When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a little on religion. We were convinced that individuals would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no idea how to operate 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 image on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no idea how to fix it. We nearly missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what was causing our probablem when we discovered about monitor sync 101 and realized that they occasionally need to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we have to have turned at least 20 games, we had put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of the puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, indoor playground equipment gave us the games we had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to continue learning how to correct issues.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying arcade fix, then I spent studying in school and the instruction proceeds to repay.
For the previous couple of years, we've had a mean bug that's crept to our fleet. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we would consistently observe a 0.2 to 0.5 drop in the 5V voltage and couldn't quite figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we'd raise the energy source to operate hot and that would be helpful for another 3 to six weeks before the electricity 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 all kept failing. Because we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we missed something a lot more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this bug was able to brick at 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display exactly the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our clients will riot, so 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 in the power source and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it even went to the edge connector, I noticed that 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 lineup to put to a brand new one, I instantly saw what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, so which you cannot find a better deal on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That's a whole lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It is a part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
As soon as you start this up however, you can see that from the outside it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a bit of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker wire from the power supply to the harness and Voila!
While this simple bug should have been spotted sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to work out the source of our difficulty and to understand that with very little work, we've got another 20 awesome games back on our website. Learning to correct arcade games has never been easy and your schooling never really ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the following game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save the exact same headache by A.) double assessing the cable you're using when you can't receive your voltage to journey cleanly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.