We were convinced that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no idea how to work on them. Before we knew that our launch was a month away and we'd managed to collect about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All of our monitors will display a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no clue how to repair it. We almost missed our launching, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes need to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we must have turned on at least 20 games, that we had put a good deal of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of the puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all had to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to correct problems.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying arcade fix, I ever spent researching in college and the instruction proceeds to pay off.
For the previous couple of years, we've experienced a mean bug that's crept into our fleet.
To fix the symptom, we'd boost the power supply to operate hot which would be helpful for the following 3 to six months until the power supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a few times, we started to put the matches into deep storage until we could figure out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, indoor playground equipment we missed something a lot more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this bug was able to throw at 20 of our matches. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one from the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the event of the drop in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, measured the power at the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it even went to the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power source. The moment I crimped over the end of the line to put to a brand new one, I instantly saw exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, so that you can't find a better deal on the jamma harnesses which we buy. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the tap looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to conduct the power to the board. That is a whole lot of metal to run a small quantity of voltage. It's part of why I suspected that it was our culprit.
Once you start it up though, it is possible to see that from the outside it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a lot of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker cable in the power source to the harness and Voila!
While this simple bug should have been seen sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 awesome matches back on our site . Learning how to correct arcade games has never been simple and your education never ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the next game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other men and women who have run into similar problem, can save the exact same headache by A.) double checking the cable you are using when you can't receive your voltage to journey directly from your power source to your circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly better quality jamma harnesses.