This is a long-overdue follow-up article to answer all of your questions about the super-popular Pacman 30th anniversary connect and play device found at most retail outlets such as Walmart, Target, Rite Aid, and Best Buy. CBS and Amazon.
That’s one question out of the way. How much do these devices sell for? Is a two-player mode supported? How do you plug it into your television and what channel do you use? How do I play on a modern television with HDMI? Can the batteries be changed without losing your high scores? Are the parts inside replaceable? Can the included RCA cable be extended in length?
Questions
I’m going to answer a few of the easier questions right away. I wanted to point out that these devices sell new for about 20 bucks, but used devices can be found on eBay for less. The 35th-anniversary Pacman connect and play device is an officially licensed product.
All the games installed on the device support both single-player and two-player modes. To play a single-player game, press button A to begin the game. To play a two-player mode game, press button b to begin the game. Let’s jump into the video to answer the rest of your questions. Let’s break it out of its hibernation so we can get some of your amp questions answered.
One of the questions
So one of the questions that I had coming in from comments was how do you plug in yourPacman 30th anniversary plug-and-play device into your television. Well, the answer is quite simple. You simply take the cable that it comes with and plug it into your television. You’ll have these ports in the front if you have an older television.
They’re RCA ports, or in the back and you plug yellow to yellow and white to white and then another one of the questions that I had was well what channel do you put your television on. Well, in this case on your older television, it’s on the channel called line, which is your input channel.
But on a lot of televisions, you’ll use channel 3 or channel 4. So it depends on the model of your older television and then all you do from there is power on the unit, so there’s probably a high degree of possibility that you don’t have an older television like this that has these RCA inputs, and if that’s the case and you still want to be able to play your plug and play device,
Then you’ll need
Then you’ll need a way of upscaling the signal from this RCA input into an HDMI format, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in the next segment. How can we make this plug-and-play unit work on a modern television through HDMI? So if you need to play your plug-and-play unit on a modern television through HDMI, then as I mentioned, you will need this upscaling device that I’m showing right here.
I ordered this on Amazon. You can also get it on eBay, even cheaper than what I purchased it for. It has a switch on it that switches between 720p and 1080p, and essentially it works both ways, but what I noticed was that in the 720p mode it looked a little clearer, so I’ll leave that to you to decide which to use. Now we’re going to take a look and see if this device does what it purports to do. So here I’ve plugged in the USB cable into the device and I plugged it into a spare USB charging port that I have. I’m going to plug that into the power.
How to setup
I’m going to plug that into the power. I’m going to plug that into the plug-and-play unit into the device and let’s see what we get. I’m going to plug this in now. Now that that’s in, I can plug the other end into the television. Now that I have it all hooked up, it’s time to give it a try. It goes sweet. So the next question is does the upscaling device introduce lag, in other words, if you’re playing pac-man and you press to move left, does he immediately move left? When you switch to the right, does he immediately move right?
I noticed zero lag. There is probably a little bit introduced, but I was unable to detect it during my gameplay testing. All right, let’s pop this bad boy open and see [Music] If we can swap the batteries out without losing our high scores, all right. I have four Duracell batteries here to use as replacements, and the idea is to take the ones out with the spring so you can slide them in quickly. Boom right behind that last one all right.
Let’s see
Let’s see if I still have high scores. I did turn it on and I do still have high scores, so you can still see I have high scores still all right. The next question is whether the parts inside are replaceable. Let’s open up the unit. I’ve never opened this up before. Let’s see what’s inside. [Music] not much to it inside but it does look like these buttons here should be very simple to replace the joystick. We have to take off a few more, three more screws.
That’s also the motherboard. Yeah, look at that. I’m not that familiar with arcade joysticks, but I don’t imagine it being that difficult to swap them if we needed to, and then look at the buttons here. [Music] all right. We are back in business all right, so the next question is how do I extend the RCA cable length if I need a few more feet, and this one’s fairly simple.
All you need is to have a couple of adapters. There are a few different types of adapters you can get, but these right here are pretty much what you need. They’re female on both sides and you just plug it in, plug it into the end of your cable, and then, of course, you’ll have to have a spare RCA cable available with male-to-male outputs on both sides and you plug in yellow to yellow and white to white, and then you simply plug in the other end of that into your television and you have extended your cable. You can go much further back than you could before. So I have a little splitter right here. This takes an input and splits it into two, but basically, you can use this right here.
All you need
So I’m plugging in. I’m going to plug it in right here. Let’s do that. And then at the other end, I’ve got a longer, longer AV cable plugged into the HDMI converter, so this is probably a 10-foot cable I have and I’m going to plug that in rig