We were convinced that people would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no clue how to operate on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 matches, but only 10 of those worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the identical symptom over and over again. All of our monitors would display a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no idea how to fix it. We almost missed our launching, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently based on the game. On that day, we have to have turned on at least 20 games, we had put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this final piece of this puzzle in order to be able to play them. This tiny chunk of understanding, gave us the games we had to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to fix problems.
Five years later, I spend more time researching arcade repair, then I spent researching in school and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the previous couple of years, we have experienced a mean bug that's crept into our fleet.
To solve the symptom, we'd raise the energy supply to run hot which would be helpful for another 3 to six months until the power supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a couple of times, we started to put the matches into deep storage until we can figure out why they all kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we overlooked something much more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to brick at least 20 of our matches. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 began to display 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 event of the fall in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity at the power source and then started spreading the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it went to the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power source. As soon as I crimped on the end of the lineup to place on a new one, I immediately saw exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, so that you can't find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a whole 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 it up however, it is possible to see that from the exterior it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it's short quite a bit of metal. The solution was simple, run a thicker wire from the power source to the harness and Voila!
While this simple bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to work out the origin of our problem and to know that with very little work, we've got another 20 awesome matches back on our website. Learning to fix arcade games has never been simple and your education never really ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the next game gets easier and indoor jungle gym equipment easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save the same headache by A.) double checking the wire you are using when you can't get your voltage to journey directly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.