When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a little on religion. We were confident that people would want to rent arcade games from the month, but truth be toldwe had no idea how to operate on them. Before we knew that our launch was a month away and we'd managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of those games, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All of our screens would exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating because we had no idea how to fix it. We almost missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we discovered about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we must have turned at least 20 matches, we had put a good deal of hard work into, but were missing this final 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 fix issues.
Five decades later, I still spend more time researching arcade fix, then I ever spent researching in school and the education continues to repay.
For the last few years, we've had an average bug that's crept into our fleet.
To solve the symptom, we would raise the power source to run hot and that would be helpful for another 3 to six weeks before the electricity supplies would burn out. After running into this puzzle a few times, we started to put the matches into deep storage until we can find out why they all kept failing. Since we presumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we missed something much more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this bug has managed to brick at 20 of our matches. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the event of the fall in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity in the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it went into the edge connector, I saw the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. As soon as I crimped over the end of the lineup to put on a new one, I instantly noticed what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, so which you cannot find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it looks like we may have gotten what we paid for them.
That is a lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It's a part of why I suspected it was our culprit.
As soon as you start this up however, 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, indoor jungle gym (www.childwelfaresocietykenya.org) run a thicker cable in the power supply to the harness and Voila!
While this simple bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to work out the source of our difficulty and to know that with very little work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our website. Learning how to fix arcade games hasn't been easy and your education never really ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the next game gets easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar trouble, can save the same headache by A.) double assessing the cable you're using when you can not get your voltage to travel directly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly better quality jamma harnesses.