Thank you for responding to my post!
My original post was getting a bit long winded and did not include all the different things I tried to fix the memory issue. I tried known good SmartMedia cards in the Flamin Finger and the game would not boot at all, either all LEDs lit, or just the borders or flashing. I tried formatting the card as FAT12, FAT16, write all 0's, write all 1's, I even formatted the card using my old Olympus C-3000 camera that uses this media. And yes, I copied all I could squeeze out of the failing card and wrote it to a good card and came up with just a blank screen. So there is some data that the board is looking for on that card. This reminds me of stuff like Jurassic Park 3 and the M48T58 Timekeeper chip with a little piece of code that would disappear when the internal battery died. So, I feel the next step in diagnosing my problem is to get a known good card or the Data Inside™. Also, I have seen Flamin Fingers with a different board that doesn't use the SmartMedia card. I know that there are other chip(s) on that board that serve the function of the SmartMedia card. As for clues in the manual, in addition to the "MEMORY TEST SMC FAIL" there is also "MEMORY TEST CPU FAIL" that potentially can be displayed. I never get that one. I know that if NO media is in place, the machine will display NO MEMORY CARD FOUND, or something like that (I'm not at the machine, it's living happily on location right now). So some code resides in "CPU" memory and it stops if it doesn't see the card.
