I just spent hours troubleshooting a problem with Punch-Out that didn't exist

MaximRecoil

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Did you know that Pizza Pasta and Mr. Sandman have green hair even though their hair is black in their still portraits on the upper monitor? I didn't. Even though I've played Punch-Out since it was a new game in 1984, for some reason I've never noticed it before today when I plugged my PO boardset into my SPO cabinet for the first time in a couple years, or at least I don't remember ever noticing it before.

Their hair looked black in MAME and in YouTube videos of both MAME and real hardware, so I figured something was wrong with my boardset. First I swapped the color PROMs; no change. Then the whole BAK board, then the Video board, then the CPU board; no change with any of the swaps. So I de-converted the SPO boardset I'd been swapping stuff with to a PO so that I had two PO boardsets, and their hair was green in both of them.

I decided to take a closer look at MAME, because the chances of two PO boardsets having the exact same fault are pretty slim. Their hair still looked black, but I saved screenshots of those two opponents and opened them in Photoshop. According to the eyedropper tool, their hair is indeed black in their upper monitor portraits, but it's very dark green in their lower monitor sprites (RGB value = 0, 34, 0), dark enough to look black on my PC monitor (which I keep the brightness fairly low on).

And I also noticed for the first time ever, that in SPO, Dragon Chan's lower monitor sprite's hair isn't black either, it's dark blue (0, 0, 34). I noticed that on my machine the other day, before I noticed Pizza Pasta's and Mr. Sandman's green hair in PO. There's a good chance that I've played more SPO than anyone in the world, starting in 1987, so it's bizarre that I'm first noticing this now.
 
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Pic or it didn't happen. :) I've done things like this before, but not with a game I've played thousands of times over many decades. It's crazy the things your mind can overlook sometimes.
 
I had a vending machine once where the bulb on one of the selections went out. I knew the bulb was good so I started looking at connections and following wires back to figure it out. Then I realized that I didn't have the bulb screwed in all the way lol
 
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