Placing a Crystal Castles in a Millipede Cabinet

Dan25624

New member
Joined
Jun 25, 2018
Messages
8
Reaction score
4
Location
Texas
I recently acquired an empty Millipede cabinet that was painted over in multiple coats of what looks like a thick black oil paint. I gave it a go a removing the paint but found that it ate a bit of the vinyl art. I also made the unfortunate discovery that the original side art was mostly torn off and that's why it was painted over at some point. I will likely have to sand it down to the wood and get new art.

I'm at a tipping point trying to decide whether I should do the following.

Option A: Place a millipede board in my regular centipede cabinet and install a multipede kit on it. Then install crystal castles in the millipede cabinet, side art and all.

Option B: restore the millipede with new side art and install the multipede board in its original cabinet and install crystal castles into the centipede. (This option was actually an official conversation method by Atari)

I was looking at images between Crystal Castles cabinets and Millipede cabinets and it seems there are some slight differences in some of the dimensions and profiles. Has anyone documented what these differences are and has anyone tried putting Crystal Castles side art in a Millipede cabinet? If so, how did it work out?

Thanks!
 
I would do option A no question and just make it work. Here's a Crystal Castles that I put in a scratch-built Atari Cabaret cabinet and then had custom artwork made. The Millipede style cabinet looks perfect for Crystal Castles, the centipede conversion looks like shit in my opinion.

IMG_2480.jpeg
 
Yeah, it's definitely going to require some wood working for rotating the monitor horizontal as well as making a harness adaptor for going from a Millipede pin out to a Crystal Castles pin out. All of which is doable. The control panel may be a slight issue and I may either have to source an original upright CC panel or learn to bend and punch sheet metal.
 
The woodworking is the hardest part.

You can get around the control panel issues by wiring the player 2 start button to also be the jump button (in addition to P2 start).

I hand-built an adapter to be able to test CC boards in my Millipede cab. Aside from the screen being the wrong way, it works well enough to test boards after I repair them.
 
The woodworking is the hardest part.

You can get around the control panel issues by wiring the player 2 start button to also be the jump button (in addition to P2 start).

I hand-built an adapter to be able to test CC boards in my Millipede cab. Aside from the screen being the wrong way, it works well enough to test boards after I repair them.
That's awesome to hear that it's been done as far as the harness adaptor. You wouldn't happen to have a diagram or picture of what you did to make that work, would you?
 
That's awesome to hear that it's been done as far as the harness adaptor. You wouldn't happen to have a diagram or picture of what you did to make that work, would you?


No, because it was a little involved.

But I bought one of these Centipede PCB to Millipede cabinet adapters (because Centipede and CC have the same connector sizes and spacing, so the adapter fits on a CC board), cut most of the traces, and rewired them to the CC pinout.

The only catch is that the pinouts are very different (more than I expected), so it involved a lot of wires and time. A lot of the signals on one of the Centipede connectors are on the opposite connector on the CC board, so it required a lot of wires back and forth between the two. But it works.

Someone should make a proper PCB-based one, but it isn't worth the time, because the market for them would be pretty small.

 
No, because it was a little involved.

But I bought one of these Centipede PCB to Millipede cabinet adapters (because Centipede and CC have the same connector sizes and spacing, so the adapter fits on a CC board), cut most of the traces, and rewired them to the CC pinout.

The only catch is that the pinouts are very different (more than I expected), so it involved a lot of wires and time. A lot of the signals on one of the Centipede connectors are on the opposite connector on the CC board, so it required a lot of wires back and forth between the two. But it works.

Someone should make a proper PCB-based one, but it isn't worth the time, because the market for them would be pretty small.

I've done a lot of of this type of thing and yes, time consuming is a great word for it. Generally straightforward and pretty repetitive, but time consuming. And you have to keep your wits about you the entire time looking between wiring diagrams so you don't miss something or fuck something up.
 
Sounds like I'm gonna have to do some more research. I'll document my work here as I go.

Thanks to everyone for the help so far, it's appreciated!
 
I like Option A. I just had a Crystal Castles sitting next to a Millipede before I traded the Crystal Castles. I've got a Centipede, and the Millipede to Centipede adapter, and I've got Multipede and Braze kits for it, so my Millipede cabinet is pretty much on the chopping block once I need the space. Here are pics of the two next to each other:

20250821_150036.jpg 20250821_150219.jpg

I'm currently doing a Major Havoc (Tempest Conversion) build, and was thinking a while back about using the Millipede cabinet as a base for it. It would be an Alpha-1 style build with some significant woodworking to transform the Millipede cabinet into the right shape. Alpha-1 was the name under which Major Havoc was prototyped, and it came in a Crystal Castles style cabinet. This thread has got me thinking about that again. The Tempest cabinet I have for it is trash, and needs major restore work. But I've already got everything I need for it but time so this all might be a pipe dream.

Long story short, I put the Millipede and Crystal Castles cabinets side-by-side and made a couple of transferable templates to see how far off they are in dimensions from each other. There's an inch or two of difference front-to-back under the CP due to CP overhang, and Millipede has more meat at the top front. They're very, very similar.

A Millipede cabinet could easily take Crystal Castles side art if it was printed with the image dimensions correct for Crystal Castles, but to fit the slightly bigger Millipede profile. Same with the kickplate. The marquee translite would be a direct fit as far as I can tell. You'd have to have the CPO custom printed, or you could probably use a Crystal Castles CPO if you filled and drilled some holes. The trackball would drop in, but you'll need to light it. Buttons will require some thought as to how best to handle them. Rotating the monitor is not much work.

As noted, the harness is going to be problematic. Discussion thus far on the harness leaves it untouched and uses a modified adapter that I imagine looks like spaghetti once it's wired up. If I were doing a permanent conversion like this, I'd lean towards repinning the PCB connector correctly for Crystal Castles instead of fooling with an adapter. I'm thinking 98% of what's needed is there already, just pinned wrong for Crystal Castles.

I think you've got a great idea here, and you've got options. It will be a bit of work no matter which way you slice it - but if done right it would be pretty cool. Good luck!
 
I'd probably go with option 1, but I had a CC and sold, never got into it compared to Centipede and Missile Command.

A friend of mine (RIP) had a crystal castles in a missile command cabinet with the official conversion kit. Don't see a lot of those.
 
Back
Top Bottom