Jolt Country

Prior to Thanksgiving, my all time Donkey Kong high score was 36,000. This is not a very good score in the big scheme of things. I would say if you have played Donkey Kong more than 10 times in your life and if you had a good or lucky game, you could probably achieve this score.

For Thanksgiving, I moved my 48-in-1 arcade cabinet into the back dining room. Because of the Kong Off 3, I began playing Donkey Kong. About a week after Thanksgiving, I scored 39,000, my all time high score.

The next day my 11 year old son scored 41,000.

This caused me to step up my game a bit. I watched a few strategy videos on Youtube and buckled down. My new high score of all time is 80,300. I have not come close to that score again. On good games now I score in the 60,000 range.

In this thread we will talk about Donkey Kong. We will share strategies and scores and we will boost activity on Jolt Country.

The machine lasted roughly three weeks before dying under my watch. The monitor died long ago; I didn't even attempt to fix it and simply replaced it with a computer monitor. Yesterday, the power supply died, taking with it the PCB. I've since tested both. The power supply is definitely dead and the PCB is definitely dead. At this point, every part of this cabinet that cost more than four dollars has died. It is as if Jesus Christ himself came down and destroyed this cabinet as a reminder that I am not to dabble in such things.

The cabinet is now as dead as every thread I've started here in the past month.

Merry Christmas.

That is extremely frustrating. In my defense, I did not see your thread earlier, because I am bad at things.

My all-time high score was 78,000. I felt that I wouldn't really have to get in motion until you beat my score, which you did. It felt like I played my very best game to even get that far. That's the crazy thing about arcade games. If I get 30,000 on Asteroids, I feel I got my money's worth and it's difficult. Ben dropped 300,000 on it.

You are better at Donkey Kong than me, but with your machine destroyed it does look like I have more time. Do you need an ATX power supply?

I feel like if I worked at it, I could beat both of you.

RETRO: BUY ME A DK MACHINE IMMEDIATELY (also, how's them 200 pounds comin' bra??)

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:My all-time high score was 78,000. I felt that I wouldn't really have to get in motion until you beat my score, which you did. It felt like I played my very best game to even get that far. That's the crazy thing about arcade games. If I get 30,000 on Asteroids, I feel I got my money's worth and it's difficult. Ben dropped 300,000 on it.

I was scoring 20,000 every game and then one time hit 30,000, so I knew it was possible. When I started hitting 30,000 every time, I scored 50,000 once. Now I score 50-60k every time, but I hit 80,000 once, so now I'm shooting for that on every game. I was really hoping to score six figures before the end of the year.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:You are better at Donkey Kong than me, but with your machine destroyed it does look like I have more time. Do you need an ATX power supply?

I'm good right now. I had two spares out in the garage. I tested the one in the machine and I was getting around 2.5v on the 5v. I took one of the spare power supplies I had, swapped it in, and also got 2.5v on the 5v. I tried the third power supply and it's giving 5.1v. I think the other spare came out of a bad game I had at one time and so I was "saving it for parts". I am now "saving it for parts" in my trash dumpster, along with the other one.

Even with the good power supply in, the PCB fails the self-test. I took the PCB over to a friend's house and swapped it into his JAMMA board. The LEDs are supposed to blink during the self-test process but mine just stay constant which is bad. We couldn't get it to do anything over there either so it looks to be dead. I'm guessing the power supply went and took the PCB with it. I've got a replacement board coming so I may give this goddamn hobby one more chance.

What on earth happened to it? Did you hook the poor thing up to a dunk tank? :(

My power is shit here. We have power flickers 3-5 times a week. I can only assume one of them took out the power supply, which in turn took out the PCB. :/

One new power supply and one new PCB later and we're back in business! I could not find another 48-in-1 so I picked up the 60-in-1.

We are again playing Donkey Kong!

I can't get anywhere near that 80,300 again. My highest score in the past two weeks has been 65,000.

I'm going to play right now to determine where I am having problems.

I've racked up 3 80,000+ games in the past 2 days. Current high is 83,700.

Level 4 is where things go to shit. Barrels go nuts, flaming barrels get erratic, and the springs... dear god, the springs.

I watched a million point game on YouTube. I didn't watch the whole thing but I watched enough of it to see what the difference between me and him are.

My goal for level one is to earn 5,000 points. Sometimes I almost get there, sometimes I get a couple extra points, but I usually I hit around 5,000. Other than jumping an extra barrel or two, I didn't see how I could score more than that.

On the video, the guy earned 8,500 on level one. At one point he was gathering barrels in twos and threes (which earns more points for jumping them) and then he would run down ladders to jump them again and again. My goal for level one was to beat it as fast as possible. His goal was to stick around as long as possible, racking up points.

I like to leave level two with at least 13,000 points, although sometimes I can get as many as 14,000. On the video, the guy had 20,000. Same kind of thing. I kill the barrels to clear a path and win; this guy kills them, gathers them, and kills them again and again.

On my highest game ever, I got to Level 4 stage 4 and earned 83,000. On the video the guy had cleared 100k by that point.

DK is a broken game and people getting high scores on it are devoting their lives to exploits of a broken game.

Get 100,000, and then quit. This is the best and only way to deal with Kong (Donkey).

Welp, we can close this down.

Time to make room for that new Space Ace machine!

Fuck. All right. I'm selling the multigame.

In the Polybius cabinet, or just the board?

I guess just the cabinet. Let me see how much of a pain disconnecting the freeballing monitor will be.

I did this yesterday. I was actually just trying to get to the level 4 springs to practice that level, so I didn't point push along the way. Had I done that, this would have been my highest scoring game of all time. If I had done all the point tricks this would have been a 120k game for sure.

I would say 90% of the time my game ends by getting hit by a spring. Unless I'm not paying attention or something really random pops up, I can navigate all the other levels with ease.

I am not playing Donkey Kong as much as I used to, but when I work from home sometimes I'll play a couple of rounds while lunch is cooking. I would say all of my games end in the 60-70k range now, minimum. To hit 80k you have to reach level 4 barrels and to hit 100k you have to beat level 4 springs, which I have done twice now. I think I have the timing down better now. I'll have to time myself to see how long it takes to get to that level.[/img]