What The In-Crowd Won't Tell You About Arcade Game
All of our monitors would exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating because 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 discovered about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to get hooked up differently depending on the game. On that day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, that we had 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 very small chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we all needed to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix issues.
Five years later, I still spend more time studying arcade repair, then I spent researching in college and the education continues to pay off.
For the previous couple of years, we've had an average bug that is slipped to our fleet. When we measured the voltage running the games, we would consistently observe a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and couldn't really figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up power.
To solve the symptom, we would boost the power source to operate hot which would be good for indoor playground equipment the following 3 to six months before the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we began to put the games 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 energy, we missed something much more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 began to display exactly the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull this one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the case of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power in the power supply and then started tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the power before it went to the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had already dropped. I suspected the connector between the wire and the power source. As soon as I crimped over the end of the line to place on a new one, I instantly noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, that you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it looks like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the tap looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to conduct the power to the board. That's a whole lot of metal to run a small quantity of voltage. It's a part of why I suspected it was our culprit.
Once you start it up though, you can see that from the exterior it seems 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 supply to the tap and Voila!
While this simple bug ought to have been seen sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to understand that with very little work, we've got another 20 amazing games back on our site . Learning to correct arcade games has never been easy and your education never really ends, but each time you solve a puzzle, the next game becoming easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save themselves the same headache by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can not get your voltage to travel cleanly from the power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.
Replies