I love collecting the mini / cabaret games as it means that I can fit more games into the same ammount of space. As I always want more games, space is a real premium for me. Mini games do sacrifice some of the artwork of the fullsized games, but I think the space saving makes it worth it.

The game is fully working

I have modified the game slightly by adding an illuminated red leaf button instead of the original plain white fire button. Also I have orded an illuminated red trackball to match. I like to plat my machines in the dark and illuminated controls add a real nice touch for me.

When I got the game, there was a really naff joystick installed instead of the trackball. I couldn't live with this so I immediatly put together a trackball out of various old trackball parts and installed it (new tracball parts are on order!) In order to fit the trackball I had to restore the harness going to the main game pcb as it had been slightly modified to allow a joystick to work.

The vinyl sides are peeling and need replacing.

The bezel is scratched and needs replacing / repro'ing

The control panel overlay is not bad, though there are some good repro's so I will proably replace it.

Shortly after getting the game put together and working (about 10 mins) the screen went all screwy and the game cut out. I immediatly turned off the game and disconnected the game pcb. I hooked up my multimeter to the +5v line on the ARII board and powered the machine back on. the 5v line was reading 5.04 volts which is pretty much perfect, just as I was about the switch the game off and plug the boards back in, the 5v line shot up to 7.5volts! Argh! So my game pcb has been cooked by 7.5v!

I pulled out the ARII board and performed a full rebuild (It was actually the LM305 that had gone faulty) but I wanted to make sure I don't have any more power supply problems for a long time. I also performed the ARII sense mod to stop voltage jumping problems in the future.

I put the game pcb back into the game and all I got was garbage on the screen, so looked like the 7.5v jolt had killed it.

I performed repairs on the game pcb and refitted it. The game was now fully working once more (and likely to be a damn site more reliable now)

I purcahsed a millipede board from the US as "untested" which of course turned out to be non-working. Infact, the game was very very faulty (I suspect another victim of someones power supply going supernova and sticking 7volts or more through it) I replaced something like 20 chips to get the millipede working (oh well at least it should be reliable now that half of the chips have been replaced) I also purcahsed a millipede multigame board and installed that onto the pcb. The multigame board allows you to play both millipede and centipede from the same board. You can change game at any time by pressing both player1 and player2 start buttons at the same time. To use this, you must have a millipede board, hence why I bought one.

I have made a harness to plug my newly repaired millipede board into the centipede cab (quite a difficult task as the pinouts for both games are very different and also there are 2 edge connectors on both games) The harness I have made also has a jamma edge connector as well, so if the game goes faulty again, I can easily plug it into my jamma test rig to diagnose any problems. The harness only requires a couple of wires connecting up and then it is ready to go into the centipede machine.

The multigame kit will also store highscore for both games independantly and also allows you to make adjustments to game settings in test mode, without having to mess about with the dip-swtich settings.

I am looking forward to playing millipede, which is a faster harder version of centipede, with even more enemies. I still like centipede though and will want to play both games, so this multigame kit is ideal for me really.