Golden Tee Fore 2005 Showcase

Game Manufactured by Incredible Technologies (c)2004
Cabinet Manufactured by Dynamo

One day a few weeks back I was poking around the local Craigslist when I came across a post for a Golden Tee Fore 2005 arcade game.  The listing said the machine worked,  but that he was getting an error that the local operator had deemed to be related to the hard drive being bad.  They were asking ZERO dollars for the game.  Free.  Welp,  I am quite attracted to the word "free" most of the time so I shot out an email inquiry.  I didn't expect much as the listing had been up for about an hour by the time I sent the email.  After replying I went about my day as usual.

About 5 hours later,  just after dinner,  I get an email asking if I was still interested in the game … along with a phone number.  I made the call and talked to a guy who told me that he had a number of replies but he chose to call me because I'd mentioned that I collected arcade games and I would be able to get the game up and running, etc.  I told him I was definitely interested but wanted to know if the game was upstairs or in a basement.  The man replied "You can take it out my back door and around to the front."  I reply that I'll take it… when was a good time to pick it up.  He asked if that night would work for me.  I told him I'd see him in an hour or so.  With that I hooked up the trailer,  grabbed my tools and headed out.

The guy lived about 30 minutes from my place in a nice part of Eagle, ID… about a mile from Grinker's Grand Palace arcade (for those who know the area).   When I get to the guys place I could tell I was dealing with money.  His house was massive… I'd estimate at least 3,000 square foot.  He had 3 nice cars in the driveway… including a 2012 Dodge Challenger Hemi RT… I asked him about the car and he tells me "Yeah,  that was my 17 year old sons birthday present this year."  … the bastard.  Anyway,  I go in the front door and I am directed…down… that's right… to the basement.  Yup… the game was in the basement but to his credit he DID have a walk-out.  That said,  it didn't help much.  Why?  Well,  you walk out the back door… across 12' or so to 8 steps down… around the pool to 11 steps up… across a 12' concrete slab then up a pea-gravel walk-path about 25' or so,  through the gate,  then up another 40' (at an incline) through wet grass.  Nice.  Needless to say this wasn't going to be something I can do on my own.  Luckily the guys 2 teenage sons were around.  Between the 4 of us we managed to wrestle the damn thing out of the house,  down the steps, around the pool,  up 11 more steps,  up the pea-gravel path,  across the front lawn and in to my trailer.  I just about died.  No,  I am not kidding,  I really just about died.  It was… BY FAR… the most difficult thing "arcade related" I have ever done… by a long shot.  But the game made it in to the trailer and I didn't actually manage to kill myself so all is good.

Once I got the game home it took myself and a neighbor kid to lift the back end of the machine up to and upright position and wrestle it off the trailer and in to the garagecade.  After all was said and done,  aside from a rather large bruise on my arm and a few nicks and scrapes,  I managed to come out OK (one of the scrapes is STILL visible today!).  After a day or so of recuperation time I took stock of what I actquired.  Upon power up the monitor did work… and I could see and hear when it came to the pre-boot test the hard drive would make a bunch of racket and then it would loop back to the beginning.  Yup,  hard drive issue I said to myself.  After downloading the CHD file for GT2005 and imaging it to a hard drive (I had to go through a couple because this older board wouldn't recognize 80GB hard drives) I confirmed it was a hard drive issue as the game came to life.  After some tests the game is playing perfectly.  It was setup to run in low res mode and does so fine,  but knowing that Golden Tee Fore does medium res,  and the Wells Gardner monitor in the cabinet has a medium res mode,  I tried to get it up and running in the higher resolution but failed.  I could not managed to get the monitor to sync at medium res.  Even at low res there are some slight geometry issues that I think a cap-kit will rectify … perhaps it will rectify the sync issue in medium res as well?   Time will tell.

To do: Re-cap the monitor chassis.  I already have the kit here,  I just need the time to get to it.  Once I do that I will determine if I can get the game to run in Medium Res again.  As for what I am going to do with the game (I already have a Golden Tee Fore Complete cabinet),  I am not 100% sure.  The original idea was to swap all my gun games over to the Dynamo cabinet as it's in MUCH better shape than the Atari showcase cabinet that they currently are in.  Add the fact that montor is burn-free and that seems to be the most prudent choice (my current shooter showcase cabinet has a mildly burned tube)… but damn that is a lot of work to swap 6 games over from one cabinet to the other.  The other options are to sell the game as a GT Fore 2005,  upgrade it to GT Fore Complete and sell it that way… and I even had an idea of turning it in to a dedicated 4-player JAMMA machine.   As of right now, I am not sure what I am going to do with it aside from recapping the monitor.  Once I do that and I decide what avenue I will be going with,  I will update this post.  Until then…

Please share...