When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. We were confident that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, indoor playground equipment but truth be toldwe had no idea how to operate on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month away and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a good chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All of our monitors would display a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating since 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 have to get hooked up differently based on the match. On that day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of the puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of understanding, gave us the games we had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix problems.
Five decades later, I still spend more time studying arcade fix, then I spent researching in school and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the last couple of years, we have had an average bug that is slipped into our fleet. The matches would work good after refurbishment, but three to six months later obtaining them turned on, they would all start to neglect.
To solve the symptom, we'd raise the power supply to operate hot which would be helpful for the following 3 to six months until 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 figure out why they all kept failing. Since we presumed, it had been caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we overlooked something a lot more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this insect was able to throw at 20 of our games. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so I sat down to get to the root of the case of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, measured the power in the power source and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it even went to the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had already dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. As soon as I crimped over the end of the lineup to place on a brand new one, I immediately noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I'd be willing to bet you a quarter, which you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a whole lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It is a part of why I never suspected that it was our culprit.
As soon as you start this up though, it is possible to see that from the outside 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 sooner and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to work out the origin of our problem and to know that with very little work, we've got another 20 awesome matches back on our website. Learning how to fix arcade games has never been easy and your education never ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game gets easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save the exact same aggravation by A.) double checking the wire you're using when you can not receive your voltage to travel directly from your power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying just a little bit better quality jamma harnesses.