We were convinced that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be told, kids indoor playground we had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month off and we'd managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of them worked!
All of our monitors would display a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to fix it. We nearly missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem when we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes need to be hooked up differently based on the match. On this day, we must have turned on at least 20 matches, we had put a lot of hard work into, but had been missing this final piece of the puzzle so as to be able to play them. This tiny chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we all had to begin and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct problems.
Five decades later, I spend more time researching arcade fix, then I spent researching in college and the instruction proceeds to pay off.
For the previous couple of years, we've had an average bug that's crept to our fleet. The games would work great following refurbishment, but three to six months after getting them turned on, they would all start to fail. When we measured the voltage running the games, we'd consistently observe a 0.2 to 0.5 fall from the 5V voltage and couldn't quite figure out why the PCB board seemed to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we would raise the power source to run hot which would be good for another 3 to six weeks until the power supplies would burn . After running into this puzzle a few times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we could figure out why they all kept failing. Because we presumed, it was being caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we overlooked something much more obvious.
After cleansing the chips, it would sometimes assist, but this insect has managed to throw at 20 of our matches. Well todayour Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the very same symptoms and quite frankly if we pull this one from the fleet, our customers will riot, so that I sat down to get to the origin of the case of the fall in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the electricity at the power supply and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it even went to the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had already dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power source. The moment I crimped on the end of the lineup to place on a brand new one, I immediately saw what my problem was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, that you can't find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the exterior, the tap looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to run the power to the board. That's a lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It's a part of why I never suspected that it was our offender.
As soon as you open this up though, you can see that from the outside it looks 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! 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 ought to have been spotted earlier and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also incredibly exciting to work out the source of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we've got another 20 awesome games back on our site . Learning to correct arcade games has never been easy and your schooling never ends, but every time you solve a mystery, the following game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save themselves the same headache by A.) double assessing the wire you're using when you can't get your voltage to journey cleanly from the power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying just a little bit better quality jamma harnesses.