Finishing up Centipede

I’ve had a busy summer this year. I was able to wrap up three projects before the weather turned cold. I already reported on the Time Pilot restoration, and shopping my Earthshaker pinball. The last game I finished up this summer was my Centipede that I’ve had in the garage for a few years. I was never able to get this into the house to work on because it was soaked in mouse urine and smelled really bad. Last year I picked up a replacement cabinet but had not had the time to transplant the working parts from the first cabinet. I finally got this done and now have a nice working Centipede in my gameroom!

All kinds of cabinets around this project! The front one is a friend’s who just happened to store his in my garage for a few weeks. Cool photo opp!

When I last checked in on this game, I had just purchased the replacement cabinet and stripped all the parts out of the original cabinet. I also already rebuilt the control panel and had it ready to install on the new cabinet. I stopped at this point because the new cabinet had its sides covered in white laminate. I needed to take some time to decide if I was going to remove the laminate and buy reproduction side art for the cabinet. Well, the more I thought about doing this, the more I realized that I should just keep the laminate. The white laminate looked great, and I would not even see the sides anyway due to how tight my gameroom is. There just is no space between games to show off the artwork. With that decision out of the way the rest of the project would be easy!

The last step done to the “mouse urine” cabinet. I hate to destroy original cabinets!

Since I had the cabinet gutted and cleaned out, the first step was to put the original Centipede power block back in the bottom of the cabinet. I actually took this apart and repainted the metal framework from this assembly. I then cleaned all the remaining parts and reassembled it. I also put a new fuse holder block in it because the other one was pretty old. This assembly needed to go in first because there were several harness connectors that needed to be plugged into it. This would allow me to align the harness to it. Once the harness was aligned it was easy to lay out to all the other areas of the cabinet.

All cleaned out and ready for some parts.

As I mentioned before I had a special harness that was modified to play both Centipede and Millipede boards. They have different wiring connections so they weren’t interchangeable in the original harness. I added another PCB track above the normal Centipede location so I could install the Millipede above. It fit like a glove! After the PCB was installed, I finished the rest of the internal components and harness installation. Everything looked great when I was done.

Starting to look like an arcade game.

After the internals were all reassembled, I reinstalled the control panel. I rebuilt the trackball and put a new fire button in the panel, but I hadn’t fixed the LED lights in the start buttons. They weren’t working so I was hoping the LEDs were burned out. I picked up a set at Radio Shack and replaced them in the button. I had to drill out the rivets holding the button assemblies together. The LEDs were a little tricky to replace because the they were soldered to the button contacts. It was worth all the effort to rebuild because the buttons are really bright now!

Switch disassembled awaiting a new LED

Nice and bright!

The panel looks great in the new cabinet!

Once I finished reassembling the game it worked great! The Millipede board isn’t working right so I need to do some work to it to get it to run. The Centipede works GREAT and is a lot of fun to play. I had one spot left in the gameroom to squeeze this in. Now the gameroom is done for the year. I have several more projects coming up but with the weather change there won’t be any new games for a while.

All assembled ready to go.

Looks great along my other Atari cabinets.

I have it to the right of my Crystal Castles, but I think I will move it soon because the Crystal Castles looks hidden between the large Centipede and Pole Position cabinets.

Centipede has a great marquee!

Check out all the Centipede restoration pictures in my Centipede Photo Album