Retrogaming love is a many legged creature

After searching local ads for NES games and arcade cabinets I happened upon a guy selling a Centipede cabinet as follows:   Arcade Cabinet and Header for Centipede game.
Original arcade cabinet and header for Centipede.  The cabinet does not have a monitor or the
centipede game board. -  $150

So on Monday, June 23rd I met the seller at the storage center where he had this "not so little" gem holed up.

The cab looks very much intact and with the exception of the control panel overlay all the artwork is there.  The side art has a few scratches, carvings, burn marks, etc but definitely workable.  The T-molding is peeling in places and there are dings and chunks of wood missing.  I suppose, though, if the machine was immaculate then doing a resto on it would seem a moot point.  After a little bit of negotiation I managed to talk the seller down from his asking price a bit and got the cabinet for a fair shake.

A quick search on wikipedia reveals that centipedes are Cavernicolous (cave-dwelling).  This little factoid helps to diminish the guilt I have about locking my new machine away in my cold, dark shop.  When my mancave is completed this species will be in its natural habitat.

I am so excited to be embarking on another arcade cabinet project.  This will be my first crack at a partial restoration. I say partial because I plan to keep the artwork more or less intact and preserve the vibe of the original machine, but as it has no arcade monitor, board or guts anymore I plan to convert the interior into a mame machine capable of playing as many of the classic hits from that same golden age of arcade games as possible.  One of the first steps is to try and design a control panel that will obviously play Centipede as it was intended but (without getting too over-the-top) also be capable of games such as:  Donkey Kong, Pacman, Asteroids, and the like.  It should have a clean interface with the original style 1 and 2 player buttons, a trackball, 1x 8way joystick and maybe 2 or 3 buttons.  I realize that some of the games from that era had 4 or 5 buttons (Defender and Asteroids I think are examples), but at least with the case of Asteroids I have managed to play it on my other machine using only a few buttons and it still allows for fun game play.  I think want to go with a Zippy joystick with a white or green colored ball to bring out the colors of the sideart and/or marquee on the machine and led-lit colored buttons to tie the control panel together with the awesome original artwork.

I won't say that Centipede is my favorite game from this era, but certainly the artwork that came on this cabinet is some of the best I have ever seen.

I hope that others out there with similar interests will get something out of this series and, if nothing else, I want to document the choices I make for this project (good and bad) and see how it turns out.