When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. We were confident 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 away and we had managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All our screens will exhibit a scrambled image 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 realized that they occasionally need to get hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we must have turned at least 20 games, that we had already put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of the puzzle so as to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct issues.
Five years later, I still spend more time studying arcade game fix, I ever spent researching in school and the education proceeds to pay off.
For the last few years, we've had an average bug that is slipped into our fleet. When we measured the voltage running the games, we'd always observe a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and could not really figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up electricity.
To solve the symptom, we would boost the power source to operate hot which would be helpful for the following 3 to six weeks before the power supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a couple of times, we started to put the games into deep storage until we can find out why they all kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we missed something a lot more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to throw at least 20 of our games. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display exactly the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the case of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity at the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it went to the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had already dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. As soon as I crimped over the end of the line to place on a brand new one, I instantly noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, so that you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we buy. Unfortunately, it looks like we may have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a whole lot of metal to conduct a small amount of voltage. It is a part of why I never suspected it was our offender.
As soon as you start this up though, it is possible to see that from the exterior it looks 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 supply to the tap 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 easy bug should 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 very little work, we have another 20 awesome matches back on our site . Learning how to correct arcade games has never been easy and your schooling never ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can not get your voltage to travel cleanly from the power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.