We were convinced that people would want to let 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 had managed to accumulate about 100 games, but only 10 of them worked!
We knew enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of those games, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All of our monitors would exhibit a scrambled image 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 exactly was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently based on the game. On that day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had already put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this final piece of the puzzle so as to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we had to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix issues.
Five years later, I still spend more time studying arcade fix, then I spent studying in college and the education continues to pay off.
For the last couple of years, we've had a mean bug that's crept to our fleet. The games would work good after refurbishment, but three to six months later obtaining them turned on, they would all start to fail. When we measured the voltage running the games, we would consistently see a 0.2 to 0.5 drop in the 5V voltage and could not quite figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up power.
To solve the symptom, we would raise the energy supply to operate hot and that would be helpful for the following 3 to six months until the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the games into deep storage until we could figure out why they kept failing. Because we assumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we overlooked something a lot more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes help, but this bug was able to brick at least 20 of our matches. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our clients 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, then measured the power in the power source and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it went into the edge connector, I noticed the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power supply. As soon as I crimped over the end of the line to place on a brand new one, I immediately saw exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be willing to bet you a quarter, which you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we may have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It is part of why I never suspected it was our culprit.
As soon as you open it up however, it is possible to 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 source to the tap and Voila!
While this easy bug should have been spotted earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with very little work, we've got another 20 awesome games back on our website. Learning how to fix arcade game games hasn't been simple and your education never ends, but each time you solve a puzzle, the next game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar trouble, can save the exact same headache by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can't get your voltage to journey directly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.