Turn Your Arcade Game Into A High Performing Machine

When we first began All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. We were convinced that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be told, we had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month away and we'd managed to collect about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All of our screens would display a scrambled image on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no idea how to fix it. We nearly missed our launching, but we finally clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they occasionally have to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we have to have turned on at least 20 games, we had already put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of this puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we all needed to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to correct issues.
Five years later, I spend more time researching arcade fix, then I ever spent researching in school and the instruction proceeds to pay off.
For the previous couple of years, we have had a mean bug that's crept to our fleet. The matches would work great following refurbishment, but three to six months after obtaining them turned , they'd all start to fail. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we'd consistently 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 power.
To fix the symptom, we would raise the energy source to operate hot and that would be helpful for another 3 to six months before the power supplies would burn out. After running into this mystery a few times, we began to put the games into deep storage until we can figure out why they all kept failing. Because we presumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we missed something a lot more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes help, but this bug has managed to throw at least 20 of our games. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one from the fleet, our clients will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the event of the fall in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity in the power source and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it went into the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had dropped. I now suspected the connector between the wire and the power supply. The moment I crimped on the end of the line to put on a new one, I instantly noticed exactly what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, so which you can't find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
That is a whole lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It's part of why I suspected that it was our culprit.
Once you open it up though, 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 soft play equipment arcade in the Jack of All Trade showthis weekend.
While this simple bug ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 amazing games back on our site . Learning to correct arcade games hasn't been easy and your schooling never ends, but each time you solve a mystery, the next game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save the exact same aggravation by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can not receive your voltage to travel directly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.