When we first started 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 told, we had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew that our launching was a month away and we had managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of those worked!
All our monitors will display a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to fix it. We almost missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes need to get hooked up differently based on the game. On this day, we must have turned on at least 20 games, we had put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of the puzzle in order to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we needed to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to fix issues.
Five decades later, I spend more time researching arcade fix, then I ever spent researching in school and the instruction proceeds to repay.
For the last couple of years, we have experienced a mean bug that's crept into our fleet. The games would work great after refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned , they'd all start to neglect.
To fix the symptom, we'd raise the energy source to run hot and that would be good for another 3 to six months before the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a few times, we started to put the matches into deep storage until we could find out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we overlooked something a lot more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to throw at 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull this one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get into the root of the event of the drop in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity in the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it went to the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. The moment I crimped over the end of the line to place on a new one, I immediately saw what my problem was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, that you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the harness looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to conduct 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 never suspected it was our culprit.
Once you start it 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 wire from the power source to the harness and Voila!
While this simple bug should have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we have another 20 amazing matches back on our site . Learning to fix arcade games has never been simple and your schooling never really ends, but each time you solve a puzzle, the following game gets easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, indoor playground equipment other men and women who've run into similar trouble, can save themselves the exact same aggravation by A.) double checking the wire you're using when you can not get your voltage to journey cleanly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit better quality jamma harnesses.