Atari Tempestipede Cabaret

[tb lilley]

I picked this up in the summer. 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. I thought ..... But a Tempest conversion looked impossible. For a start I'd need the cabaret marquee and control panel - impossible - I know of a guy in the US that's been looking for those parts for about a year. And then there's the small matter of a colour vector monitor .... 

Cut a long story short, whilst deliberating my options, along came this little lot:

The Tempest PCB set wasn't part of the deal - I dropped lucky with a US seller for that.

So, conversion look to be on.

Progress on this has been slow, but I've made a start. 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:

The other side of the cab was in better nick:

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

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

Applied, and trimmed with Stanley blade:

T mould applied:

New Bezel (Trent Plastics), bezel retainer, and control panel fitted:

That's about it for now. Still have to renew the other side and apply t moulding. Next up will be the front ....... Still a long way to go on this one, but it's a start.

 

[Alpha1]

Nice work so far duder!

 

[DanP]

Yeah agreed, great work so far, looking forward to the updates. Where did you get the vinyl from? I've got a couple of cabs that could do with this sort of treatment

Dan

 

[tymawrcymru]

Yep, I am impressed. Nice

 

[backflipper]

Cool

 

[Qubit]

Hi there
It's looking good so far.

Did you find a monitor?

Maybe this would do the trick.

http://www.vectorvga.com/requirements.htm

Cheers

 

[tb lilley]

Yes, monitor secured. Doesn't work mind you. That'll be a saga in itself. But cheers for the link.

 

[Purity]

I would also be interested to know where you got the vinyl from

 

[Stevros]

Great work

 

[tb lilley]

Sorry chaps - meant to post a link a few days ago. Stuff is DC-Fix. I ordered mine from Amazon, but think it can be found cheaper elsewhere. The Atari Tempest / Centi cabarets are surprisingly deep, so it needs to be a 90cm roll.

Link

 

[MarbleMad]

That the mahogany ?

 

[tb lilley]

So, a bit of progress on the Tempestipede ......

Left hand side of the cab has now had the DC-fix treatment. In addition, the cab front has been with a friend to have fresh laminate applied:

Here she is with marquee and coin door fitted:

Starting to look like a Tempest cabaret:

Just need to fit speaker grill. But I've got a shocker of a hangover today, and need to break out the drill. Not happening today.

 

[tb lilley]

So ...... now that cosmetics almost sorted, it's time to address the rest of the cab.

First up, power:

I really struggled to find an Atari colour vector power brick. Did track one down to the US, but with shipping it came in at over £100. ..... I might bite the bullet and spring for one next year, but in the meantime I've made use of what I had to hand - a Centipede power brick, paired with a toroid transformer.

It's not pretty:

But it is functional:

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:

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 Nad, I also now have a tested working Tempest PCB. So, next up will be monitor. Might try to get that sorted tomorrow, but it needs a lot of hours putting into it ....

 

[MarbleMad]

is that the mahogany covering you used?

 

[tb lilley]

Woodgrain Walnut.

 

[tb lilley]

So ...... 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. Notoriously unreliable WG6100. Looks pretty good from this side:

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:

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:

Next up, deflection PCB. I struggled to get hold of one of these. Really struggled. Finally tracked one down to a guy in the US. But he refused to ship to UK. Grrr. 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 3 miles apart. He dropped it round on his way home from work .... Small world.

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

Before:

During:

After:

In addition, the following parts were replaced / upgraded:

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

Time to put it all together:

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

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

Switch it on ..... and bingo:

Needs picture size and focus adjustments. But that'll wait until later in the week. Hopefully now just a case of transferring it all into the cab and job done.

 

[tb lilley]

Despite promising myself I'd leave it for tonight, 5 mins of tweaking has improved things. Think the yoke needs an adjust, but looking better:

 

[Alpha1]

nice work!

 

[forcefulfil]

good work!
did u also follow the instructions to re-set/check the H.V. after fitting the LV2000?

Orange wire on the neck board connector from the H.V. set to 180v

easier than doing it from under the anode cap!

phil

forcefulfil2013-01-06 23:40:41

 

[dezbaz]

That's brilliant James!

Nice to see a classic up and running

Cute little cab there too. You don't see many of them around

I like your writeup on the WG6100 upgrade - Thanks for sharing