We were convinced that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe had no idea how to operate on them. Before we knew it our launch was a month off and we'd managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
All of our screens will exhibit a scrambled picture 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 need to get hooked up differently based on the match. On that day, we have to have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had already put a good deal of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of the puzzle so as to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to continue learning how to correct problems.
Five years later, I spend more time studying arcade repair, then I spent studying in college and the education continues to pay off.
For the last few years, we've experienced an average bug that is slipped into our fleet. The matches would work good after refurbishment, but three to six months later getting them turned on, they would all start to fail. After we measured the voltage running the games, we would consistently observe a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and could not quite figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we would raise the power supply to operate hot which would be helpful for another 3 to six weeks before the power supplies would burn . After running into this mystery a couple of times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we can figure out why they kept failing. Since we presumed, it had been caused by bad circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we missed something a lot more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes help, but this bug was able to brick at least 20 of our games. Well todayour Mortal Kombat 2 began to display exactly the very same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull this one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get to the origin of the event of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity at the power source and www.arcadereview.org then began spreading the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it went to the edge connector, I saw the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. The moment I crimped over the end of the line to put on a brand new one, I instantly noticed exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, which you can't find a better deal on the jamma harnesses which we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
That's a whole lot of metal to conduct a small amount of voltage. It is part of why I suspected that it was our offender.
As soon as you start 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 source to the tap and Voila! Mortal Kombat 2 back up and running, just in time for our free play arcade at the Jack of All Trade showthis weekend.
While this easy bug ought to have been spotted sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to figure out the origin 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 schooling never ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the following game gets easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other men and women who've run into similar trouble, can save the same headache by A.) double checking the wire you are using when you can not receive your voltage to journey cleanly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.