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I find myself dying constantly in Donkey Kong. Although I don't have to pay money each time, it's still annoying to keep having to watch the intro each time.

I've tried pressing all buttons I could think of, so I don't think it's skipable, but maybe it is.

Same thing with Puckman/PAC-MAN.

On pinball machines, you can usually tell it to: "get on with it already!" by pressing a button, and so it would make sense for an all-digital game to also have such a feature for people who have already seen the intro a million times and just want to get on with the game.

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    With an emulated arcade (e.g. MAME), you can of course save the complete state and reload it, but I assume you are talking about a physical arcade machine in your posession? With ROMs you don't want to modify?
    – dirkt
    Commented Sep 29, 2020 at 5:19
  • On the real arcade it was possible to skip the whole 1st level. If Mario was placed above the right most ladder of the ground level, facing camera with only left foot above the ladder. Jumping to the right in a certain way would make the sprite fall through the bottom and the position detection would arrive at the ceiling where it would trigger the level completion code. This bug does not work on emulation. It worked like a charm on the cabinet that was in the pub close to the high-school I went to.
    – Patrick Schlüter
    Commented Sep 29, 2020 at 6:51
  • Could you start registering your accounts, please? (This is by no means necessary, but it'd help you be more than a string of anonymous identifiers to the rest of the community; plus, you'd get a running total reputation score, and it'd be slightly easier to send messages like this to you.)
    – wizzwizz4 ♦
    Commented Sep 29, 2020 at 18:51

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The ability to skip cut scenes was a rather late addition to the arcade scene. I'm not quite sure why; if a player would rather skip a cut scene than spent time watching it, I can't imagine arcade operators being opposed. Pinball machines likewise took awhile to let players skip animation sequences, though in the days before such sequences could be skipped they usually wouldn't be very long unless they were a reward for something impressive a player did. The bonus-count sequence in Pinbot would take awhile if the player scored 5x 99000, but that would usually happen after a rather long ball where the player would be happy to have a breather. It's somewhat interesting playing older pinball machines where the end-of-ball sequence can be two seconds or less.

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While it doesn't "skip" per-se, if you are playing the game on MAME, you can press the Page Down key on your keyboard to temporarily unlock the speed throttling and somewhat "fast forward" through intros and such you don't want to wait around for.

The key might not be universal, but in my experience it works for anything that isn't emulating a keyboard (e.g. Apple II emulation), so for Donkey Kong it will do just fine.

What the key does is simply removes the throttle on the emulation and lets the game run as fast as your computer can run it. Normally, you want a 1MHz 6502 to run at exactly 1MHz so you get the authentic experience. Holding PgDn will possibly get that 6502 running at 20MHz (depending on the raw performance of your computer), so those intro sequences can just blip past until you release the key.

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    There's no indication in the question that this game is being played under emulation.
    – Mark Williams
    Commented Oct 29, 2020 at 19:06
  • @MarkWilliams you're right - I assumed it was MAME! At least corrected the answer to reflect that.
    – bjb
    Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 1:21

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