When we first started All You Can arcade game, it was a little on religion. We were convinced that individuals would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no idea how to work on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
We knew enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All our screens will display a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no idea how to fix it. We almost missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they occasionally have to get hooked up differently based on the match. On that day, we have to have turned at least 20 games, we had already put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of the puzzle so as to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we needed to get started and was enough to keep us motivated to continue learning how to correct problems.
Five years later, I still spend more time researching arcade fix, then I spent studying in school and the instruction proceeds to repay.
For the last couple of years, we've had an average bug that is slipped to our fleet. The games would work good after refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned , they'd all start to neglect. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we would always see a 0.2 to 0.5 drop from the 5V voltage and could not quite figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up electricity.
To solve the symptom, we'd boost the energy supply to run hot which would be helpful for the following 3 to six weeks until the power supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we could figure out why they all kept failing. Because we assumed, it had been caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much energy, we overlooked something a lot more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes help, but this insect has managed to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit exactly the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so that I sat down to get to the root of the event of the fall in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, measured the electricity in the power supply and then started tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it went into the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had already dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power supply. The moment I crimped on the end of the lineup to place on a brand new one, I instantly saw what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, that you cannot find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we may have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the harness looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to run the power to the board. That's a whole lot of metal to conduct a small amount of voltage. It is part of why I suspected it was our offender.
Once you open it up though, you can see that from the exterior it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a bit of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker cable in the power source to the harness and Voila! Mortal Kombat 2 back up and running, just in time for our free play arcade in the Jack of All Trade showthis weekend.
While this simple bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to figure out the source of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 awesome matches back on our website. Learning to fix arcade games hasn't been simple and your schooling never really ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the next game gets easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar trouble, can save the exact same headache by A.) double checking the wire you are using when you can't receive your voltage to travel directly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying just a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.