We were confident that individuals would want to let arcade games by the month, but truth be told, 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 matches, but only 10 of them worked!
All our monitors will display a scrambled image on the monitor. It was super frustrating since we had no clue how to repair it. We nearly missed our launch, but we eventually clued in on what was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and realized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently based on the match. On that day, we must have turned on at least 20 games, that we had already put a good deal of hard work into, but were missing this last piece of the puzzle in order to have the ability to play them. This tiny chunk of knowledge, gave us the games we needed to get started and was sufficient to keep us motivated to keep learning how to fix issues.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying arcade repair, I ever spent studying in school and the instruction continues to repay.
For the last few years, we have had a mean bug that is slipped into our fleet.
To solve the symptom, we would raise the energy supply to run hot which would be helpful for the following 3 to six weeks until the power supplies would burn . After running into this puzzle a couple of times, we began to put the matches into deep storage until we can figure out why they kept failing. Because we assumed, it was being caused by poor circuit boards trying to draw too much energy, we overlooked something much more evident.
After cleansing the chips, it might sometimes assist, but this bug has managed to throw at 20 of our games. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 started to display the same symptoms and quite honestly if we pull this one by the fleet, our customers will riot, so I sat down to get into the origin of the case of the drop in voltage.
To do this I took my voltage meter, then measured the power at the power supply and then began spreading the 5V line and measuring wherever I could touch wire. When I measured the electricity before it went into the edge connector, I saw 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 place to a new one, I instantly noticed what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I would be willing to bet you a quarter, that you cannot find a better bargain on the jamma harnesses that we purchase. Unfortunately, it seems like we may have gotten what we paid for them.
From the outside, the tap looks as though it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to conduct the power to the board. That is a lot of metal to conduct a small quantity of voltage. It's part of why I never suspected it was our offender.
As soon as you open it up though, you can see that from the outside it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it is 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 seen sooner and has caused us a lot of headaches, it is also incredibly exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with very little work, we've got another 20 amazing matches back on our site . Learning how to correct kids arcade games games has never been easy and your schooling never ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the next game gets easier and easier to repair.
Hopefully, other people who've run into similar problem, can save the exact same aggravation by A.) double checking the wire you're using when you can not receive your voltage to travel cleanly from your power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying just slightly more better quality jamma harnesses.