When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a little on faith. We were confident that individuals would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe had no idea how to work on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month off and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All our monitors will exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no idea how to repair it. We almost 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 sometimes have to be hooked up differently based on the match. On that day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, we had put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of this puzzle in order to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to continue learning how to fix issues.
Five years later, I spend more time studying arcade fix, I spent studying in school and the education continues to repay.
For the previous few years, we have experienced an average bug that's crept to our fleet. The matches would work good after refurbishment, kid vr but three to six months after getting them turned on, they'd all start to fail. After we measured the voltage running the games, we'd consistently see a 0.2 to 0.5 drop in the 5V voltage and could not quite figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up electricity.
To solve the symptom, we would boost the energy supply to run hot and that would be helpful for the following 3 to six months until the power supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we could find out why they all kept failing. Because we presumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards trying to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this bug has managed to brick at 20 of our matches. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit exactly the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get into 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 started tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. 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 source. As soon as I crimped on the end of the lineup to put to a brand new one, I immediately noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, which you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
From the outside, the tap looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge cable 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 never suspected it was our offender.
As soon as you open this up however, you can see that from the exterior it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is 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 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 problem and to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our site . Learning how to correct arcade games hasn't been simple and your schooling never really ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the following game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar trouble, can save the exact same aggravation by A.) double assessing the cable you're using when you can't get your voltage to travel directly from the power source to your circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.