GOLDEN TEE COMPLETE REPAIR happy story

[blackgoldgrey]

This is a story shared to help others. I've had lots of help in this website!

My Golden Tee Complete from 2006, green board failed to boot intermittently. First and only I've owned. A bit cranky but worked before this.

The pattern was that the lights came on, the HDD read was attempted and then it would start over again. After about five tries it would give up, then nothing.
In my setup, that failure then failed to startup the monitor (tri-sync from factory I think its D9200 or D9400). So I had no on-screen awareness of why it was failing.

I first thought it was the power supply which was factory.
Mistake one: I took the power supply out to test it. When it has no load the factory power supply shows a voltage of 9-10 volts on the 12 VDC rail. I thought this obviously wrong since I expected 12 VDC. So I ordered a new one from:

https://www.gatorcade.com/product/200w-power-pro-power-supply/

Perfect match. Great service.  But the new PS had 10 VDC on the 12 VDC rail (?).

REALIZATION. So I then decided to test it under load. My expectation was that "under load" the voltage would always decrease!. But no. In this board/PS the voltage increased to 11.45 under load.

I adjusted the 5V knob on the PS up which increased both the 5V and the 12 V rails (under load).
By "under load" I mean I read the voltage while connected to the board and once the system was attempting to start.

REALIZATION. But the machine would not start and the monitor was not activated. I realized that may there was something on the screen but my monitor would not show me.

Good IDEA: So I then hooked up an LCD monitor with a VGA input and this time I was able to read the screen.  The disk check passed, but the boot sequence reported low voltage (this is with the new Power Supply).  So while it was connected and on the low voltage screen I raised voltage on the knob on the PS to around 5.2VDC and then boot proceeded normally.

All good?  No, I was still getting intermittent boot failures. So I then decide to replace the HDD (23 year old specimen -wow!)

Found these guys https://www.arcadeservices.com/contact-us.html
Great site, lots of great options. Ordered the Compact Flash with IDE attachment for only $30 plus S&H. GOLDEN TEE FORE COMPLETE, I already had the 2.09 ROM chip.

Received in 3 days. Works great with noticeably faster loading than the HDD.

So now system is working normal.
My monitor still has a hard time starting up and requires long up and reboot but that is for another story.

Newbie but happy to keeping 20-40 year old systems alive!