I had a chance over the long weekend to get a bit of work done on the Golden Tee conversion. Unfortunately, not as much work as I would have preferred due to some family commitments. Regardless, I’m happy with the progress I made although I did have a few stumbling blocks along the way. I’ll be the first to admit that the wiring has been a bit of a pain. The wires are all color coded and tracing blue wires, green wires, red wires, yellow wires and orange wires is not easy for someone who is color blind.
The first step was removal of the All American Football boards from the cabinet. What I found underneath the board surprised me a bit, a huge round hole, which was previously concealed by the metal panel the boards were mounted to. This hole would ultimately alter my plans for mounting the Golden Tee boards in the position I wanted but it wasn’t a real big deal.
After the boards were removed I began taking out the wiring that was no longer needed. Fortunately, the wiring for the coin door lights, marquee light and monitor was already hooked up and could remain in the cabinet. The wiring to the coin door, excluding the lights, speaker, service switch and volume control was stripped from the cabinet. I then removed all of the joystick wiring and button wiring from the control panel. Because the old control panel had 8 buttons and 6 joysticks, this was the bulk of the wiring. I took extra care to keep the All American Football wiring harness intact so I could always revert the cabinet back if desired.
With all of the All American Football components out of the way, it was time to start the actual conversion of this cabinet to Golden Tee. Because of the discovered hole, I had to find a spot to mount the Golden Tee board that would ensure it was securely mounted. Once I did this, I realized that I was not going to be able to mount the hard drive where I initially planned. The hard drive got mounted to the side of the cabinet. I then found a spot on the cabinet base to mount the computer power supply. The computer power supply was to be used to supply power to the hard drive and additional power to the board, as the wiring harness alone won’t provide the necessary power. Here are a few shots of board, hard drive and computer power supply mounted in the cabinet:
Just for clarification, in the first picture from right to left, the hard drive (mounted to the cabinet side), the Golden Tee board and the switching power supply. The second picture is a shot of the computer power supply mounted in the base of the cabinet (and yes, the bottom needs to be vacuumed out). I will refer to the two power supplies as the switching power supply and computer power supply to avoid confusion, although it will soon become irrelevant.
Once all of the component were mounted it was time to start wiring! I hooked the jamma wiring harness to the Golden Tee board and ran the power wires to the switching power supply and hooked them to the corresponding terminal, either +5VDC, +12VDC or ground with spade connectors. I then ran the video green, red, blue, sync and ground wires up to the monitor. This is where I ran into my first minor problem. I did not have the connectors needed to run the new wiring directly to the monitor so I needed to connect the new wires to the existing wires. I snipped each wire toward the bottom of the cabinet and created a butt joint between the old wire and new wire securing it with heat shrink tubing. I can tell you that the heat shrink tubing created a far better butt joint than I could via crimping.
The only thing left was to apply the needed power to the hard drive and additional power to the board. I ran molex connectors from the computer power supply to the two required spots on the board and another to the hard drive. I plugged the computer power supply into the wall and discovered that it didn’t work…it was dead. Now, someone is going to pipe in and tell me that the computer power supply is an ATX power supply and will only work when plugged into an ATX motherboard. True, but you can also get them to work by shorting the PS/ON pin with ground. I verified that the computer power supply was dead by plugging it into a working ATX computer. This was my biggest challenge as I didn’t have a spare computer power supply handy.
I started researching the power requirements for a Golden Tee green board as my switching power supply had plenty of power. While reading the manual, I discovered that a specialized connector was available that would allow the Golden Tee green board to run directly off the switching power supply and provide the necessary power to the board and hard drive. When I looked at the connector, I realized it was simply a molex splitter with bare wires on one end that allowed for it to be wired directly to the switching power supply. I had my solution. I cut the molex connectors that I needed from the non-working computer power supply and ran to my local computer store and picked up 3 14″ molex extenders. I knew that the red wire on the molex plug was +12VDC, the yellow +5VDC and the black wires ground. I wired all three molex connectors to spade terminals and connected the wires to the appropriate terminal on the switching power supply. Here are a few shots of the wiring:
The wiring is a bit of a mess right now as it’s a mix of the new jamma wiring and some of the old All American Football wiring that I haven’t yet removed from the cabinet. All of the wiring that is tied together and attached to the cabinet is new wiring. The stray wires you see running across the board set, etc. still needs to be removed.
So, with the monitor hooked up to the PCB and the necessary power supplied, it was time to fire up the game and see the results. Over confident in my abilities, the first time I powered the game up, I didn’t even look at the monitor. I looked at the back of the machine to make sure I didn’t spot any sparks or smoke! Everything looked good and I noticed that the IDE activity light on the board indicating hard drive activity was flashing. Lo and behold it was booting. It first checks the hard drives for consistency then proceeds to an initialization screen:
The monitor is still mounted vertically in the cabinet, which is a job for another day. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t proceed past the initialization screen. I’m going to guess, at least I hope, it’s due to the fact that no controls, test switches, etc. are wired to the PCB yet. That’s the progress so far. The next step will be creating the new control panel, or at least a temporary panel so I can hook up the controls and try to get the game past the initialization screen. Stay tuned!
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