Golden Tee Fore Complete Red Board Stuck on Initializing

jimmyfloyd

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Golden Tee Fore Complete Red Board Stuck on Initializing

I have a Golden Tee Fore Complete red board that I am bench testing (My cabinet is still at a friend's.) I purchased this board, along with a HDD and CF HDD that were listed for complete. The board will load just fine until this point, then will just sit there and not do anything. From reading on similar issues, I'm leaning towards a hard drive issue.

The hard drive does spin up.
It is labeled as a complete
No lights on the board are solid. The 2 Status LEDs remain blinking.
I tried different cables, and both slots.
The hard drive, when put into a USB enclosure spins up, but does not register in Windows.

The CF card seems to do nothing either with the board or Windows machine.


Setup is a 300watt ATX power supply, likely from my SSB system I upgraded.
Board
Graphics card directly into VGA monitor.
I have 3 working graphics cards, and each got to this same point.


So what should I look at next? I'm guessing the HDD is hosed. I do have several other IDE drives I could image if I could find a GT Fore Complete image to create it from. I can also spin up a linux machine or test the drives with my Mac if it would produce different results.

Since I don't have the cabinet, I can't hold down start perse, but I could jumper the pin to spoof it. Do I need to jumper to ground or +5V?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks ahead of time.
 

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there is no switch to help u..
how long dose it sit in that screen ?
1min,10min, fore ever ?
what it looks like to me is a missing boot sector on the harddrive/cf
if u look at it there should be 3 paritions
u could run a mbr repair (master boot record),that might coxe it back to life.
as a rule i do not post links
but what the heck
http://www.planetemu.net/roms/mame-chds
scroll through there and find your chd.
now do u know how to use chdman 1.46 ?
btw what boot rom # is yours ? this would be u15
just read its # to me
if it is less then 2.09 ?
then start there

ed
 
I knew I forgot some details.

The Boot Rom is 2.09.
It sits here for 20+ minutes, after which, I turned it off.


I actually found that link right after and am in the process of downloading it.

I have used CHDMAN 1.40 to backup and restore my SSB drive. have not used 1.46 yet.

I believe it found the three partitions, but I don't have a picture of it.

Will there be an issue with the CHD since my screen shows 6.00.00 and the CHD is 6.00.01?

Also, how would I go about trying to rebuild the MBR?

Thanks for the help so far.
 
Last edited:
for rebuidling mbrs i use a program called mini partition wizzard 9.1
use the mini not the full size 1
it will give u the option to rebuild mbr
this can be done in windblows i just forget how right now

also i recomend using chdman 1.46
much easier

6.00 and 6.0.1 should be the same
but d/l both just incase u get the red screen of death (serial # dose not match build #)

now follow 1.46 completly
it is very important
DO NOT LET WINDOWS INZALLIZE THE HARDDRIVE/CF CARD

ed
 
ya that is in post boot stuck
u may have a bad exlinx chip my bud..
there is a few other things but i will need to chk my crib notes
also please note u53 will also cause this
as will the dallas chip (u can remove it for testing only)>the dallas chip <


ed
 
I "had" 3 boards here that did exactly that. I never could get them working, I stripped all I could and tossed them.

The Xlinx chip is a fault that is hard to be 100% sure of because we don't have access to any Schematics board code ect... So best guess is really all we can do.
Now a "really" big in depth board repair place will have the SMD rework station for the large chips. but the "hobbyist" more than likely will not.
I know ToplessZ has a lot of experience with these boards and even he can not fix that chip issue.

It gets to be to time consuming and hard to identify the actual fault. Besides there are literally thousands of these boards out in the wild, buy a cheap one and swap your parts to it to make it what you need it to be.
I bought a box lot of Red and green (Untested) boards for like 150.00 There was at least 15 boards in it.
 
ya the main boot is a real problem
i have chased it to the exlinx chip.
what u need to do this is far out of the reach for a hobyist
just to get them to jtag is a pita,let alone reload the code set
and thats only if the chip is not damaged ?
i can rework all the ic's on the board
but truly is it worth it ?
as darrena pointed out a box for 150.00 for 15 boards
thats a 10.00 a board gamble i would take hands down
here is a little bit to get u to a point where u can make a very good informed dission
this applys to red/green boards
and it is a test i did just for this reason
For "testing" this is a list of part's not required to make the game board boot
1=u50 >battery back up ram
2=u22 >card reader inter-face chip
3=u719 >modem :mark pin 1 with a black sharpie:
4=u117 >rs232 interface :this chip interfaces the trackball
if u follow this your board should boot propley
remember it only for testing
there is no way shape or form the board will fuction propley as a game with these items removed,but if it was going to boot ?
it will then.,if not u have deeper problems

ed
 
Thanks for all the replies. I will try these tests this weekend and see. On a good note, my GT Fore 2004 machine that's at my Buddy's is a red board and works, so hopefully I can swap chips and have it function as a complete, which was the main purpose of purchasing this board.

So since this is probably going to be a writeoff, any tests I can do that won't fry the chips would be helpful. Or I can wait until I get it here and then do the testing with the GT 2004 chips on it.
 
Can I use a Big Buck Hunter Board if I swap the chips?

If the BBH board is a Red one yes. The green boards had 2 variations BBH and BBH2 had 8 and 16 meg versions on the green board. Also on a Green board the IC that controls the input is different BBH series use the Optic coded chip (For Guns) and GT uses the Trackball coded Chip.

IIRC red boards have both options so it will just work.

There are a couple chips you HAVE to swap that make easy(Simple swap) change not so easy.

As you know you have to Change the U53 Security also at times the Boot EEPROM, But also a small 8 leg SMD chip U61
This chip has the Serial Number of the board and the (at least 2) bytes for what game it is.
This chip has to be swapped for a donor board to be "upgraded"
 
Yeah, I am dealing with all red boards at this time. There might be one green board coming as a package. Can the chips be swapped from Red to Green or the other way?
 
this is truly the only rule u need to follow

1=red screen of death,by this i mean game will post load and at the final
load will come back and tell u the s/w dose not match the board serial #
this is u61,it must be reprogramed with the new serial#.

ie u61
swap it out also as darrena explained to u (if needed)^^^^^^^


ed
 
So I tried to make a new hard drive from an old Window's drive I had. It completed, but when I tested it, it did not recognize the drive.

Should I format the drive first? I have access to Windows, Linux and Mac, so if one is better than the other, that would be great. The drive is 40gb.
 
So I tried to make a new hard drive from an old Window's drive I had. It completed, but when I tested it, it did not recognize the drive.

Should I format the drive first? I have access to Windows, Linux and Mac, so if one is better than the other, that would be great. The drive is 40gb.


If you do not have the 2.09 Eagle boot EEPROM that drive will not work.
Anything below that is limited to around 10Gb MAX Also if you want to try a CF card you NEED the 2.09.
Unfortunately the factory chip is OTP (one time programmable) so you will need to find a replacement EEPROM, also need a programmer if you don;t have one. ect... The files are in MAME in a file called iteagle.zip.

There are a few people that sell these chips. Look on Ebay or Contact Steph at hobbyroms ect...

Or if you can track one down find a 8 or 10 Gb IDE hard drive at a local PC repair shop ect...
 
I do have the 2.09 Chip in my board. The original hard drive allows me to get to the shown screen, the new one doesn't seem to recognize it.
 
GT is very particular about the Hard drive JUMPERS also. If you do not know, there is a jumper on the hard drive itself next to the IDE port it has3 positions, MA SL CS IIRC GT wants the drive to be set to MA (Or DS) on some drives.
 
So I picked up a BigBuck Hunter Red Board that had the same RED1 8-pin chip, and the 2.09 Boot Chip on it. I tested the board to power up, since I don't have a BBH Hard drive or CHD file, and it powered up. Since everything else looked good, I swapped over my G4C chip and powered it up. This time it loaded, and went further than the other board, giving me the Red Screen, as shown in the picture.


Based on previous responses, this means that swapping U61 on the boards should resolve this and give me a good working board, correct?

Would it be prudent to install the U26 RED1 chip and 2.09 Boot chop from the BBH board into the original GT board, just in case either of those were my issue?
 

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