When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. We were confident that individuals would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe 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!
All our screens would exhibit a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to repair it. We nearly missed our launch, but we finally clued in on what was causing our probablem when we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they occasionally have to get hooked up differently depending on the game. On that day, we have to have turned on at least 20 games, that we had put a lot 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 knowledge, gave us the games we had to get started and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix problems.
Five years later, I spend more time studying arcade repair, then I ever spent researching in school and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the last few years, we've experienced an average bug that is slipped to our fleet. The matches would work good following refurbishment, but three to six months later getting them turned on, they would all start to fail.
To fix the symptom, we would raise the power supply to operate hot which would be good for the following 3 to six weeks until the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a few times, we started to put the games into deep storage until we can find out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes help, but this bug has managed to brick at 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 started to exhibit exactly the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull that one by the fleet, our customers 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 electricity at the power source 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 saw that the voltage had already dropped. I now suspected the connector between the wire and the power source. The moment I crimped on the end of the line to put on a new one, I instantly 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 might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the harness looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to run the power to the board. That's a whole lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It is part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
Once you start this up though, you can see that from the exterior it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it's short quite a bit of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker wire from the power supply to the tap and Voila!
While this easy bug should have been spotted sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to work out the source of our problem and kids indoor playground to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our website. Learning to correct arcade games hasn't been simple and your schooling never really ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the next game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar trouble, can save themselves the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can not receive your voltage to travel directly from your power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit better quality jamma harnesses.