beating the dead horse, Golden Tee Topper message

armyaviation

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I know this has all been discussed before but i have a GT 2005 fore and when i got my topper it read GT Fore and said a name of a business on it. now it just says Golden Tee Golf and something about incredible tech. how could that have changed. also where can i get a freaking GT card for my card reader. someone has to know where they all went
 
I know this has all been discussed before but i have a GT 2005 fore and when i got my topper it read GT Fore and said a name of a business on it. now it just says Golden Tee Golf and something about incredible tech. how could that have changed. also where can i get a freaking GT card for my card reader. someone has to know where they all went

Mine changed to the generic message when I got a new hard drive. Yeah... I dunno. It's voodoo.
 
I don't have one, or really know anything about them, but I've heard the same thing... that various things will cause the board to change or reset the messages. I was talking with Pinball Wizard a while ago about hacking one of these signs, but probably getting rid of the control board and using a normal microcontroller... rather than trying to reverse engineer the original program/board.

DogP
 
its weird, today i played it and it reads GT "Fore" now. the other day i left it on for a while and it never changed. you would think with all the wealth of knowledge on this forum that someone would have the answer about how these things work
 
The only way to interface with it was via the IT server that is offline. I called IT recently and they said they had no recommendations.
 
Google turns up nothing but dead ends on this. With all the electronics guys in the hobby, I'm shocked that no one has ever come up with a board to drive the LEDs. Maybe an arduino project that could plug in to the led grid directly and bypass I.T.'s driver board? I'd pay good money if someone could produce this...
 
if its trying to connect over the network why not put a crossover cable on it, attach it to a computer, and sniff out the handshake data. you have one piece to the puzzle.
 
if its trying to connect over the network why not put a crossover cable on it, attach it to a computer, and sniff out the handshake data. you have one piece to the puzzle.

Can you even get to that point? I think its a phone modem preset to a specific number.
I have a GT2005, and gave up on this pretty quick. The alternative was to try to find a similar sized programmable display and just bypass the game doing it altogether.
 
Google turns up nothing but dead ends on this. With all the electronics guys in the hobby, I'm shocked that no one has ever come up with a board to drive the LEDs. Maybe an arduino project that could plug in to the led grid directly and bypass I.T.'s driver board? I'd pay good money if someone could produce this...

This would definitely be cool. I have one of these toppers, but not the game. Would be fun to have it display stuff, hang it on the wall or something.
 
if its trying to connect over the network why not put a crossover cable on it, attach it to a computer, and sniff out the handshake data. you have one piece to the puzzle.

I'm pretty sure it's not Ethernet, but dial-up... and I'm not sure, but I think some boards talk to the game PCB, others talk to the servers directly (I seem to remember reading that the old ones had modems, but the new ones didn't have the modem section parts populated).

But yeah, if someone has a working Golden Tee 2005 and a display, you could definitely take a logic analyzer and see what data is sent across the line. But it'd probably be a lot of effort to reverse engineer and give you very limited control of the display (just setting the predefined available fields, like location name, and maybe leaderboard).

I think the better thing to do would be to take a microcontroller and hook it up to the driver circuitry and program it from scratch. It would take very little effort, allow you to do basically anything you want, and do it over USB, RS232, or whatever interface you want. I actually built/programmed a display like this 6 or 7 years ago for a project in a microcontroller class in college.

DogP
 
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