Tempest Cabaret

tb lilley

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I picked this up a few months ago. It's what's left (not much) of what was an Atari Centipede cabaret:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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The other side of the cab was in better nick:

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Here she is, looking in need of a bit of work .....

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After finally finished sanding and filling, it was time to apply DC-Fix to the sides. Large roll, cab laid on top. Traced outline with a pencil, then roughly trimmed:

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Applied, and trimmed with Stanley blade:

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Left*hand side of the cab. In addition, the cab front went to a friend to have fresh laminate applied:

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Here she is with marquee and coin door fitted:

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Starting to look like a Tempest cabaret:

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Just need to fit speaker grill at this point.
 
So ...... With the cosmetics almost sorted, it was timeto address the rest of the cab.

First up, power:

I really struggled to find an Atari colour vector power brick so I made use of what I had to hand - a Centipede power brick, paired with a toroid transformer.

It's not pretty:

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But it is functional:

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So that's a Centipede power brick that's now outputting 50VAC CT on pins 10-11-13. Which is nice.*

Straight forward enough. The toroid is drawing power from after the power brick's line filter. Also uses fuse F1. Also plumbed in so that cabs on/off switch also functions as on/off for the toroid. I just spliced the toroid output into pins 10-11-13. So the Tempest harness is almost entirely unhacked. I say almost as pin 13 on the Tempest harness, where the harness plugs into the brick, is female. And I had to repin that to a male pin. Other than that, it's untouched.

Here's the harness hooked up to the brick, with newly rebuilt (all new caps, all new transistors) AR2:

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All the voltages check out, so looking good. Also traced the 50VAC CT through the harness to the WG6100 connector. Again, all voltages present and correct.

So that's power sorted. Thanks to EclipseEye on this forum I also now have a tested working Tempest PCB.
 
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So ...... Next up, time to bite the bullet and get on with the monitor. Never had a colour vector monitor before, let alone worked on one.

Here she is. WG6100. Looks pretty good from this side:

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No burn. At all. Which is where the good news ends, and the bad news starts. As a quick glance round the other side reveals a few missing components:

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Needs:

HV board.
Deflection board.
The 6 frame mounted transistors.
Neck card.
Missing wiring to be re-instated.
And a full rebuild and upgrade to make bullet proof.

A loose HV cage and board were supplied with the monitor. Here's a list of all parts replaced and upgrades applied to the HV board, and what it looked like when I'd finished:

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Next up, deflection PCB. I struggled to get hold of one of these. Really struggled. Finally tracked one down to a seller on here, but he wasn't keen on shipping to the UK. So I asked him to ship to my cousin who has been living in the States for past 20 years. No problem. When I sent the seller my cousin's address, turns out that they live only 5 miles apart.. Small world.

Anyway. First thing, remove LV section and fit LV2000.*

Before:

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During:

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After:

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In addition, the following parts were replaced / upgraded:

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Next up, frame mounted transistors x 6 and re-instate wiring:

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Time to put it all together:

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Starting to look a lot better .... So time to test ....

Everything laid out on the bench (utility work top ....):

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Switch it on ..... and bingo:

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After building and fitting a shelf to house the marquee light, it was job done:

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Overall I'm pretty pleased with it. Nice project that kept me busy.
 
Really great work on this, it looks awesome. The vent differences are probably not a big deal since you aren't going to run it 24/7.
 
Hi, tb lilley!

Good work!

Your marquee seems damaged. One user send me a scan copy for restore some moths ago. I restored the piece for challenge. User never interested on.

it's a pity that no one take advantage about the work I did. I show you in this topic:

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showpost.php?p=2281191&postcount=69


Regards
 
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Nice job on this...what do you think of the DC-Fix? Looking into getting some for a cocktail.
 
Thanks guys.

DC-Fix very easy to work with. You can apply it, but if you get it wrong you can remove then re-apply. I'd say you get about 3-4 minutes to do that. After 5 minutes it starts to go off - you can still remove, but might start to stretch it a little. Gives a nice finish, and takes a lot of the stress out of it. I was impressed with it.
 
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