Who Else Wants To Know The Mystery Behind Arcade Game?

When we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on religion. We were confident that people would want to let arcade games from the month, but truth be told, we had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew that our launch was a month away and we had managed to accumulate about 100 games, but only 10 of them worked!
We knew enough to refurbish a good chunk of the games, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All our screens would display a scrambled picture on the screen. It was super frustrating because we had no clue how to fix it. We nearly missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what was causing our probablem once we discovered about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently based on the game. On this day, we have to have turned at least 20 matches, that we had already put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this last piece of the puzzle in order to be able to play them. This tiny chunk of understanding, gave us the games we all needed to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to continue learning how to fix problems.
Five decades later, I spend more time researching arcade repair, then I ever spent researching in college and the instruction proceeds to repay.
For the previous few years, indoor jungle gym equipment we have had a mean bug that is slipped to our fleet. The matches would work good following refurbishment, but three to six months later obtaining them turned on, they'd all start to neglect. After we measured the voltage running the matches, we would always observe a 0.2 to 0.5 fall in the 5V voltage and couldn't quite figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we would boost the power source to run hot and that would be good for the following 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 find out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it had been caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much power, we missed something a lot more evident.
After cleaning the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this insect was able to throw at least 20 of our matches. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display exactly the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull that one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get into the origin of the case of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power in the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it went to the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. The moment I crimped on the end of the lineup to place to a brand new one, I immediately noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, which you cannot find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
That's a whole lot of metal to conduct a small amount of voltage. It is a part of why I never suspected it was our culprit.
Once you start it up though, it is possible to see that from the exterior it seems 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 harness and Voila!
While this simple bug should have been spotted earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to figure out the source of our difficulty and to understand that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 awesome games back on our site . Learning to fix arcade games has never been simple and your education never really ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the next game gets easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other men and women who have run into similar problem, can save themselves the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the wire you are using when you can't get your voltage to travel directly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying just a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.