Never undestimate the harness! It's pretty much the weakest link!

tigerstyle

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Never undestimate the harness! It's pretty much the weakest link!

I've had random issues with my dedicated MK1 cabinet over the past two years; resets; and in the year; the monitor had this strange 'rumbling' effect. Its hard to describe. Anyone last night this very cool guy who sold me most of my cab was over to deliver my latest purchase, a Terminator 2; and while the game was warming up; he decided to check out my MK as he knew it had problems.

He checked the power supply, the voltages were perfect and solid; check the monitor, check for shorts, and suddenly, he poked the jamma connector. The game instantly rebooted. Then when he would touch the cables -- instant reboots. he gave the connector a solid epic cleanup (turned out they were super dirty), and replaced the pins; and also cleaned up the edge connector on the board.

He replugged everything and boom! The game was perfect! No more reboots, the colors were somehow super clear, no more 'rumbles', no more reboot, I left the cab running by itself for a couple of hours, I finished the game twice, and no reboots, NOTHING.

All those years, all those problems were related to the stupid harness! ARG!
 
Been there, done that. I wish all fixes were this simple.........
 
I often re-pin the harnesses of machines, especially older machines that have odd problems. I have found that it solves many of the nagging problems others experience with their machines. Here is my short list of things that I think need to be done to a game before I allow it to go anywhere public:

Rebuild monitor
Rebuild or replace power supply
Re-pin harness(es)
Rebuild, or at least clean, joysticks


Using this basic list of stuff I even managed to make two different Pole Position cabs reliable enough for public use. One went down after about four years but a quick check found that an edge connector walked off slightly during a move and it came right back up after reseating. They are both running strong now with over 5 years of use.
 
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