Arcade Game And Love Have Seven Things In Common
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 would exhibit a scrambled picture on the monitor. It was super frustrating because we had no clue how to repair it. We nearly missed our launching, but we finally clued in on what exactly was causing our probablem once we learned about monitor sync 101 and recognized that they sometimes have to be hooked up differently depending on the game. On this day, we must have turned on at least 20 games, that we had already put a lot of hard work into, but were missing this final piece of the puzzle in order to be able to play them. This tiny chunk of understanding, gave us the games we had to begin and was enough to keep us motivated to keep learning how to correct issues.
Five decades later, I spend more time studying arcade fix, I spent researching in college and the instruction continues to pay off.
For the last few years, we've experienced an average bug that's crept into our fleet. The matches would work good following refurbishment, but three to six months later getting them turned on, they would all start to neglect. When we measured the voltage running the games, we'd consistently see a 0.2 to 0.5 drop from the 5V voltage and couldn't quite figure out why the PCB board appeared to suck up power.
To fix the symptom, we'd raise 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 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 had been caused by bad circuit boards hoping to draw too much power, we missed something much more obvious.
After cleaning the chips, indoor playground equipment it would sometimes help, but this insect has managed to brick at 20 of our games. Well today, our Mortal Kombat 2 began to exhibit exactly the same symptoms and quite honestly 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 electricity in the power source and then began tracing the 5V line and measuring where I could touch wire. When I measured the power before it went into 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 over the end of the lineup to put to a new one, I instantly noticed what my issue was.
We love getting a good deal and I'd be happy to bet you a quarter, so that you cannot find a better deal on the jamma harnesses that we buy. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have gotten what we paid for them.
From the outside, the harness looks like it uses a thick 18 gauge wire to conduct the power to the board. That's a whole lot of metal to run a small quantity of voltage. It's part of why I suspected it was our offender.
As soon as you open it up though, it is possible to see that from the outside it seems 18 gauge, but on the inside it is short quite a bit of metal. The solution was easy, run a thicker cable in 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 seen sooner and has caused us a great deal of headaches, it's also extremely exciting to figure out the origin of our difficulty and to know that with hardly any work, we have another 20 awesome matches back on our site . Learning to correct arcade games has never been easy and your education never ends, but every time you solve a puzzle, the following game becoming easier and easier to fix.
Hopefully, other people who have run into similar problem, can save themselves the same aggravation by A.) double assessing the wire you're using when you can't get your voltage to journey directly from the power source into a circuit boards and B.) paying only a little bit more better quality jamma harnesses.
