Why you should not insert a cartridge when the C64 is on

[drk421]

Not NES related, but I had a C64 when I was a kid and was always told never to insert a cartridge when my C64 was on. My friend accidentally did this, and afterwords a bunch of strange things started happening such as keys not working or displaying the wrong character when pressed. Garbled characters also appeared when the system was powered off and back on. This behavior persisted for at least 1-2 days and then the system went back to normal.

I have no idea why this happened, but I have tried it since then with an old C64 and these strange behaviors do occur. All I can imagine is that there were probably a bunch of BUS collisions when the cart was inserted.

Anyone know what actually causes this weirdness?

[tokumaru]

Even weirder is the fact that the problems go away after a while!

[Drag]

Makes me think some kind of static electricity is being introduced when you do that.

[Memblers]

Maybe latchup? Then maybe it can't recover until the power supply capacitors discharge? Just guessing.

[cpow]

Maybe latchup? Then maybe it can't recover until the power supply capacitors discharge? Just guessing.

There certainly were oddities related to the PS. I remember putting mine in the freezer several times to make it start working again.