Red Donkey Kong...what does serial number mean?

vader1979

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Just got a red Donkey Kong on saturday...just curious if anyone has a good idea of what the serial number means on the back of machine....model number tkg3-up-us and serial number 01237....it is a four board PCB...i know that is rare...but heard conflicting stories as to what serial number means...any help or ideas??
 
Means you have a real red donkey kong. If I remember correctly the first 2000 DK's were red cause they were Radarscope conversions.

Andrew
 
Does anyone know if its true that first serial numbers for red dks...1000-1800...were converted radarscopes...while the remainder 1200 were empty cabs intended for radarscope but were never made but instead fitted with dks?
 
Do a search for "Radar Scope Tag Data" and you'll get all the info you need.

Not all red Donkey Kongs started life as Radar Scopes. Based on what we've seen so far, the serial number with TKG-2 means it was a radar scope conversion, TKG-3games started life at the factory as red Donkey Kongs. The way to tell for sure is to look at your PCB stack. If there are TKG-2 stickers on the PCB you have a Radar Scope conversion (if you were to take off the sticker you'd see the "TRS" printed on the PCB indicating the PCB was a Radar Scope originally). My bet is that you have TKG-3 on your boardstack (my guess would be TKG3-06)

The best thing you can do is take a lot of pictures of the cab (including the inside) and post them in tag data thread so your data can be added to the database. There was a lot of variation on how they did the early Donkey Kongs.
 
Also, just out of curiosity, do you have the earlier ROM revision with the ladder cheat? It'll say "Nintendo 1981" instead of "Nintendo of America 1981" on the title screen if you do.
 
this answers a memory i've had where our Happy Joe's pizza parlour had one of the first donkey kong's in town. i clearly remembered it as being red and it had the ladder cheat.

I was told there was no way i was remembering that correctly and it had to be blue.
apparently my memory may be accurate.
 
I remember playing one BITD at a truckstop that was red and had the ladder cheat. I was told at the time it worked on the red cab. Of course, at the time, I didn't know Nintendo offered upgrades to remove that cheat, so it wouldn't necessarily have worked on all red cabs ;)
 
The ladder cheat came on all TKG-2 and TKG-3 (4-board) Red and Blue Donkey Kongs originally. When Nintendo came out with the TKG-4 (2-board) stack games it came with the new "speed up" programming which eliminated the ladder cheat. Nintendo also offered it as an option to buy the EPROM's for your older TKG-2 and TKG-3 games to speed up play.

Murph
 

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unfortunately it does not have the ladder cheat...that was first thing i checked when i played game for first time...oh well...
 
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