The Unexplained Mystery Into Arcade Game Uncovered

indoor playgroundWhen we first started All You Can Arcade, it was a bit on faith. We were convinced that people would want to rent arcade games by the month, but truth be toldwe had no clue how to work on them. Before we knew it our launching was a month away and we had managed to collect about 100 games, but only 10 of those worked!
We understood enough to refurbish a fantastic chunk of the matches, but we kept hitting the same symptom over and over again. All of our monitors will exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating because we had no clue how to fix it. We almost missed our launching, but we eventually clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we discovered about monitor sync 101 and realized that they occasionally need to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On that day, we have to have turned on at least 20 matches, we had put a good deal of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of this puzzle in order to be able to play them. This very small chunk of understanding, gave us the games we had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to continue learning how to fix issues.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying arcade fix, then I ever spent researching in college and the education continues to repay.
For the last couple of years, we have had a mean bug that's crept into our fleet. After we measured the voltage running the matches, 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 electricity.
To fix the symptom, we'd boost the energy supply to run hot which would be helpful for another 3 to six weeks until 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. Because we assumed, it had been caused by poor circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we missed something a lot more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, it would sometimes help, but this insect has managed to brick at least 20 of our games. Well now our Mortal Kombat 2 began to display exactly the 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 root of the case of the drop in voltage.
To achieve this I took my voltage meter, measured the power in the power supply and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring where I could touch cable. When I measured the electricity before it even went to the edge connector, I saw that the voltage had dropped. I suspected the connector between the cable and the power supply. As soon as I crimped on the end of the line to put to a new one, I instantly noticed exactly what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be happy to bet you a quarter, which you can't find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses which we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we may have gotten exactly what we paid for them.
From the outside, the harness looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge cable to conduct the power to the board. That is a whole lot of metal to run a small amount of voltage. It's a part of why I never suspected that it was our culprit.
Once you open this up though, it is possible to 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 cable in the power source to the tap and Voila!
While this easy bug should have been spotted sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it is also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our problem and indoor playground equipment to understand that with very little work, we have another 20 awesome games back on our website. Learning to fix arcade games hasn't been simple and your schooling never ends, but each time you solve a puzzle, the next game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other men and women who have run into similar problem, can save the exact same headache by A.) double checking the wire you are using when you can not get your voltage to travel directly from your power supply to your circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.