than the arcade game and in my opinion fairly lousy.
The small bar-top Tron (which I showcased in a video awhile back) scratched the Tron itch somewhat but it started to bug me as time went by, I really wanted the real thing. Bar-tops are hard to figure out where to place in the arcade unless you have, well, a bar which I don’t. Also, despite using a legit PCB inside and controls I hated the modern non-CRT display and some of the artwork on the cabinet was reproduced in an incorrect ratio which drove me bonkers.
I got a wild hair to take the guts of the bar-top and transplant them into a cabaret Tron cabinet. Originally I planned to build the cabinet from scratch much like we did with our Liberator cabaret many years ago. Unfortunately no good specific measurements or CNC plans were available for a Tron cabaret so I had to get creative.
Bally-Midway made a large number of their titles from 1980-1983 in a cabaret format. One of the challenges with these games is that all of their cabaret cabinet titles are just a little different as far as dimensions go. In addition although titles such as Galaxian, Galaga, Pac-Man, and Ms. Pac-Man were produced in a decent quantity in the cabaret format.. other titles such as Blue Print, Robby Roto and yes Tron were made in much lower quantity making surviving copies rare today. I would estimate that Midway made around 21,000 Tron uprights. About 400 cocktails, and maybe around 200-300 cabaret cabinets.
I got lucky during this summer when I bought a lot of CRT monitors from an old operator and he asked me if I was looking for any odd parts. I half jokingly said I was looking for a Tron cabaret control panel he pulled one off his shelf and sold it to me for a reasonable price. I felt this was the catalyst to make my Tron cabaret dreams come true.
I decided the best way to go about the project was to find a donor cabinet of either a converted game or a cabinet that was a close match. Compared to Tron, Ms. Pac-Man cabarets are fairly easy to find, since they made over 4000 of them. The physical dimensions of the Ms. Pac cabaret are almost exactly the same as Tron with a few subtle differences. The marquee uses a wrap around one piece plastic style instead of brackets that hold in a flat glass marquee. Ms. Pac has one speaker instead of Tron’s two. The biggest difference is the control panel, Tron’s isn’t directly comparable size wise with the Ms. Pac cabinet. This meant my super rare Tron control panel couldn’t just be transplanted to the Ms. Pac cabinet.
A fellow collector sold me a very nice Ms. Pac-Man cabaret which when it arrived I started having second thoughts because it was in such great shape. I already have a full sized Ms. Pac which has great patina, but man that mini Ms. Pac was almost dead mint… a real survivor. I decided my goal was to turn the Ms. Pac into a Tron in such a way as not to do anything permanently damaging to the original game. I removed the entire insides of the game and carefully packed them away for a rainy day. After gutting it the only things left were the monitor, coin door, and marquee lights… and the cabinet of course.
The biggest challenge with the transition of Ms. Pac to Tron was the control panel. Like I stated earlier, Ms. Pac’s control panel is taller on front facing, and a tiny longer front to back, not to mention the holes for the controls are all wrong. The Tron cabaret control panel gave me a good guide for where everything went, I just needed it to be Ms. Pac size to properly fit into the donor cabinet.
So I needed to make a Tron style control panel that would fit our donor Ms Pac. This would be a project needing meticulous measurements and planning. I had never made a metal control panel from scratch before so I did the reasonable thing. I rolled up my sleeves, got all my materials together, and asked my wife to do it.
Using OnShape my very smart wife was able to design in CAD a Ms. Pac sized panel with he proper alignment of Tron holes. This took a bit of trial and error, and we ended up getting our friend Chris to 3-D print some samples of the controller mounting to make sure the spacing was correct. Tron uses dimples for the bolt heads to lay flat in the top of the control panel for a flush appearance once the overlay is placed. This was maybe the trickiest factor to get correct. We sent the panel off to had made in China (no one in the US could do the divots for less than the cost of a used Hyundai) and for about 170 bucks (plus 60 dollars for freedom tariffs) we had a very nice looking control panel in a few weeks.
We used tiny JB Weld on the bolts to keep them in place. Next up, the control panel came covered in oil to prevent rust, so brake cleaner got all that taken care of. Then we painted the control panel. I set up our trusty folding canopy I use as a paint booth in the back yard. This is the first time I have done this at our new house and was glad I didn’t have any of the nosey HOA people in my hood questioning if I was doing anything sketchy in my backyard.
After that placing the very nice repo overlay from Phoenix Arcades, we could handle the inside stuff (power supply, wiring, etc.). I was able to reuse the bar-top wiring harness although a whole new power supply needed to be built since I now needed a isolation transformer to handle the CRT. The Ms. Pac power supply wouldn’t work here since Tron uses a different system, plus again I didn’t want to hack up anything from the original guts of the Ms. Pac.
It all fit pretty well other than the marquee (Ms. Pac uses the wrap around plastic style marquee) which required some shenanigans. I plan on making a true Tron wrap around marquee to really bring it all home but otherwise it all looks great and I am pretty pumped about it. I placed two smaller speakers in sort of a angles manner so they would still get the flow through from the speaker grill and I didn’t have to modify the outside at all. The only bit of wiring that really needed some assistance was creating a plug for the coin door and lights since the bar-top used a credit button.
I think our little transplant worked well and is pretty close to the original cabaret Tron cabinet. The extra black area on the longer front of the control panel doesn’t bother me. We also couldn’t spot weld ears on the control panel for the clamps to lock down so we took the ones off a Ms. Pac control panel which have a bolt pass through design. I painted the bolts to be black so they don;’t look too out of place.
Although the purist in me would complain that my little Tron still isn’t authentic, it is much closer to the real thing than the bar-top was and I think it looks great. You do miss the dramatic lighting and some of the more unique artwork from the upright version in the cabaret but space is becoming an issue in my collection and I welcome the smaller footprint. I tend not to give into crazy mods for games but I have seen other collectors make the Tron joystick light up and I thing that would be pretty cool. It is a shame you can’t really see the nice bezel artwork due to the overall dark cabinet and angle of the monitor.
Tron becomes the 8th cabaret cabinet in the collection out of 37 games. It’s hard to tell what the future of the collection will bring but I feel like I do have space for a few more games, only time will tell. So until next time, I’ll see you on the grid fellow programs.
