Just an overview

Years ago I picked up this CATERPILLAR made by OLYMPIA. It is a CENTIPEDE clone (I think) under license. PCB is very similar to the Atari board but the most important difference is the control panel; in fact this cabinet version was born with a joystick and not with a trackball. Original Atari board supports both kind of controls and Olympia board does the same.

These are the initial conditions



As you can see side arts are in very good conditions. The designer of this cab is very famous in Italy; he is Cortez (Luigi Corteggi). He drawn a lot of comics covers in the past and designed some other Olympia cabinets as Vega and Portraits.


Marquee is not in good conditions. Blue is crappy and when the back light is on the resulting image is bad.




Actually I’ve seen coin doors in bad conditions and so this is quite good. Just dirty and a bad sticker.



This is the control panel. Very bad. The cabinet had been converted in I don’t know what but for sure this happened several times…

Marquee

Marquee seemed to be in good condition but putting a back light I could see all blue part was compromised. I tried to paint it with the right tone of color but the result was quite bad.

Marquee support were not so rusted so I could restore them quickly.

Then I followed these steps:

1 I took a good picture

2 I vectorized it

3 I sent it to print

Old and new marquee compared:

New marquee has different colors, I’ll reprint it don’t worry. My fault, I took the picture with a cold light. Anyway this is a good start.

Upper part

Just few hours to clean the part behind the marquee and remove the old-style switch on the top…

This is the part behind the marquee

…and this “was” the switch…

Sides and Supports

Side arts need to be cleaned only, while the supports were completely rusted.

I removed the old paint and most of the rust, then I painted as usual with  protection layer, then a primer and, in the end, the black paint.

T-molding

T-molding has been damaged by some pins

so I removed all pins and I used some putty to close the holes and irregularities.

after sanding all the surface I used glossy black

That’s all

Power Supply

I found some modifications on the power supply. In fact inside the cab close to the original power brick I found a switch.
Then I found an OLYMPIA sticker covering the holes for additional fuses. I removed it in order to use that image to reproduce the sticker for the coin door.

Cleaned and checked, replaced just the diodes.

Coin Door

Coin door was dirty only but the sticker should be replaced. Ashtray is in good condition.

more in detail…

This is the sticker found on the power supply

I scanned and vectorized it, then I printed on a transparent layer and then I glued it on metal paper. Last picture shows the comparation between the repro and the original.

this is the result after cleaning.

Last step: the Control Panel

The most damaged part of the entire project.

I prepared an aluminium rectangle in order to cover the damaged part

and I glued it with metal glue and then I covered with assembling glue sanding all over, giving a rounded shape on the edges.

In the mean time I reproduced the layout on a vinyl surface and applied it.

Replacing the wheels

Wheels were damaged and the panel destroyed. Actually I think years of humidity weakened the structure.



As you can see the cabinet weight deformed the wheels.

First of all I removed all stuff screwed on the panel

I just used a plywood panel screwing it on the old structure. New wheels have been screwed too with long screws in order to get stronger the entire part.

New wheels are tested on 70Kg each and can be braking



Then I replaced the screws on both sides used to block the side protections. Original screws were very small, new screws are longer and can block the new panel.

I can see inside I had no conseguences




This is the result.