We were confident that individuals would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we 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 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a good chunk of those matches, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All our monitors would exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no idea how to repair it. We nearly missed our launching, but we eventually clued in on what was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently depending on the match. On that day, we have to have turned on at least 20 matches, we had already put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of this puzzle in order to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all had to get started and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix issues.
Five years later, I spend more time researching arcade repair, I spent studying in school and the education continues to repay.
For the last couple of years, we have had a mean bug that is slipped to our fleet. The matches would work good after refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned , they would all start to fail. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we would consistently see a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and couldn't really figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up power.
To solve the symptom, we would raise the power supply to run hot and that would be good for the following 3 to six months before the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we can figure out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes help, but this bug has managed to throw at 20 of our matches. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 started to exhibit the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get into the origin of the event of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power at the power supply and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the power before it even went into the edge connector, I saw the voltage had already dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power supply. As soon as I crimped on the end of the line to put on a new one, I immediately saw exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I'd be willing to bet you a quarter, that you cannot 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.
From the outside, the tap looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to conduct the power to the board. That is a lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It is a part of why I suspected that it was our culprit.
Once you open this up though, you can see that from the exterior it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a lot of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker wire from 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 easy bug ought to have been seen earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to work out the origin of our problem and to understand that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our website. Learning how to correct arcade games hasn't been easy and your education never ends, kids indoor playground but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save themselves the same headache by A.) double assessing the cable you're using when you can't receive your voltage to journey directly from your power source to your circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.