We were convinced that people 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 launch was a month off and we'd managed to accumulate about 100 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All our screens will exhibit a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to repair it. We almost missed our launch, but we finally clued in on what was causing our probablem when we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes need to get hooked up differently depending on the match. On that day, we must have turned at least 20 games, that we had put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this final piece of this puzzle so as to be able to play them. This very small chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we all had to get started and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct issues.
Five years later, I still spend more time researching arcade repair, then I ever spent researching in college and the education continues to pay off.
For the previous couple of years, we have had an average bug that is slipped to our fleet. The matches would work good following refurbishment, but three to six months later obtaining them turned , they would all start to neglect.
To solve the symptom, indoor playground equipment we'd raise the energy source to run hot and that would be good for the following 3 to six weeks until the electricity supplies would burn . After running into this puzzle a few times, we started to put the games into deep storage until we can figure out why they kept failing. Since we assumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes help, but this insect was able to throw at least 20 of our games. Well now , our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one by the fleet, our clients will riot, so that I sat down to get to the root of the case of the drop in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, measured the power in the power supply and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it even went into the edge connector, I noticed that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. As soon as I crimped over the end of the line to put to a brand new one, I instantly saw what my issue was.
We love getting a fantastic deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, so which you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we may have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the tap looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to run the power to the board. That's a lot of metal to conduct a small amount of voltage. It's a part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
Once you open this up however, it is possible to 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 harness and Voila! Mortal Kombat 2 back up and running, just in time for our free play arcade in the Jack of All Trade series this weekend.
While this simple bug should have been seen earlier and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to work out the source of our difficulty and to know that with very little work, we have another 20 awesome matches back on our website. Learning how to fix arcade games has never been easy and your schooling never really ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the following game gets easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other men and women who have run into similar trouble, can save themselves the same headache by A.) double checking the cable you are using when you can't get your voltage to journey cleanly from your power supply into a circuit boards and B.) paying only slightly better quality jamma harnesses.