When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. We were convinced that people would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no idea how to operate on them. Before we knew that our launch was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of them worked!
We knew enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of the games, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All of our monitors would display a scrambled image on the screen. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to repair it. We almost missed our launch, but we finally clued in on what exactly 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 that day, we have to have turned at least 20 games, we had put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of this puzzle in order to be able to play them. This tiny chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all needed to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix problems.
Five years later, I still spend more time studying arcade repair, I ever spent researching in college and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the previous few years, we have had a mean bug that's crept into our fleet.
To fix the symptom, we would boost the energy source to operate hot which would be good for the following 3 to six weeks before the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this puzzle a few times, we began to put the games into deep storage until we could figure out why they all kept failing. Since we presumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards trying to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to brick at least 20 of our games. Well todayour Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit exactly the very same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull that one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so that I sat down to get to the origin of the event of the drop in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power in the power source and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it went to the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had already 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 instantly saw exactly what my issue 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 deal on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It is a part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
Once 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 cable in the power supply to the harness and Voila!
While this easy bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to work out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with very little work, we have another 20 amazing games back on our website. Learning how to fix arcade games has never been easy and your schooling never ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the following game becoming easier and indoor jungle gym easier to fix.
Hopefully, other men and women who've run into similar problem, can save the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the cable you are using when you can't get your voltage to travel directly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly better quality jamma harnesses.