zlacker

>>1317+(OP)
This reminds me of exploits we used to do to arcade cabinets back in Sydney in the 80's and 90s. The school gas heaters used to have what we called "clickers", piezoelectric ignition devices you could remove from the heaters.

You then took that clicker to your local arcade, and clicked one of the corners of the CRT, that would send a shock through the system and add credits to your game. I believe this was because the CRT was grounded on the same ground lines that the mechanism for physically checking a coin had gone through the system.

Suffice to say, they caught onto this over time, and added some form of an alarm into it. But up until then... Those were truly the best times.

>>intoth+k4
Reminds me of an arcade machine a friend would get behind, turn it off and back on, and it would give you a free token. Maybe its designed that way so the employee can test it for free, not sure. But he climbed behind it, and proceeded to play for free.

>>gianca+s9
I believe some of those early arcade games were more electrical engineering than software engineering, so perhaps it was easier to set it up that way?

To my understanding some of those early arcade games also had jumpers to control some of the behavior. It could be that a tech set the "free credit on reboot" jumper and forgot to reset it when they were done.