
Arcade Rats on the Moon - empressplay
https://paleotronic.com/2019/02/27/arcade-rats-on-the-moon/
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tzs
Battlezone had an interesting bug that may have been able to actually damage
the hardware.

If you timed it right, you could arrange to be on your last tank, with a shot
from the enemy tank on its way to you, when a guided missile would be sent. If
you then let the shot from the enemy tank kill you before the missile reached
you, the game would end.

It would then go into attract mode and show some pre-scripted gameplay to lure
in players.

Just one little problem...since your game ended before the guided missile
reached you, the guided missile was not destroyed. It continued on in the
attract mode game where it would happily kill the demo tank.

Apparently, the demo code was not at all ready for the demo tank to get killed
early before the script called for it, and the game would then crash.

When we made this happen on the Battlezone a friend of ours owned, with his
permission and with him watching, the crash evidently set the video system to
some mode that exceeded the specs of the CRT and it fried things.

I have no idea how consistent this result is, because the owner made us
promise to not do any further experiments after he fixed the game.

~~~
userbinator
If the video timings are software-controlled, as a lot of them are, then out-
of-spec settings can absolutely damage monitors.

[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-
the-wrong-sync-frequency-really-destroy-a-crt-monitor)

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blakesterz
This was great! I can't imagine how many quarters I dropped into those things
when I was young.

