When we first started 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 idea how to operate on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month off and we had managed to accumulate about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
All of our screens will exhibit a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to repair it. We almost missed our launch, but we finally clued in on what was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they occasionally need to get hooked up differently based on the game. On this day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had put a good deal of hard work into, but had been 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 enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct issues.
Five years later, I spend more time researching arcade fix, I ever spent researching in college and the instruction continues to repay.
For the previous few years, we've had a mean bug that's crept to our fleet.
To solve the symptom, we would boost the power source to run hot which would be good for the following 3 to six weeks until the power supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we can find out why they kept failing. Because we assumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we overlooked something much more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes help, but this bug has managed to brick at 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 started to exhibit the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one from the fleet, our clients will riot, so that I sat down to get to the root of the case of the fall 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 where I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it went to the edge connector, I saw the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. As soon as I crimped on the end of the lineup to put to a brand www.kidamusement.com new one, I immediately saw exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, so that you cannot find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we may have gotten what we paid for them.
From the outside, the harness looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to run the power to the board. 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 culprit.
As soon as you open it up though, you can see that from the exterior it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a bit of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker cable in the power supply 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 showthis weekend.
While this easy bug should have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to figure out the source of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we have another 20 amazing matches back on our website. Learning how to correct arcade games hasn't been simple and your schooling never really ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the following game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar trouble, can save themselves the same headache by A.) double checking the cable you're using when you can not receive your voltage to journey directly from your power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly better quality jamma harnesses.