Can touching your CRT fry something in your PC due to the static?

[BlazzingFlippers]

I cannot even believe this but as I'm getting my Mame cabinet ready for some friends to come over and play on this thing, I decided to wipe down the screen of my Wells Gardner D9800 while turned on.  Owning a CRT is new for me so maybe this was a big no no?

Anyways, when I went to wipe it, the static I guess built up and I heard a pop sound.  To my horror my SlikStik 1st player buttons stopped working.  The IPAC was hooked up via USB mode.  2nd player buttons and other random buttons work fine.  I went into notepad to diagnose if the buttons were outputting anything and they were not.  I shutdown the pc, hooked up the SlikStik via PS2 insted of USB to see if that made any difference and the behavior was the same.

Did I fry the IPAC?  Of all the times for this to happen...  Man I'm bummed out...

[SirPeale]

Static can kill stuff, sure.  Was this equipment in a cab away from the monitor?

[Ummon]

Yeah, always good to have stuff off when working on it. I don't always do this, mind, and mostly have been okay....not once....but everything crucial and expensive I've been lucky with.

[qrz]

the operating HV on this set should be around 30kv.
thus generating a rather nasty static charge is all too possible.

don't know what an "IPAC" is , but any robustly designed input/output circuitry
will have crowbar protection.

qrz

[BlazzingFlippers]

Thanks everyone.  The IPAC is the computer board inside of the SlikStik that controls everything.  It stores all your keyboard mappings to joystick buttons via flash memory.  What must have happened is the jolt zapped the memory from the onboard flash.  Re-flashing the IPAC to the factory state set everything back to normal thankfully. 

[Ummon]

Yeah, they're pretty rugged. I've accidentally zapped mine by plugging into the +5V the wrong way, but I didn't lose my settings.