Why I Stick To 1970s Plug-and-Play Consoles: The Radica Golden Tee

In the 1970s, video game consoles often just had built-in games, with no cartridge slot. We’ve covered a lot of those here, from the Magnavox Odyssey 500 to the colorful Atari Pongs. But in the 2000s, the concept came back, as the “plug-and-play” games. So I decided to dig into one of those. What could go wrong? Well, what could go right?

Why Radica?

So, why did I decide to look at the Radica Golden Tee Home Edition? A few reasons. First off, Golden Tee, the last of the casual arcade games, has a home version today, Golden Tee GO!. It’ll set you back, oh, just around $3300 at the time of this post’s writing. Don’t want that? Arcade1up will sell you a machine for a few hundred dollars with the Golden Tee 3D-era titles from the turn of the millennium. Or you could pay less than $20 for this thing. (That’s a used price, so not a fair comparison– but since when have I cared about being fair?)

Golden Tee, if you’re not familiar, is a trackball golf game. That’s another reason I was interested in this title; at least it tries to offer a unique controller experience. Better than, say, a plastic figure where a cartoon’s nose acts as a joystick.

Finally, the last version is that this is a 2000’s Radica game. At the time, Radica also put out a Sega Genesis-on-a-chip device with built-in games, which could be modded with a cartridge slot. But it also had some audio issues. I wondered if this Golden Tee was running on Genesis hardware as well; the Sega Genesis never got a trackball (though the Master System did). So it’d be interesting to see– was someone still making licensed (Radica held a Sega license) Genesis games in 2005? Or did they just hack up an existing game?

Plug and Play

There is one big difference between 1970’s plug and play consoles and 2000’s plug and play consoles, and let me tell you, it is glorious. Did you catch it in the shot above?

Separate composite video and audio out cables. No need to composite mod this; by the 2000’s, only the lowest of the low end TVs didn’t have AV input (RF only TVs seem to have only truly died with the CRT, at least in my experience in the United States), and many people would find it much more inconvenient to use an RF switch. And if you did need it? Eh the manual says figure it out yourself.

So let’s hook this up to the Framemeister and see what happens! “Plug” and then “play”, as they say, constantly.

That’s a classic example of not being able to synchronize with a video. But I’m a little surprised to see it here; usually when the Framemeister can’t sync you just don’t get a picture, rather than this analog-style rolling picture. What about the OSSC Pro? (The Koryuu is being used to separate composite to component)

See what’s happening here? The color is off, but color isn’t a big deal– I can correct images easily enough. The problem is, it’s constantly shifting between 262 scanlines and 263 scanlines. And to understand why it can even do that, we need to consider video interlacing.

The standard 60Hz NTSC TV standard (more properly “System M”) used here in the United States separates the interlaced 480i “frame” into two “fields”, each having 262.5 scanlines. (This includes the overscan areas and the blanking interval) How do you have half a scanline? Well, you don’t. The fact that the second “field” is delayed by half a scanline is how the TV is timed to drop the field half a scanline, drawing the interlaced field.

So when you want to make a progressive scan image, you just draw the same field without the half-a-scanline delay. But how many lines is it? It could be 262, or 263– but I’ve never seen both before. And I’m fairly certain this is intended to be interpreted as 240p. I guess this way you get even closer to the exact field timing of 480i?

And yeah CRTs let you get away with anything. But this was 2005. LCD and plasma televisions were definitely in at least some people’s houses by then. Hell, HD CRTs had to upscale the image too. But they weren’t using the Framemeister. If only we had some kind of technology to see what a very basic TV upscaler might use…

These MINI upscaler boxes are reported to use chips similar to those used in televisions; in this case, it uses a Macro Silicon MS1858, a composite to HDMI chip with its own built-in microcontroller. I have no idea when this chip came out– the Chinese-language datasheet doesn’t help– but the one in my MINI box says 2011 so let’s assume no later than that.

So can this silly little box sync up with Radica’s strange hybrid of interlacing and progressive scan?

Yep! Now, it doesn’t look good; compare to the Framemeister above, the scene is dark and details are distorted. But it does work; and honestly, this sort of experience was pretty common for composite gaming on flatscreens. It was terrible. That’s one of the things that touched off interest in upscalers like the Framemeister and RGB video in the States at all.

Which is to say, this is a totally authentic experience for 2005. In fact, take a look at that font above. Isn’t it a bit narrow? I usually wouldn’t say anything, but the nature of this box is that my video capture is all stretched to 16:9, and there…

The “Bogey” font looks better. Was this game designed to be played stretched? Well, probably not.

Gold ‘n’ Tee

So, how’s the game? Well, it’s fine; maybe even good. But a first impression was pretty bad, because the game pulls a classic bait and switch. Here’s how each hole starts, with a first-person view of the ball resting on the (golden?) tee. And the golf ball is round in 4:3, so that “Bogey” text is probably just bogus.

But this game doesn’t actually do a first-person golf view other than that first shot. That was the standard for golf games by 2005, and indeed was pretty common on the Genesis too. In fact, in 1984, two decades before Radica’s Golden Tee, Ayako Okamoto’s Match Play Golf on SG-1000 was doing first person views down the course.

But you know what? Once I got past that hurdle, I remembered that one of my favorite golf games is 1990’s Top Player’s Golf for the Neo Geo, and that game doesn’t have a first person view either. And playing golf with a trackball is fun.

The gameplay is swift and arcade-like. The golf cup feels particularly large, which makes it fairly straightforward to get it in even when using the sand wedge from the edge of the green; this is something you want, since the trackball isn’t the most precise here. (The one on this device felt a bit rough to boot, but hey)

I could definitely see a group of people having fun here passing the trackball around. Which is what a game like this was for; there’s not even really an ending beyond showing your score. Here’s a video of my playthrough; because it’s large I uploaded it to the Tube of You. While we have these monopolies lying around we might as well take advantage of their bandwidth. And yeah, the image quality is bad. And as you’ll see, I’m not uploading this to brag… quite the contrary.

So’s the audio

I decided to record some audio of the console’s opening theme for you. So the Radica consoles were notorious for their terrible audio, which could be cleaned up with a mod. (Bad audio amplification circuits are pretty common with the Genesis even during its lifetime, for some reason) So here’s the main menu theme of the Golden Tee Home Edition.

It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t sound terrible in the way like a Sega Genesis with a terrible amplification does. If anything, it sounds compressed– and what was compressed doesn’t sound like FM + PSG, but like a sampled track. So we see a clue right here that this may not be a Genesis after all.

Rip the damn thing open

Or, I don’t know what I expected.

This thing is a pain to get apart, mostly because of the screws at the bottom of deeply inset holes in the plastic, which my iFixit screwdriver set didn’t fit in. But I got it apart eventually.

The bulk of the system is taken up by the trackball mechanism, like you might expect. Trackballs basically work the same way as ball mice, just intended to be used differently; that meant optical encoders, which were cheap commodity technology. The board at the top features our main circuitry. This is it! This is our main computer!

Some Radica stuff had a separate memory chip; you can see the footprint of one here, but that’s all we’re getting that’s comprehensible. Otherwise, these are just epoxy blobs– “chip on board” packaging. Bane of cheap products everywhere.

So I was stumped here at first. I imagined wiring tiny wires to the footprint of a flash memory chip and trying to dump the blob, but with my soldering skills I’d likely just destroy the blob in the process.

And then I realized: someone else probably already did this.

MAME to the rescue

In that case, the someone else is David Haywood (MameHaze), who reverse-engineered the Golden Tee Golf Home Edition and other Radica plug-and-play games of the era back in the impossibly distant year of 2018. The work of the MAME project and its volunteers continues to be completely indispensible to this blog– here’s the driver.

So what is underneath that epoxy blob? It’s not a Genesis. But it’s something even better– this blog’s favorite CPU, the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502. I’m not sure how well understood the specifics of the 6502 is; if it was easier to replace the ROM on mine, I’d like to see if it’s a 65C02, or a 6502 clone without a decimal mode, which would imply some Famicom DNA in this. My guess is it’s a 65C02, though. Which makes this an 8-bit console.

The graphics hardware is not a Famicom, of course– a screenshot would tell you that– it seems to be similar to but not the same as the hardware that powered the strange XaviX console. Or should I say, that powered the games of the XaviX, since the XaviX hearkened back to the Epoch Cassette Vision by keeping all of the game hardware in its cartridges. According to the die, it’s called “ELAN EU3A14”. My guess is that it’s this ELAN Microelectronics, a Taiwanese firm. If so, the EU3A14 seems to be too old to be featured on their website.

And the audio? It seems to be based around ADPCM samples, similar perhaps to the PC Engine CD, but with more channels. Six, to be precise. Aggressive ADPCM compression could account for the “muffled” sound of the main menu music; most of the game has no music whatsoever, though.

Also of note is this debug menu, accessible by holding “LEFT” and “BACKSPIN” when turning on the console. It ends by turning off the console, including the power LED; this console uses a switch to turn itself on and off, and doesn’t have any way to turn itself off given by the software. Just an interesting artifact I suppose.

The Tee For Me

Between this little box and the multi-thousand-dollar Golden Tee GO!, in 2011 Jakks Pacific put out the TV Games Golden Tee Golf, which has a very similar form factor, but appears to be a more advanced Sunplus chip that is capable of the behind-the-golfer position I apparently am so desperate for. But I’ll leave that for some other time. I managed to get the trackball out of this and am now rolling it across the floor. That’ll keep me and the cats busy for awhile.