Donkey Kong JR "repair"

hindered

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Hi all,

Just wanted to share some information with everyone. I had a DK JR board which has been working fine since getting it repaired by Dick Millikan. The other day, I turned it on and left it on while I played other games. When I was done, I looked at the DK JR cab and the screen was black. When I powercycled it, it would make the initial "jump" power on sound, and then a heart-beat clicking noise, but the game would not power on.

So, I took my Braze HSS kit out of the DK and put it into the DK JR to troubleshoot. Lo and behold, it worked fine. So, I swapped the original z80 back in -- board would not come up.

Long story short, Braze let me know that the HSS basically replaces the EPROMS and related circuitry on the CPU board -- I was unaware of this, and thought it was just a modification to how the game runs. Since I knew to check the eproms, I went down and made sure they were all seated properly -- 5E was a little loose and I heard it pop back into place -- the game then booted up fine without the HSS kit installed.

Current theory is the board heated up and let the chip pop out a bit. Still it's interesting to know that the HSS kit does so much -- in theory a CPU board could be very hosed but work fine once a HSS kit is installed.

Just wanted to share the info.
 
Yep, more evidence of that fact is, if you have the orginal DK program (ladder cheat) and you install the DKII or HSS, you'll end up with the new DK program. Twin Galaxies won't acknowledge the scores unless you have an unmodified DK 2 board set (and you do a zillion other things).
 
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