A New Addition, A Project Revisited

Regular readers of this blog will recall a project I started several months ago.  Being unhappy with the gameplay of Leland’s All American Football, I decided to strip the cabinet and convert it to a Golden Tee machine.  I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to pick up another cabinet which have altered my plans, probably for the better.  Jeff Rothe, from rotheblog.com posted a message on CoinOpSpace about a non-working Golden Tee cabinet for sale in eastern Illinois for the whopping price of $20.  Jeff put me in contact with the seller, who I exchanged several e-mails with.  The seller was nice enough to send me a few pictures of the cabinet and I immediately noticed one big improvement over the All American Football cabinet I was currently using for the project.  The cabinet had a 25″ monitor, as opposed to the 19″ monitor I had in the All American Football cabinet.

There were a couple of things I didn’t like about the cabinet, but nothing that was a deal killer.  There was an area which had been removed from the front of the cabinet, more than likely for a bill acceptor.  The bill acceptor was removed long ago, so all the remained was a large hole.  The top piece had a corner that had been broken off and was re-attached with some brackets.  This was nothing that a little bondo and wood couldn’t fix.  The game was not working at all, but I figured that for $20 it was worth it if I could at least salvage the monitor.

I picked up the machine and besides the damage mentioned above, cosmetically all it really needed was a good cleaning.  I then proceeded with some basic troubleshooting to see what in the cabinet worked or didn’t work.  I started with some voltage readings at the power supply and had 120 volts coming into the cabinet.  I then moved to the +5v terminal on the power supply and found that I only had about 4.1 volts.  This is usually too low to power anything in the cabinet.  Most power supplies have an adjustment knob on them for adjusting the voltages, but turning this knob did nothing to repair the low voltage.  I swapped in a spare power supply I had around, adjusted the voltage to 5.1 and the entire cabinet came to life.

So, for the low price of $20, I had a working Golden Tee 2000 board set, a somewhat banged up cabinet and a working 25″ standard resolution monitor.  Not bad!  As I was cleaning the cabinet out, I found 2 beer bottle caps, 1 ping pong ball and $2.50 in quarters.  So, in reality I only paid $17.50 for the cabinet.

Once I found that the cabinet only needed a power supply, it made my decision that much easier.  The Golden Tee components would all be going into the cabinet.  The control panel was pretty beat up on the cabinet and my initial thought was to take the original Golden Tee overlay that I had and place it on the cabinet.  After taking some measurements, I realized that the left and right button holes on the overlay hung about 1/2″ over the edge, which wasn’t going to work.  Here’s a shot of the overlay I planned to use for those that are interested:

I then looked at some other options, like the control panel overlay sticker that was available, along with a decal set to label the trackball and button functions. I had concern that the stickers would eventually peel up, so I decided to design my own overlay. It’s a take off of the original with a few of my own twists (click for a full sized image):

This overlay is made to fit exactly on the existing control panel.  After several trial runs, I can tell you that the blue background prints darker than it looks.  The overlay is currently in the process of being printed on adhesive backed polycarbinate laminate.  Once I receive it, I will transfer my Golden Tee 2005 boards into the cabinet and start on the cosmetic repairs.  I should have pictures of the cabinet in the next few days.  Now, I need to decide what I’m going to do with the All American Football cabinet once again.

Stay tuned!