When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were convinced that people would want to let arcade games from the month, but truth be told, we had no clue how to operate on them. Before we knew that our launching was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of them worked!
We knew enough to refurbish a good chunk of those matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All of our monitors will exhibit a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to fix it. We nearly missed our launch, but we finally clued in on what was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and kid vr recognized that they sometimes have to get hooked up differently based on the match. On that day, we must have turned at least 20 games, we had already put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of the 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 enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix problems.
Five decades later, I spend more time researching arcade fix, I ever spent researching in college and the education proceeds to repay.
For the previous couple of years, we've had an average bug that's crept to our fleet. When we measured the voltage running the matches, we would consistently see a 0.2 to 0.5 drop from the 5V voltage and couldn't really figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up electricity.
To fix the symptom, we would boost the energy supply to operate hot and that would be good for another 3 to six months before the power supplies would burn . After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we can figure out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we missed something much more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes help, but this insect has managed to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 began to display the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull that one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so that I sat down to get into the root of the case of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, measured the electricity in the power supply and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch wire. When I measured the power before it even went into the edge connector, I saw the voltage had already dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power supply. The moment I crimped on the end of the line to place to a new one, I instantly noticed what my issue was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, which you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
That is a whole lot of metal to run a small quantity of voltage. It is a part of why I suspected that it was our culprit.
Once you open this up however, it is possible to see that from the outside it looks 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a lot of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker cable in the power source to the tap and Voila!
While this simple bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to work out the source of our difficulty and to know that with very little work, we've got another 20 amazing games back on our site . Learning to correct arcade games hasn't been easy and your education never ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game gets easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other men and women who've run into similar trouble, can save themselves the same headache by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can't receive your voltage to journey cleanly from your power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying just a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.