When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a little on religion. We were convinced that individuals would want to rent arcade games from the month, but truth be toldwe had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month off and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 games, but only 10 of them worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of those games, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All of our screens will exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating because we had no clue how to fix it. We nearly missed our launching, but we finally clued in on what was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they occasionally need to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we have to have turned at least 20 matches, that we had put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of this puzzle so as to have the ability to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all needed to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix issues.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying arcade repair, I ever spent studying in school and the education proceeds to pay off.
For the previous few years, we've had an average bug that is slipped to our fleet. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we'd always see a 0.2 to 0.5 fall in the 5V voltage and could not really figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we would raise the energy supply to operate hot which would be helpful for another 3 to six weeks until the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we started to put the matches into deep storage until we could figure out why they kept failing. Because we assumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards trying to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it might sometimes help, but this insect was able to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display exactly the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull this one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the event of the drop in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity at the power supply and then started tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it even went to the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power source. The moment I crimped on the end of the lineup to place to a new one, I immediately saw what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, which you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we buy. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the harness looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to conduct the power to the board. That's a whole lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It is part of why I never suspected it was our offender.
Once you open this up however, you can see that from the outside it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a bit of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker cable in the power source to the tap and Voila! Mortal Kombat 2 back up and running, just in time for our free play arcade game at the Jack of All Trade showthis weekend.
While this easy bug ought to have been seen earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to work out the source of our problem and to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 awesome matches back on our site . Learning to fix arcade games has never been simple and your schooling never really ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other men and women who have run into similar trouble, can save the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the cable you are using when you can not get your voltage to journey directly from the power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly better quality jamma harnesses.