When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were confident that individuals would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe had no clue how to operate on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 matches, but only 10 of those worked!
All of our screens will exhibit a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating because we had no clue how to repair it. We nearly missed our launching, but we finally clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On that day, we have to have turned at least 20 matches, we had already put a good deal of hard work into, but had been 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 enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct problems.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying kids arcade games fix, then I ever spent studying in school and the education proceeds to pay off.
For the last few years, we have had a mean bug that is slipped into our fleet. When 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 quite figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up electricity.
To fix the symptom, we would raise the power source to run hot which would be good for the following 3 to six months before the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we could find out why they kept failing. Because we presumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much energy, we overlooked something a lot more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 started to exhibit the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull that one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get into the root of the event of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power at the power source and then started spreading the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it even went to the edge connector, I noticed the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power supply. The moment I crimped over the end of the lineup to place on a new one, I immediately noticed exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, so that you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a whole lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It's a part of why I suspected that it was our culprit.
As soon as you start it up however, it is possible to see that from the exterior it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it's short quite a lot of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker cable in the power source to the harness and Voila! Mortal Kombat 2 back up and running, just in time for our free play arcade in the Jack of All Trade series this weekend.
While this simple bug ought to have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to work out the source of our problem and to understand that with very little work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our site . Learning how to fix arcade games hasn't been simple and your education never really ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the next game gets easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save the same headache by A.) double checking the cable you're using when you can not get your voltage to travel directly from your power source to your circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly better quality jamma harnesses.