Donkey Kong Afraid of Cameras

kentmurphy

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I restored a Donkey Kong and tonight I was taking pictures of the inside of the cabinet. When I took a direct as possible picture of the game boards, the game all of sudden made the Mario death sound and random graphics started flashing across the screen. Yes, the game was on and in attract mode. I power cycled the game and the problem went away. Is it bad to take pictures of gameboards with the power on? Could the camera flash have caused this?

Kent
 
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Yes - I was working on Joe Magiera's Cube Quest and the rom board had all of the eprom windows uncovered and there are (going from memory) something like 20 of them. A friend came by to take pictures and the camera flash upset the game and caused it to reset when he took a picture of the rom board with his flash. Even if an Eprom window was covered IMHO it would depend upon how opaque the label really was.

I've taken plenty of flash pictures of boards in operation where this did not occur so I think the conditions have to be "perfect".

This would be an easy experiment if anyone has the time to verify.

Best,

Bill
 
Not likely. It was probably EMP from the strobe firing. I have had the same thing occur when I've tried getting closeup shots of boards working (when I finish repairing a Williams boardset I like to send a picture with the '0' showing on the ROM card). I found that if I am within about 2-3 feet of a working board it will sometimes act like an electrical spike hit it (which is what probably happened). If you back off and then zoom in, you won't get this and you won't get as much glare off the boards.

ken
 
I actually did the same thing and the game rebooted. I took another pic, and got the graphic issues, but they went away after a power cycle.

The Nintendo eproms are usually not covered by stickers, I think the flash went into the window, or the EMP is what I figured happened.
 
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