mgerety

TP won't emulate this. This is a windows app that requires like 8 dependent apps running and is a nightmare to configure. It's not something TP would emulate.

The machines use Happ trackballs.

You need a Nytric card for this to work. it's a specific interface card used by the game. If you can find one, these will work, and with some work can be installed on everything up to and including Windows 8.1 32 bit. If you dont' have a nytric card, you can't get this game to work (unless there is a released loader/patcher I don't know about). Your machine will need SQL Server with a specific System Admin password set, and some highly customized installation discs to even get this installed on an existing machine. Unless SQL is patched out (and if it is, you can never make any progress in the game), there's no way around it. You can create a new machine from scratch with these discs (the bootable discs re-image your machine), but, again, without the Nytric card and a specific nVidia gfx chipset, you won't get in game. And if you can find a workaround... it still won't work right. If you ARE interested -- you can pick up these machines for pretty cheap sometimes, and there's an active community server that you can onboard your machine to and play in an active community with over 100 registered and active machines and users.

People are playing online currently, not with an emulator, but on a hosted server that I reverse engineered and built from scratch. Another person had developed a more rudimentary server previously that they took offlline, so I reverse engineered all of the protocols, encryption, etc and built a working community server from the ground up. Everyone (except me) who is joined to the server is using original hardware and recovery discs, running on XPEmbedded. As of right now to play this game you need a Nytric , a working card reader, and a Global VR card to participate in tournaments. The server works almost exactly the way the server from GlobalVR did. The issue is, I don't need people getting cabinets, using an unproven guide to upgrade, then potentially corrupting their data and/or causing issues with the server when connecting, causing a crazy support headache for me. I don't have the bandwidth to support that. Also, it's very likely that when/if we get a good loader that would allow bypassing of the nytric and allow for "soft" smartcards, I'll require some kind of certification of each install before I allow them to join the server, likely via some kind of a service that gets installed on the machine that can report back if anything is modified out of band and bans that "cabinet". The community is great and is regularly playing and opening the floodgates to a bunch of shoddily created machines with a bunch of other crap on them, created using a guide that is not ready for primetime would be a major problem.

rawbe - I don't think it's that far off. It's complicated. I've reverse engineered and am running a community server that cabinet owners are connecting to for tournament mode. This game is pretty tightly tied to a SQL Server database, and hacking it out would disable the most important chunk of the game: world tour mode. All progress is saved in the database as well, so it's really not as easy as "hack it all out and make it run".. It also requires a smartcard to play world tour mode and online, but I've seen that be hacked out in other loaders, I'm sure that could be done as well. There are also some 5 dependent processes that run on the machine. All in all installing it is kind of a pain in the butt, and getting it to run is not an easy exercise. However, maybe in time (we'll see). It's a fun game and holds up even today.. graphics are pretty good, and with a widescreen hack look even better.

Yeah so.. I'm not sure who leaked this guide but... It's not going to help anyone. It requires you have the files that are referenced in that PDF -- and the link isnt' there, and i just disabled sharing of that link from my dropbox. Those instructions aren't ready yet, and if you try to onboard a cabinet onto the community server using those instructions it will not work -- world tour mode will be broken.. That guide is incomplete and is missing instructions.. --

Mohkerz, I'd love to see the number of people playing this online grow, but there are a couple of barriers to doing this currently. The primary one being the Nytric USB I/O interface. There's a working dongle emulator at the moment (Which I'd love to be rid of)... but the controls are all through the nytric, and I would know where to begin to bypass that and allow the mapping of keyboard controls and the mouse to the trackball interface. Is that something that's up your alley? The community has figured out how to change golfers and add in hidden golfers like Tiger Woods, etc, and I've figured out how to hack player images for those players into the game screen. A member of the group has reverse-engineered the server and we have online tournaments regularly. We're currently working on figuring out how to add courses into the game and maybe even make them tourney playable. If we could find someone to attack the dongle/Nytric issues, we'd be on our way to a pretty robust online tournament experience.