Now that the busy summer is over, it’s time to try to finish up some of my Centipede work before Winter. I’d like to get this game down into the gameroom before it gets too cold to work on it in the garage.
The first thing I needed to do was to buy some more repair parts from Bob Roberts. Bob is a great guy and I often refer people to him for parts. He has several repair kits compiled for common problems. This time I ordered another part for the Centipede monitor since it was still not working as well and I liked. I also ordered parts to rebuild the trackball, because it was totally worn out and needed replaced or rebuilt. I received my order on Monday, and as always Bob included a couple surprises. He sent me a nice little mini-screwdrivers and a small bag of candy for Halloween!

I made sure I took several pictures to show how easy it is to rebuild a trackball. Trackballs wear out badly, and this one was virtually unplayable in its condition. Here are a couple shots of the trackball and the rollers inside before replacement:

Basically these are really easy to work on. Just remove the six screws holding the shell together, and pop off the top of the shell. The ball and roller assemblies lift right out. Two of the rollers have the encoder wheel screwed into the side of them. Just remove the small screws holding those on with an allen wrench. Just be careful not to bend the encoder wheels. Those need to be perfectly flat to work the best. The repair kit I purchased from Bob includes the three rollers, and six sealed bearing assemblies. I also purchased a new white button and a new “snow white” trackball because I liked the look of it more than the offwhite ball, and my old one was really scratched up and worn.

Here are a couple comparison photos of the parts:

Then just put the trackball back together and here’s what you get:

I’ve been a bit too busy lately with spring activities to post this earlier, but I bought a couple classic Atari arcade games a few weeks ago. I picked up a Centipede and a Crystal Castles! Found these on Craigslist locally. I was really surprised that they were still available three days after they were posted on CL. Usually games get snatched up after a few hours.

Here are the original Craigslist photos:

Centipede and Crystal Castles are both games that I really enjoyed in the 80′s. I was glad I had the opportunity to add these to my collection. They were both pretty beat up, and were really dirty from sitting in a barn for the last several years. They looked complete so I figured I would be able to get them going pretty quickly.

I had to make two trips to pick them up. I was glad that I only had to drive about an hour each direction to get them. I hauled them in our mini-van, so I can only take one game at a time. Once I got them home, I started testing them to see what worked and what didn’t.

Centipede:

The centipede was dead. I turned on the power and saw nothing happening. I did a quick check of the fuses and found one that was blown. Swapped it out, but still didn’t get any life from the game. I did notice that the LED on the board was lit, so I knew the game was getting power. I tested the voltage going to the board and it was correct. The monitor neck tube was not glowing, so I knew it was dead. Since I knew the Crystal Castles monitor worked, I pushed the games close together and hooked up the Centipede video cable to the Crystal Castles monitor. The game worked great!

Looking around inside the cabinet, I saw three distinct game boards mounted to the inside. If I remembered right, Centipede only used one

I plugged each of them in, and there were three games! I had fully working game boards for Centipede, Millipede, and Bulls Eye Darts! I’ll probably keep the Centipede and Millipede boards. The Bulls Eye Darts board was a converted Centipede board. It is the one with the add-on daughter card in the picture above. If anyone is interested in trading for this board, please let me know. Plugs right into a Centipede cabinet. Looks like a pretty cool dart game for a trackball cabinet.

Bulls Eye Darts (sideways on my horizontal Crystal Castles monitor)

The first thing I did to this cabinet was to spend some serious time cleaning it up. It spent several years in a barn, and was pretty beat up. The front edges of the side panels by the marquee were busted up, which looks to me like the cabinet was dropped on its face at one point in its life. I found some broken marquee glass inside, so I’m sure that’s what happened. I’ll have to repair that wood and smooth it out with some bondo to build it back out.

Most Atari cabinets were made out of 3/4″ MDF particle wood. This stuff absorbs water like a sponge. the other problem is that it also absorbs moisture from the air if in a damp environment, which leads to swelling along all of the outside edges of the side panels like you see below. I will have to sand this down, put some wood hardener on it to strengthen it up, and smooth it out with some bondo. I hate having to repair moisture damage in MDF cabinets!

After I took off the marquee, which had peeling paint, I discovered a mouse nest. It smelled horrible in the cabinet from all the mouse urine. I even found the *dead* mouse! Yuck! I tried to clean out everything, and even bleach the smell, but it didn’t really help. I decided I would bust out the horizontal board with the speaker grill to make a new one. Luckily, I had a replacement speaker and light assembly to replace the other board that was badly soaked in urine!

Mouse nest tucked in behind the marquee light.

Nasty! Notice all the swelling in the MDF. This stuff is a sponge for mouse urine!

The other part that took some work to clean was the control panel. The trackball would not even roll. I tried to clean out the trackball and lube the bearings, but the rollers were badly worn. I will rebuild this with a handy trackball rebuild kit from Bob Roberts real soon! I was able to get the rest of the parts pretty clean, and the overlay cleaned up really nice. And of course, no more mouse urine runs on the the inside of the control panel!

More nasty mouse urine!

Pretty dirty!

Much better!

All reassembled, waiting for new controller parts.

To repair the monitor, I installed a G07 repair kit I bought from Bob Roberts. It included a new flyback, which I never replaced before, and a full cap kit. After installing all the new parts, the monitor came on but it was all blue. I checked some diagnostics flowcharts I had, and swapped out a couple transistors that were supposed to fix this problem. Still nothing. I finally spent an extra hour or so looking at all the components, and I saw the the diodes on the bottom of the monitor chassis were mounted backwards. I turned them around, and the monitor worked perfectly!

WAY too much blue in the monitor’s picture!

After replacing the transistors that were supposed to fix this, still looks the same.

Finally got the blue to be normal!

The picture looks really good.

The Street Fighter 2 board that I use for testing has a really nice dot pattern to help adjust the image size and convergence.

Here’s the real game playing on it. Still have to make some size adjustments, but it looks great!

Well, I still have plenty of work to do on this thing. I have to finish replacing all the controller parts that are worn out. I need to tune in the monitor to make the picture to look as good as I can. Finally, I have to repair all the cabinet damage and replace the boards I removed. Once all that is done, I’ll finish cleaning it up and take it down into the gameroom. More to come! I’ll also start working on the Crystal Castles after this one is done, so expect a full update on that machine too.