My Donkey Kong Jr. boards finally showed up on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. As I’ve discussed before, you can easily play a Donkey Kong Jr. board in a Donkey Kong cabinet. It’s simply a matter of moving the connectors from one board to the other. What I didn’t realize was how easy it was going to be to mount the Donkey Kong Jr. boards in the cabinet along with the Donkey Kong boards.
If you look at the following picture, you’ll see the the position of the Donkey Kong board in the cabinet:
My Donkey Kong board is the 2-board version. The original Donkey Kong board was available in both 2-board and 4-board configurations, so there is already a spot in the cabinet to add an additional 2 boards. You can see the wood railings with the slot in the middle, to the right of the Donkey Kong board, which the Donkey Kong Jr. boards will slide right in to. I’ll need to rig something up to tie the new Jr. boards to the Donkey Kong boards to keep them from flopping around.
Once I got the Jr. boards into the cabinet (I’ll have pictures later), it was simply a matter of swapping the connectors from the Donkey Kong board to the Donkey Kong Jr. board. When I fired the game on, I was met with a screen that was scrolling wildly from left to right. Adjusting the hold on the monitor didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference as I could get the scrolling to slow but never completely stop. After about a 1/2 hour of adjusting different monitor settings I finally discovered that one of the pots on the Donkey Kong Jr. board that adjusted the image centering was bad. I was able to temporarily repair it and finally got a centered, non-scrolling image on the screen.
I apologize for the bad pictures, I had to use my wife’s fancy camera which is way too advanced for me.
I’ve ordered new pots for the Donkey Kong Jr. board to permanently correct the scrolling issue. I also ordered them for my Donkey Kong board, just to head of any problems in the future. I figured while I’m at it I might as well cap the monitor, so a cap kit is on the way as well.
Some might wonder why I didn’t just opt for the modified Donkey Kong Jr. board that plays both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. This would eliminate the need to swap the connectors between the two boards. The first issue is cost…$160 plus shipping seems pretty costly to simply make modifications to a board I already own. If I didn’t already own a Donkey Kong board as well, I probably wouldn’t balk at the price. Secondly, there are some discrepancies with the Donkey Kong sounds which are noticeable enough to me to be an annoyance. I’ve seen others who have set up rotary switchers to switch between the games, but to be honest, I have no idea how they’ve accomplished it. Another collector is apparently working on a plug and play automatic switcher which I will definitely buy if it becomes available. Regardless, it’s nice to have another game in the collection. I realized after about 1/2 hour of play last night that I’m not very good at Donkey Kong Jr. I’m going to need lots of practice.
P.S. Bonus points to those who can name the band and album of the post title.
RATT. Reach for the Sky.
Correct! Almost a week for someone to come up with the answer. Apparently the 80’s hair band fans aren’t visiting this site too frequently. That’s probably a good thing.