When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. 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 launching was a month away and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
All of our screens would display a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to fix it. We nearly missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what was causing our probablem when we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes need to be hooked up differently based on the game. On this day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had already put a lot of hard work into, indoor playground equipment but had been missing this last piece of the 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 fix issues.
Five decades later, I still spend more time studying arcade fix, I ever spent studying in college and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the previous few years, we have had a mean bug that is slipped into our fleet.
To solve the symptom, we'd boost the energy supply to run hot which would be helpful for the following 3 to six months until the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the games into deep storage until we can find out why they all kept failing. Because we presumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we overlooked something a lot more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to throw at least 20 of our games. Well todayour Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our clients will riot, so that I sat down to get to the origin of the case of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, measured the electricity at the power supply and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it even went into the edge connector, I noticed the voltage had already dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power supply. As soon as I crimped over the end of the line to put to a brand new one, I immediately saw what my problem was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, so which you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the outside, the harness looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to run the power to the board. That's a lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It is part of why I suspected it was our culprit.
As soon as you start this up though, it is possible to see that from the exterior it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it's short quite a lot 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 series this weekend.
While this simple bug should have been spotted earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to understand that with very little work, we have another 20 amazing games back on our site . Learning to fix arcade games has never been simple and your education never ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the following game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar trouble, can save themselves the exact same headache by A.) double assessing the cable you are using when you can't receive your voltage to journey cleanly from the power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.