When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a little on faith. We were confident that people would want to let arcade games from the month, but truth be toldwe had no idea how to operate on them. Before we knew that our launch was a month off and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a good chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All of our monitors will exhibit a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no idea how to fix it. We almost missed our launch, but we finally clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to get hooked up differently based on the match. On this day, we must have turned at least 20 matches, that we had put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this final piece of this puzzle so as to have the ability to play them. This very small chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we needed to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct problems.
Five years later, I still spend more time studying arcade fix, then I ever spent researching in school and the instruction continues to repay.
For the previous couple of years, we have experienced an average bug that is slipped to our fleet. The matches would work great after refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned on, they'd all start to fail. When we measured the voltage running the matches, we'd consistently see a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and could not really figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we would boost the power supply to operate hot which would be good for another 3 to six months 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 can find out why they kept failing. Since we presumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we missed something much more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this insect was able to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 started to exhibit the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get to the root of the event of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, measured the electricity at the power source and then began 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 saw that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. The moment I crimped over the end of the lineup to put on a new one, I instantly noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, that you can't find a better deal on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for kids indoor playground them.
That is a lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It's part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
Once 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 supply to the harness and Voila!
While this easy bug should have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to understand that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 amazing games back on our site . Learning how to correct arcade games hasn't been simple and your education never ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the next game gets easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save themselves the exact same aggravation by A.) double checking the wire you are using when you can't get your voltage to travel cleanly from your power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.