When troubleshooting an arcade game, you might get to a point where you start to suspect that your board has issues. Swapping in a tested, working board in JAMMA wired cabinets is an easy way to find out if it’s your current board or the cabinet that’s causing your issues. In this post, we will [...]

When an individual button or joystick direction stops working properly, we tend to blame the problem on bad wiring or a faulty switch. When several buttons and/or joysticks stop responding, the problem can usually be traced back to faulty ground wiring between these parts. In this post, we will discuss how to connect (or reconnect) [...]

If you’ve played many arcade games in your time, you’ve probably noticed that not every game uses the same amount of buttons. For instance, fighting games such as Street Fighter 2 are known for their 6-button layout while some classic games such as Pac Man require no buttons at all. Due to these differing configurations, [...]

While replacing a plug on a power cord can fix some issues, there might be times when you find that the cord itself is causing problems. Frayed and exposed cords can lead to inconsistent power issues with your arcade cabinet that can cause the parts inside to break down earlier than expected. In this post, [...]

Most of the time when we hear symptoms such as color bleeding or shadowing, our first thought might be to install a cap kit. While cap kits are known to solve problems such as these, it could just be that our convergence rings are out of alignment and need to be adjusted to correct the [...]

Just like most console video games, arcade games have different options that you can adjust in order to change the gameplay experience. Options such as difficulty, number of lives and number of plays per coin are just some of the options that can be changed on your arcade game. While newer arcade games usually use [...]

Back when arcade games first came out every game had a different wiring scheme which made trying to swap a board from one game to another a very difficult task. This problem compelled the arcade manufacturers to get together to create a standard and thus the JAMMA standard was born. In this post, we will [...]

The majority of problems you will encounter with arcade monitors will involve working with the monitor chassis. In order to properly work on or repair a monitor chassis, we must be able to remove it from our arcade cabinet. In this post, we will discuss how to remove and install a monitor chassis from an [...]

Sometimes when you move a game you might find that your monitor has some areas of discoloration or that your once bright colors now appear somewhat washed out. This might be due in part to some unwanted magnetic fields interfering with your screen. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use a degaussing coil to [...]

When a monitor just has a black screen, it’s a pretty good indication that it’s not getting power. The typical places to start with this kind of issue would be the power cord and the HOT, but lets say that you’ve checked them and they are not your problem. Where do you go from here? [...]