Refurbishing A Centipede Arcade

This is going to be fun!

It was a Friday night and I was listing some things for sale on Craigslist when I did what I do every time I’m on Craigslist and that was to check the Free listings. Usually there’s a bunch of crap in there and anything worth its salt is gone in a blink of an eye.

Which is why I was amazed to see a Centipede arcade cabinet and thrilled when the person who had it started responding to me!

Now that I have this beast in my garage I want to fix it up and document the process. I plan on adding tons of videos and pictures as I go along so stay tuned and check back often.

What’s wrong with it?

Almost everything, lol. The main board is missing, the controls are missing, the CRT has burn-in, the control board has new holes drilled in it with no controls and two torn control board art pieces, the coin drawer has no key or wires attached anymore, the marquee is missing and the list goes on.

Okay what’s the plan?

The side art is mostly intact and so is the overall structure so my plan is to gut out all of the old electronics except for the speaker (assuming it works) and:

Clean the cabinet
Replace the CRT with a spare Dynex LCD TV I have (mounted vertically)
Use a Raspberry Pi with Retro Pi
Replace the Marquee with a reproduction from arcademarquee.com
Strip the artwork from the control board and add custom artwork based off a design here (adding the trackball back in): http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,55639.0.html
Add controls from the X-Arcade 2 player DIY kit with trackball
Replace the fluorescent back-light with Adafruit Neopixels programmable LEDS
(This is debate-able though. I might stick with the traditional fluorescent bulb)

The ultimate goal

The end goal is to have everything in the cabinet wired up to a single power switch that when turned on goes to centipede by default (with trackball controls and 1-2 player selection) but has an escape key combination to get into a RetroPi/Emulation Station UI with additional games. Money is tight right now so some of this project may be on hold for a while but what I can test and build in the meantime I intend to document.

Photos

Left Side Art

Cabinet with CRT removed.

Marquee and speaker

Coin Door

Coin Door Back

Inside Coin Door

Inside of back door

Left Side Art 2

Left Side Art 3

Testing centipede on a vertically oriented LCD with Retropie

Daughter approved!

Power supply inside back of cabinet before cleaning

Back of coin door

CRT electronics

Fitting Dynex LCD TV to cabinet

Back door pieces

Neopixels are alive!

Neopixels

Joystick with ball screwed on

More Neopixel wiring

Articulating LCD mount.

Original LCDTV Speaker

Cutting out original speaker

Drilling holes for speaker wire in LCDTV bezel

Hole in LCDTV bezel right speaker

Speaker wire attached

Hole in LCDTV bezel left speaker

LCD Mount

Power Strip Mounted in cabinet

LCD Mount

Old USB Hub

XSource Controls

Marquee and an old Mac keyboard

LCD from front

Behind Marquee raspberry pi and Neopixel circuit

Back door fixed

Inside back door close-up

Testing the speaker

I removed the marquee back-light and speaker assembly to test if the speaker still had sound and this is what happened.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ8vq7r21Q?rel=0]