Silver Strike Help!

[Onslaught23]

Hello,

I have a pedestal build with all the common stuff MAME, console emulators etc. If anybody knows, what is needed to run Silver Strike and Golden TEE 2k etc, Do I need to get ahold of a Nighthawk PC? Or can I just use the PC thats in the pedestal. Sorry for my newness. Someone show me the way!

[lilshawn]

all the games you mentioned now run on a custom Linux distribution catered to the specific motherboards and videocards used in those games. quite often you cant even swap out a videocard without placing a specific car in there as all the others (even similar models) have been blacklisted in the OS. the games also search for a cabinet ID number USB device, used to secure they system. this is done to prevent piracy and force operators to buy devices from them only.

so unless you buy all the games, the  computers (golden tee, silver strike, bags), IO boards to interface the controls, security chips, and 3 cabinet ID USB devices... and a switching device to swap between them, you cannot do what you propose.

[game_nerd]

There are specific models of motherboards and video cards that all these games run on. The motherboards and cpu's aren't hard to come by, video cards slightly harder.
There are a few options for running more than 1 game in a cabinet, but they are costly.. there's the perfect solution which is a 2 in 1, basically 2 computers running and you swap between them, and there's a guy called scantron5k that has some videos on a switch that will let you run 4 games semi-concurrently, use the magic switcher to swap between games. It's pretty slick. He's got some videos on youtube dealing with it. You do have to power them down and back up for each game, it's not on the fly switching like the perfect solution.

your bigger problem would be getting IO boards and CID's. for the less popular games like ssb, and bags those are fairly cheap and easy to find on fb marketplace..
for power putt and golden tee you're looking at a significant amount of money just for those two items.. golden tee has the added bonus of specific security chips for certain year versions of the game.
power putt seems to be much harder to find than bags and ssb.

[csnow]

I have GT 2021, Silver Strike, Putt Putt, and Bags all runing on a single unit.  I was able to get custom images that all work with the GT security chips.  I transfered each game to SSD drives and use an external hard drive selector that I use to select which game I want to boot to.  I got the chip from a guy on a forum, so I suppose he is or knows a developer there.  It wasn't cheap, but it was well worth the money spent.  Like you mentioned, there was only one or two video cards models that worked across all games.  That was the hardest part of the process to be honest.

I have all the games in a Silver Strike pedalstal to a 32" screen on the wall.  It is by far the most popular game system with friends and family.  Its a shame they moved to the new system because I used to get annual updates with security chip for Golden Tee.

[lilshawn]

yes, the computers are mostly the same between the games. unfortunately the boards are tied to particular versions, so if you want to use a newer board you have to have a particular version (or newer). same with the video cards.

Fortunately everything is backwards compatible, so you can use a bags/bowling computer for golf.

...just not so much forward compatible.

there may be version updates from IT to have newer board compatibility, but not sure. i havent asked.