When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were confident that individuals would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no idea how to work on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month away and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All our screens will display a scrambled image on the screen. It was super frustrating since we had no idea how to repair it. We almost missed our launching, but we eventually clued in on what was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they occasionally have to get hooked up differently based on the game. On this day, we have to have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of this puzzle in order to have the ability 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 continue learning how to fix problems.
Five years later, I spend more time studying arcade repair, then I ever spent studying in college and the education proceeds to pay off.
For the last couple of years, we have had a mean bug that is slipped into our fleet. The matches would work great after refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned , they would all start to neglect. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we would always see a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and couldn't quite figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up electricity.
To solve the symptom, we would raise the power source to operate hot and that would be good for the following 3 to six weeks before the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a couple of times, we started to put the games into deep storage until we could find out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we missed something much more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this bug has managed to brick at 20 of our games. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull this one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get into the root of the case of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity at the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch wire. When I measured the power before it went into the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had already dropped. I now suspected the connector between the wire and the power source. As soon as I crimped on the end of the lineup to place to a new one, I immediately noticed what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be willing to bet you a quarter, so that you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That is a whole lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It's part of why I suspected it was our offender.
As soon as you start this up though, it is possible to 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 simple bug should have been seen sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to work out the source of our problem and to understand that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 awesome matches back on our website. Learning to correct arcade games has never been easy and your education never really ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the following game gets easier and indoor playground equipment easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar trouble, can save the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the wire you're using when you can not receive your voltage to journey cleanly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly better quality jamma harnesses.