We were convinced that individuals would want to let arcade games from the month, but truth be toldwe had no clue how to operate on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a good chunk of those matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All our screens will display a scrambled image 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 exactly was causing our probablem when we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes need to be hooked up differently based on the game. On this day, we have to have turned at least 20 games, we had already put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of the puzzle so as to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all had to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix problems.
Five decades later, I still spend more time researching arcade repair, I spent researching in college and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the last few years, we've had an average bug that's crept to our fleet.
To solve the symptom, we'd raise the energy supply to operate hot which would be good for the following 3 to six weeks until the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we started to put the games into deep storage until we could find out why they kept failing. Because we assumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we missed something much more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes help, but this bug was able to throw at 20 of our games. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display exactly the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one from the fleet, our clients 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 source and then started tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it went to the edge connector, I noticed the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and indoor playground equipment commercial the power source. As soon as I crimped on the end of the line to put to a new one, I immediately saw exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be willing to bet you a quarter, which you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That's a lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It's a part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
Once you open this up however, it is possible to see that from the outside it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it's short quite a bit of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker cable in the power source to the tap and Voila!
While this easy bug should have been seen sooner and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to figure 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 fix arcade games hasn't been easy and your education never really ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the following game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other men and women who've run into similar trouble, can save the same headache by A.) double checking the wire you are using when you can not get your voltage to travel cleanly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit better quality jamma harnesses.