Wow. I want one of these. A scratch built Centipede with vertical monitor will definitely be my next project.
....after my bartop.
Thanks. To me, Centipede is one of the quintessential classic cabs - great lines and artwork. It also has a decent appeal to women (Centipede's [the game] design can be attributed, in part, to a female - especially the colors), perhaps second only to Ms. Pac Man.
The monitor in this cab, however, will be a horizontal 25" arcade standard resolution arcade monitor (24.8", whatever). I wanted to go with a 19" but wasn't keen on spinning the monitor around for vertical games, especially since getting it to degause automatically was outside my current capabilities.
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I just noticed my monitor shelf slightly slopes (like 3/32") to the left. That's something I need to fix. That shelf gives me neverending problems.
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Now onto my control panel overlay pics.... [opinions wanted please]
The pics are at the bottom of this post.
Both of these CPOs were made in Photoshop. Basically, what I did was download the modified Centipede CPO from the Arcade Art Library, imported it into Illustrator and resized it to my CP's size. I then imported it into Photoshop as layers and basically 'moved everything around', making sure to only shrink when needed (never enlarge). Looking at it at 100%, it looks smooth and clean.
The first panel incorporates a seven button layout. The buttons are spaced out 1.5 inches apart (though I may tighten them slightly). The joystick centers are 3 inches from the leftmost buttons (is that enough?). I'll probably be using 49-ways, so I may have to move things over a bit to account for the floppy cable connector. The buttons will all be Electric Ice buttons with RGB LEDs (thus explaining all my recent kvetching about dual LedWiz support).
The trackball panel left me slightly heartbroken. I originally wanted two trackballs with three buttons each. Unfortunately, it proved to be a bit cramped with that setup. I realized that the only reason I wanted the dual ball setup was for Marble Madness, so I decided to just ditch one set of buttons. This means I'll miss out on a couple of good games and it may seem to some as a waste, but hey, at least now the panel is ambidextrous. The balls are both 3 inch and of the Electric Ice variety - also housing an RGB LED.
One final note - I simplified the standard graphics found on an actual Centipede CPO. I'm actually more of a fan of the background stripes and starburst than I am of the foreground mushrooms. There's also intentionally nothing around the buttons (the lighted buttons are more than enough pretty-pretty).
And, of course, disregard the JPEG compression.