When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were convinced that people would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month off and we'd managed to collect about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All our screens will exhibit a scrambled image on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no idea how to fix it. We nearly missed our launching, but we finally clued in on what was causing our probablem when we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes need to get hooked up differently depending on the match. On that day, we must have turned at least 20 games, that we had put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of this puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we all needed to get started and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix problems.
Five years later, I spend more time studying kids arcade games fix, I spent studying in school and the instruction proceeds to pay off.
For the previous few years, we've had a mean bug that's crept to our fleet. The games would work good after refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned , they'd all start to fail.
To solve the symptom, we would boost the power source to operate hot and that would be good for the following 3 to six weeks before the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a couple of times, we started to put the games into deep storage until we could find out why they all kept failing. Because we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we overlooked something much more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it might sometimes help, but this insect has managed to brick at least 20 of our games. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 started to exhibit exactly the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull that one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the case of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, measured the electricity at 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 into the edge connector, I saw the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the wire and the power supply. As soon as I crimped over the end of the line to place to a brand new one, I instantly saw exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be willing to bet you a quarter, so that you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which 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 cable to conduct the power to the board. That's a lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It's a part of why I suspected that it was our offender.
As soon as you open it up though, it is possible to see that from the exterior it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a lot of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker wire from the power source to the tap and Voila!
While this simple bug ought to have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to work out the origin of our problem and to understand that with very little work, we have another 20 amazing matches back on our website. Learning to correct arcade games has never been simple and your schooling never ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the following game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save the same headache by A.) double assessing the cable you're using when you can not get your voltage to travel directly from your power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.