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XYXZYZ:
Part 2

Sorry I didn't take more pictures of the development. But  once you've seen one torn down cabinet and bare, detached control panel you've seen 'em all...

This project was a pain in the ass to do, because just after I got the machine my job starts demanding all my time, and I spent the next 4 months living at work. And I don't have much space in my little one room apartment, so it sat in the middle of the living room the whole time.

One thing I don't like about working on the cabinet is all the Centipede evidences that show up, when I removed the CPO I can see where the guy welded a metal panel to the back of it, and filled the trackball and button holes with wood filler or something like that. And while removing the MK side art, it took some of the paint off and you can see bits of the original Centipede side art (Damaged by the adhesive, but you can see it.) And you can make out the whole centipede image under the paint when you look at it at a certain angle. So, that kinda made me feel bad. But converting this back into a Centipede in the future will be a fun project!

Side art
The first thing I did was removed the side art, took about three hours using a hair dryer and goo-gone to remove the adhesive. I just sprayed goo-gone all over it, waited a while and used a plastic ruler to scrape it off. I suppose the cabinet should be repainted, but it doesn't look so bad... I did have to touch up some blemishes with a can of black semigloss spray paint though. I didn't put a lot effort into the sides because it's going to sit between two other machines and I'll remove all the paint anyway when I restore it.


The control panel
The original converter's control panel was a mess; six button SF2 layout, no holes for start buttons! And the wires were all soldered to the microswitches, many of them were in bad shape as well. Given that it was used for Mortal Kombat,  the two middle buttons were wired together, along with the start button. I wound up having to cut a lot of the wires off, mainly because I couldn't get a screwdriver in there to take the joysticks off. First, let's remove the CPO. Taking it off with a hairdryer wasn't so bad, but removing the adhesive was hard as hell! Took me two days and 2/3 bottle of goo gone, I had a paint scraper and would scrape, scrape, and scrape some more, and that stuff wasn't going anywhere. Perseverance won in the end though. And as I work on the control panel, I have the additional headache of living  in an apartment complex; I can't just get up at 6:00 and start making a bunch of noise. (I could, but I'd be a jerk) So I had to wait until midday to do anything noisy. While I drilled the start buttons in, it was obvious that my battery operated 7V Walmart drill wasn't going to do the job. So I would up renting a more powerful drill from Home Depot, they even let me do the work right there in the store. Which was nice, because that drill was noisey as hell and I wouldn't want to put that on my neighbors. Also saved me the trip of returning it.

The PC
The PC has a Athlon 64 3200 and 512MB of RAM, more than enough power to run the games I want to play. It's got an ArcadeVGA video card, and it's interfaced to the cabinet with a J-PAC. Amazingly, I had no problems at all installing the Arcade VGA. Unfortunately the J-PAC died after a week, the USB/PS2 controller IC was defective and that caused the sync to drop when the resolution goes under 620x480. I emailed Andy at Ultimarc, he immediately gave me some troubleshooting advice and determined that that particular chip was bad, he sent me a new chip the very next day. Lots of people on this forums go on about how Andy aggressively stands by his product, and it's true, you can't go wrong with Ultimarc. And I'm really sold on that ArcadeVGA, after using it on this machine, when I go to my vertical monitor machine using a Matrox G400 it just looks like crap. Looks I'm going to have to get another AVGA.  Also, before I suspected the J-PAC I wound up breaking the monitor's horizontal frequency resistor, had to remove the monitor, desolder the resistor and put it back together by hand.  :badmood:

The sound is straight out of the sound card to the JPAC using a set of headphone cables with the speakers clipped off. There's no external amplifier and actually sounds great. So it must be an amplified sound card, isn't that a rarity in on board sound hardware? Maybe I'm going to melt my motherboard someday...

The software is a Tiny XP build, MaLa frontend with MAME+ 124a. I have Daphne for Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, and ePSXe for the port of a laserdisc arcade game called "Time Gal". All integrated into the same MaLa gamelist using SGT's handy guide.

Putting it all together
I like to have the hard stuff out of the way before I put everything together and finish the machine, In my case that's configuring software and getting it all to work properly. Once that's done, It's time to wire the controls. I tossed the dirty old malfunctioning controls that came with the machine, I threw in some Happs buttons with Cherry microswitches, and some red balltop Sanwa JL-Ws, they do make a damn fine joystick. I couldn't decide to make it a three or six button layout; with six buttons the bottom row is too close to the edge of the panel and it's uncomfortable. But I'll be able to play a wider range of games, there are quite a few that won't run on my six button Xbox cabinet. So I'll just lay the CPO directly over the holes, and play three button games until the CPO gets damaged and I'm forced to plug the holes with buttons. Again, the control wires were soldered to the old switches, so I had to desolder them, add quick disconnects, and make a new wire that chains the grounds together. And the J-PAC doesn't have anything connected to the test switch pad, so I soldered a wire to it and ran it to one of the JAMMA+ switch inputs.

The only thing left now are switches and coin lamps. I made a new PC switch that extends out of the case and is mounted inside the cabinet, and I got some replacement 1892 lamps to replace the old dead ones in the Centipede coin door. I powered it by running a wire out of the PC supply's  12V line, and simply connecting it to the wires on the 12V line of the cabinet's power supply. I did disconnect it from that actual power supply, I don't know if the loading would cause any problems but I didn't want to find out. So, the coin lamps now work and I can see where to insert my quarters in the dark!

And now, after about 4 months of work, it's done.

Before-


After-







Here's the MaLa layout I made to match the graphics on the cabinet.






So what do you think?

phishpac:
I love it!  It looks like you went back in time and brought the cabinet with you.  very retro!  way to go

Lutus:
 :applaud: :applaud: :applaud: :applaud:

Wonderful.  This is what MAME cabs should look like.  Just like original cabs from the arcade hayday.

Apollo:
Very very cool, well done.

TOK:
Since you're showing Stargate as one of your marquee selections... How are you mapping the buttons to play that?
Just asking because I'm a Defender freak and was never happy with a fudged button layout. Even a 7 button layout with a Reverse button right by the player 1 stick felt like too much of a compromise.

The cabinet looks great. One of the best implementations I've seen of new art on an old machine.  :cheers:

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