Centipede like you've never seen....

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I noticed Arcadecollection (a fellow collector from The Netherlands) had a picture of his Centipede as avatar on the Dragonslairfans forum (www.dragonslairfans.com) and I saw some interesting differences. So I asked if he could mail some picks, and I was really amazed.

I've done extensive studies on the several version of Centipedes . F.I. I know that there was a _very_ limited run of 25" cocktail (!) machines.

Any way, there are generally a couple of differences between the US built Centi's and the Irish one's.

The US:
- US: purple marquee background, Irish pink
- US: "dark" blue bezel and CPO, Irish bright blue
- US: bezel insects are green/blue colored (indigo ?), red on the Irish
- US: one of the Centi's antenna's on the side art goes up in a bend, Irish is shorter and bent down.
-US: line around the Centi side-art is most often yellow, sometimes pink and (reported, never seen) light blue

However, I've never seen one like Arcadecollection's machine before. I think it was Alpha1 who pointed out that this is a Bertollino Centipede, thus built in Italy.

The things I notice:
- very obvious: the T-molding. Could be retro-fitted but it's really different
- the bezel is completely different. The insects are on the sides instead on top. It looks like they did this to allow for a bigger monitor. It indeed looks to be bigger than 19". Arcadecollection mentions 22"....anyway, very interesting !
- side-art: antenna same as Irish version but it looks to be a bit bigger than the Irish/US versions. The right "beam" of the "star" on top extends to right under the right claw of the centi. On the Irish cabs that beam is a bit longer and goes further than that claw.
Also, most noticable, the mushrooms lack the pink/yellow color !

All an all a very interesting cab indeed !!!

There is a Hantarex monitor inside which could be another indication for it to come from Italy.

There's a "Nova Apparate" sticker on the coin door which is interesting because there's also a flyer in the Arcade Flyer Archive with Nova Apparate. But I think that that was only a distributor, not a cab builder, but I could be wrong of course.
 
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Irish cab, huh? Yep, never seen one.....clean on the inside.... :)

No no no, the Irish is almost identical to the US version apart from the obvious color differences. The set-up of parts inside is exactly the same. Check out this one....completely different set-up, completely different bezel and completely different (bigger !) monitor !

I get more pics tomorrow....
 
Interesting! If this is built by Bertollino I guess it should say so on the sticker on the back or maybe even on the marquee. At least on my buddies italian built Asteroids they made it that way...

And I really hope that t-molding is NOT original :D

And yeah, Nova Apparate was mainly a german distributor...
 
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