This is one effect I discovered when I was working on getting around the anti-piracy effects of an arcade game[1][2] in order to run it on similar hardware. I think it is a more clever copy defeat mechanism than stopping the game from booting.
[1] http://mikejmoffitt.com/articles/0047-puyopuy2.html [2] https://tcrf.net/Puyo_Puyo_Tsuu_(Arcade)