Grim and Frostbitten Centipede of the Pacific Northwest

It got Real Cold here, slowing everything down except the accumulation of heating bills and consumption of alcohol. On the less frosty days I’ve been spending a little time in the garage finishing up the Centipede cocktail cab.

Picked up another piece of mat board and made a surround for the LCD. Finish isn’t as nice as the one for the Gun Fight cab but it’s also not nearly as visible once the top is down and the smoked plexi is in place.

Also got the new CPOs on the player 2 side, and wired up both trackballs. I had to swap out the original optical encoder boards with some Happ style ones since the Atari originals apparently don’t play nice with the 60n1 boards. Also had to swap the signal wires on one board for each trackball in order to get proper operation. Without doing so one axis would always end up backwards regardless of how the 60n1 was configured.

Found this too. Hadn’t noticed the old op tag on the player 2 side. Eldorado Products of Gardena, CA seems to have been actively doing business at least up until 1991, but seems to gone defunct before the Internet really took off since the company’s web presence is solely comprised of Yellow Pages scam and directory aggregator spam sites that seem to have picked up its old contact information crawling an old industry mailing list.

Project updates part 2

Also converted my ex-Bosconian cabinet from Krazy Bowl to Capcom Bowling with some parts provided by another local collector. Pretty much the same game play but orders of magnitude less obnoxious.

Took some baby steps towards making it look nicer too…

On the recommendation of one of the local collectors’ mailing lists I tried Motsenbocker’s Instant Latex Based Paint Remover.

It did a decent job… Still took a lot of brute force to get the stuff off, but it loosened the paint and left what was underneath intact. I ended up giving up on doing it by hand by the end and putting some scotch brite on a palm sander.

I think I’ll use this stuff to get the paint up off the side art on another cab, but not for a whole side again. I’ve got a jug of 3M Safest Stripper waiting for the other side of the Bosconian, so we’ll see how it compares soon.

Also finished conversion of the gutted Gun Fight cabinet I picked up a while back and delivered it to its new owner.

It has a handful of imperfections I’m not happy with, but they’re things only I would notice.

The custom monitor surround in progress… It turned out looking incredible.

It was a lot of work though. I pressed my Mario Bros. into service as an impromptu brake for the mat board I used to create it.

Spent a couple days at the office under strenuous quality control testing.

Project updates part 1

Got a bit caught up with other aspects of life so I haven’t been doing much with the blog lately. Got a lot done with the games in the last few months though!

Cleaned a terrifying amount of goop out of the coin door to the Defender cabinet and made that sucker shine again. It also has a monitor bezel now, and by pure happenstance the inner monitor surround too. Snagged the bezel for ten bucks on eBay, and found out after a little bit of comparison with Internet pics that I got three of the Williams style monitor surrounds in a pile of them I picked up a while back.

Got reaaaaally lucky and picked up this lovely thing for $150. Spent a night retrieving it from Hood River, all in all I’d still consider it a killer deal. It comes complete and loaded with Dr. Mario and Super Mario Brothers ROM sets.

While it was supposed to be working as of my purchase, I never got to test it in as found condition. While loading it onto a dolly to bring it in I dropped it on its side. Seems to have caused some damage to the monitors, hopefully that’s the extent of it. Was super bummed about that. Definitely don’t try to move one of these things solo, the size is deceptive… Two monitors and a steel cabinet mean it’ll get away from you in a hurry if you’re trying to muscle it around.