tb lilley
Member
I picked this up a few months ago. It's what's left (not much) of what was an Atari Centipede cabaret:
At some point in it's life it had been converted to a pinball video game. Which means it'd had holes drilled and flipper buttons fitted to the sides. The previous owner had done a fair bit of ground work in terms of tidying the cab up and overall it's not as bad as it might look.*
I struggled with deciding what to do with it. It came to me with most of the difficult parts to find to turn it back to Centipede, apart from the bezel, which was never going to be easy to find. Plus I'm not massively keen on Centipede.*
I've been after a Tempest cabaret for a while, and Centi and Tempest cabarets (bar a couple of extra vents on the back) share an identical cab ..... And Tempest cabarets NEVER come up for sale in the UKI thought ..... But a Tempest conversion looked impossible. For a start I'd need the cabaret marquee and control panel - impossible both almost impossible to find. And then there's the challenge of finding a colour vector monitor ....
Cut a long story short, whilst deliberating my options, this little lot fell into my arms:
The Tempest PCB set wasn't part of the deal - I dropped lucky with another seller for that.
So, the conversion was on. Shortly after committing myself to this, not 1 but 2 Tempest cabarets came up for sale in the UK. Unbelievable. As did a Centipede cabaret bezel. Doh! Still, I like a challenge......
The biggest cosmetic challenge was sorting out the sides. The holes that had been cut for pinball buttons couldn't be covered up without sorting the rest of the sides. Plus, the sides were in pretty poor shape - so I decided to renew the sides completely.
A case of sand, fill, sand, fill, sand, fill repeat repeat etc etc.
Here's the cab at its worst:
The wood around the control panel area had really suffered. I imagine this was from when the cab was operated as a pinball game - would have been the natural place to grip whilst using the flipper buttons on the side:
At some point in it's life it had been converted to a pinball video game. Which means it'd had holes drilled and flipper buttons fitted to the sides. The previous owner had done a fair bit of ground work in terms of tidying the cab up and overall it's not as bad as it might look.*
I struggled with deciding what to do with it. It came to me with most of the difficult parts to find to turn it back to Centipede, apart from the bezel, which was never going to be easy to find. Plus I'm not massively keen on Centipede.*
I've been after a Tempest cabaret for a while, and Centi and Tempest cabarets (bar a couple of extra vents on the back) share an identical cab ..... And Tempest cabarets NEVER come up for sale in the UKI thought ..... But a Tempest conversion looked impossible. For a start I'd need the cabaret marquee and control panel - impossible both almost impossible to find. And then there's the challenge of finding a colour vector monitor ....
Cut a long story short, whilst deliberating my options, this little lot fell into my arms:
The Tempest PCB set wasn't part of the deal - I dropped lucky with another seller for that.
So, the conversion was on. Shortly after committing myself to this, not 1 but 2 Tempest cabarets came up for sale in the UK. Unbelievable. As did a Centipede cabaret bezel. Doh! Still, I like a challenge......
The biggest cosmetic challenge was sorting out the sides. The holes that had been cut for pinball buttons couldn't be covered up without sorting the rest of the sides. Plus, the sides were in pretty poor shape - so I decided to renew the sides completely.
A case of sand, fill, sand, fill, sand, fill repeat repeat etc etc.
Here's the cab at its worst:
The wood around the control panel area had really suffered. I imagine this was from when the cab was operated as a pinball game - would have been the natural place to grip whilst using the flipper buttons on the side:


