When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were confident that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew that our launching was a month off and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of those worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a good chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All our screens will exhibit a scrambled picture 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 exactly was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to get hooked up differently based on the match. On this day, we have to have turned on at least 20 games, we had already put a good deal of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of this puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we had to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to fix issues.
Five years later, I spend more time studying arcade repair, I ever spent researching in college and the education continues to pay off.
For the last couple of years, we have experienced a mean bug that's crept into our fleet.
To fix the symptom, we would boost the energy supply 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 puzzle a few times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we could find out why they all kept failing. Since we presumed, it had been caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we missed something much more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this bug was able to throw at least 20 of our games. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit 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 into the origin of the case of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power in the power source and then started tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch wire. When I measured the power before it went into the edge connector, I saw the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. The moment I crimped on the end of the lineup to place on a brand 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, which you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we may have gotten what we paid for them.
That is a lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It is a part of why I suspected it was our culprit.
As soon as you open it up though, you can see that from the exterior it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a bit of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker wire from the power source 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 series this weekend.
While this easy bug should have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to figure out the source of our problem and indoor jungle gym equipment to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our website. Learning to correct arcade games has never been easy and your education never really ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game gets easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save themselves the same aggravation by A.) double checking the wire you're using when you can't receive your voltage to travel cleanly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.