When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were confident that individuals would want to rent arcade games from the month, but truth be toldwe had no idea how to work on them. Before we knew that our launch was a month off and we had managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of those matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All of our screens will exhibit a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no idea how to fix it. We almost missed our launching, but we finally clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently depending on the match. On this day, indoor jungle gym equipment we have to have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had already put a good deal of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of the puzzle in order to be able to play them. This very small chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we all needed to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to correct issues.
Five decades later, I still spend more time studying arcade repair, then I ever spent researching in college and the education proceeds to pay off.
For the previous few years, we've had an average bug that's crept to our fleet. The matches would work good following refurbishment, but three to six months later obtaining them turned , they'd all start to neglect.
To fix the symptom, we would boost the power supply to operate hot which would be good for the following 3 to six months until the power supplies would burn . After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we started to put the matches into deep storage until we can find out why they kept failing. Because we presumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we missed something much more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this insect was able to brick at least 20 of our games. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 began to display the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get into the root of the event of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, measured the power at the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it went to 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 line to place on a brand new one, I immediately noticed exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, that you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
From the outside, the harness looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to conduct the power to the board. That is a whole lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It is part of why I suspected it was our culprit.
As soon as you start it up however, you can see that from the outside it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a lot of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker wire from the power source to the tap and Voila!
While this simple bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to figure out the origin of our problem and to understand that with hardly any work, we have another 20 awesome matches back on our site . Learning how to fix arcade games hasn't been easy and your education never really ends, but each time you solve a puzzle, the following game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar trouble, can save themselves the same aggravation by A.) double checking the cable you're using when you can't receive your voltage to travel cleanly from the power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying just a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.