Earlier this week I finally moved the “new” Golden Tee cabinet that I picked up last spring into the basement for some work.  After the Cardinals loss, er… gift, to the Dodgers last night, I needed something to do so I decided to finally start working on this cabinet.  The first order of business was to remove the existing, working Golden Tee 2000 PCB from the cabinet.  Since I had a brand new jamma harness, I decided that I would also replace all of the wiring in the cabinet as well, so I stripped all of the old wiring out.

I then mounted the Golden Tee 2005 PCB, hard drive and power supply into the cabinet and hooked up only the monitor and speakers for the time being.  I fired the game up and spent about 20 minutes adjusting the size and position of the image as well as the brightness and contrast settings.  I had a pretty decent image on the screen but noticed that it kept pulsing from light to dark.  I suspected a bad adjustment pot so I began to try and track down which one was bad.  While I was working on this, I inadvertently stepped on the power cord and the game powered off.

I quickly realized that the power cord on the machine was bad, so I decided to unplug it and replace it.  As I was trying to unplug the cord, I put my hand on top of the metal power supply and was shocked.  Not shocked at what I found, but literally shocked.  Not a jolting shock, more like someone had stuck 1000 pins into my hand all at the same time. Damn, that’s always a fun way to discover that the cabinet is not properly grounded.  Obviously, the power cord was causing the game to short but it  also had no ground pin.  Why I hadn’t noticed this before is beyond me but a quick switch of the power cord with a cord that had a grounding pin solved both the “shock” issue and the unstable monitor issue.

I didn’t have a camera handy, so I took a quick video of the working game with my cell phone.  Wait, I had a camera, I just decided to take a video instead of a picture?  It WAS late by this time.  The strobing effect you see is not present on the actual monitor, it’s a product of the crappy camera in my cell phone.  This is also my first attempt at posting a video, so it might work, it might not.

There is still plenty to do on this cabinet.  I need to apply the overlay to the control panel; cut new holes for all of the buttons and hook them up; install the track ball; and wire up the coin door just to name a few.  The cabinet also needs some cosmetic work but I want to make sure everything is going to work properly before I spend too much time on that aspect.  Stay tuned…