Donkey Kong: Missing Mario, Barrels, Pauline

paulliadis

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Yesterday, installed the Donkey Kong board I got for Christmas in my DK Junior cab.

I had the game on for several hours with no problems. Toward the end of the day I started up a game and had sound but no Mario, barrels, or Pauline. I could hear that Mario was moving around when I moved the joystick and I could hear invisible Mario die when hit with an invisible barrel.

I of course crapped my pants when this happened. Once I regained my composure I unplugged the game, plugged it back in, and everything was okay again.

Did this ever happen to anybody else?

This obviously isn't good and I imagine I'll eventually have to replace some ROMS on the board. Mike at Mike's arcade has some info about this, so that's good.

Another question. The High Score save kit has diagnostics with it. Would these diagnostics help me determine exactly which rom I need to replace when the time comes?
 
mario_is_missing.cover.front.jpg
 
Yeah, saw that in another thread about this topic. Still could use some help/advice.

Sorry didn't mean to insult it was the first thing I thought of while reading your post. :)

Anyways this may be a start from mikes repair logs :


Problem: Missing all motion sprites

All sprites were missing, the I finally traced from that data lines back to see where a chip had died. When I got to the LS237 at 6J, it was dead. Probing the clock line, I found there was no clock on pin 1. The clock comes from pin 10 of the LS139 at 5F. Pins 13 and 14 had input on that chip, but there was no output on pin 10. Replacing the chip fixed the board.

Solution: Bad LS139 at 5F on the video board.
 
No worries. I saw that on the repair logs at Mike's too.

I wonder if the diagnostics from the high score save kit would help. Actually I'm hoping the problem was just a fluke, but I'm not confident.
 
I am having the same issue with mine that started today. The game played fine until I moved it to another spot in my room. Now Mario,barrels,the girl,and kong are missing from the screen. The girders and everything else are still on the screen and everything else plays fine. Where can we get the chip to fix this?
 
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