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 service menus for these adjustments, classic arcade games typically use a set of switches on the board known as DIP switches. In this post, we will discuss how to adjust these DIP switches so that you can customize the gameplay experience to your liking.

Adjusting Dip Switch Settings On A Board

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0evRVo8WM4

Before we can adjust our DIP (or Dual In-line Package) switches, we must first locate them on our board. Take a look at your board and see if you can find a set of switches all in a row. The DIP switches themselves should be one of two styles: slide or rocker. Slide style DIP switches have a small plastic square that “slides” to indicate the on or off position. Rocker style DIP switches “rock” down or up to indicate the on or off positions respectively. In our video for this post, we demonstrate how to adjust slide style DIP switches but the process is very similar for rocker style DIP switches as well.

Once we have located our DIP switches, we can begin adjusting them. Please note that DIP switch settings are typically only read when the game boots up. As such, make sure your game is turned off when adjusting the DIP switches then turn the game back on for the settings to take effect. Please do not blindly try and adjust these DIP switches as doing so could lead to undesired results. The manual for your game should contain all of the information you need to know about which DIP switches control what settings. If you do not have a manual, please check out the sites below for help locating one.

Arcade Manual Sites:

• The ARCade ARChive -- http://arcarc.xmission.com/
• Crazy Kong Manuals -- http://www.crazykong.com/manuals/
• Textfiles Arcade Manuals -- http://pdf.textfiles.com/manuals/ARCADE/
• MikesArcade.com -- http://www.mikesarcade.com/arcade/manuals.html

Depending on the setting you are trying to change, you might have to adjust multiple DIP switches. For example, the first four switches on your DIP switch might control the amount of coins per play. Your manual should indicate how to set each of these in order to achieve the desired setting. If you are trying to set your game on free play, the setting might be related to the coins per play switches or it could be on a separate switch altogether. Also, some of the games that you encounter might not have a setting for free play in which case it might just be easier to install a credit button which we will discuss in a future post.

Whether you are an arcade operator that needs adjust the coins per credit settings or a collector that likes all of their games on free play, adjusting DIP switches is a valuable skill. Just remember to always consult your manual before adjusting them to make sure you achieve the desired effects. Please leave any questions or suggestions in the comments section below.

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 help you get familiar the JAMMA standard.

Getting Familiar With The JAMMA Standard

www.youtube.com/watch?v=poL25IlGT_w

Before we get started, I would like to mention that I have posted a printable version of the JAMMA pinouts for your convenience. This will come in very handy if you are dealing with JAMMA at any point in the future. Please click the link below to access this document.

http://www.arcaderepairtips.com/jamma.html

JAMMA is a wiring standard that was developed to make switching arcade boards from one arcade cabinet to another easier. JAMMA stands for Japanese Arcade Machine Manufacturers Association and was developed in 1985. Any arcade game that predates this will not be JAMMA and even some games after this are not JAMMA. We recommend checking your manual or the internet before assuming that your arcade board is JAMMA.

A JAMMA harness is composed of a 56-pin connector (28-pins on each side) with wires coming from each of the pins. There are two sides of a JAMMA connector: the parts side and the solder side. The parts side of your board contains all of the surface mounted components while the solder side just contains traces and solder dots. It is important to identify which side is which so that you don’t plug your board in the wrong way. As luck would have it, many JAMMA connectors are labeled so that you can easily identify which side is which along with what each pin goes to.

If your JAMMA connector is not labeled with the pinouts, your first task will be to identify where pin 1 is located. The easiest way to located pin 1 is to use pin 7 which is known as the key and is usually blank. Once you have located pin 7, you’ll noticed that it divides the harness in two 2 halves. The shorter half (pins 1-6, A-F) should contain pin 1 along with all of the wires that go to your power supply. While these wires usually go straight from the power supply to the board, you might notice that someone has jumpered off of them to send power to another part of the cabinet. This is fine and a common practice.

As we look at the longer half of the connector, you will notice some wires going to the monitor. These wires (pins 12-14, N-P) are used to send the display signal to the monitor. There should be a wire for each of your colors (red, green and blue) along with a sync wire and a ground wire. If we look further down the connector, we will find the wires for our joysticks and buttons (pins 17-26, U-d). All JAMMA harnesses support 2 players, however, they might not have the all wires hooked up for each of them. Games that have more than 3-5 buttons per player or more than 2 players usually require a kick harness to work properly. A kick harness is an extra harness that attaches to the board along with the JAMMA harness to allow for the extra inputs.

You might also notice that there are not enough ground wires located on the connector to wire up all of your arcade controls. In this case, you will need to use a technique called daisy chaining. Daisy chaining is a wiring scheme that consists of jumpering a wire off of each connector so that the ground signal will carry over to the next connector. We’ll talk more about daisy chaining when we talk about control panel wiring.

JAMMA wired arcade cabinets take the work out of switching boards between cabinets. In face, the majority of the arcade games that you see today are wired using the JAMMA standard. Knowing the JAMMA standard will carry you far in your arcade repair endeavors. Please leave any questions or suggestion in our comments section below.

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 arcade monitor so that we can make any necessary repairs to it.

Removing And Installing A Monitor Chassis

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNnbEPY7DVM

Before you begin, we recommend unplugging or turning off the power to your arcade game. As we’ve talked about in previous posts, monitors hold an extremely high amount of voltage which can be very dangerous to you should you come in contact with it. Always be safe and take the time to make sure that your arcade game is unplugged when working with the monitor.

On that same note, the first thing we are going to do when attempting to remove a monitor chassis is to disconnect the power wires going to it. Most games use a Molex connector between the power supply and the monitor chassis which allows for a clean and easy disconnect. If your monitor chassis doesn’t have this Molex connector, you might need to cut the wires in order to remove the chassis. If you end up cutting the wires, you might consider installing a Molex connector to make it easier on you in the future. Please see our post on Installing A Molex Connector for more information.

Once we have disconnected power from the arcade monitor, we can remove the anode cup from the tube. Removing the anode cup is very similar to discharging the monitor. The main difference is that instead of just sticking the screwdriver up underneath the anode cup and waiting for a pop, we are going to use the screwdriver to push the prongs of the anode cup together so that we can remove it from the tube. For more information on this please see our post on how to Safely Discharge An Arcade Monitor.

Now that we have removed the anode cup from the tube, we can move on to unplugging the neck board. The neck board is connected to the very back end of the tube. It is usually a square circuit board and has wires connected from it to the main chassis. It might also have a ground wire attached to it from the monitor tube. If it does, make sure that you cut or unplug this wire before trying to remove it. The neck board should come off pretty easy with just a light amount of force. Sometimes you might find that someone used silicon or another adhesive to keep the neck board in place. It is best to remove this before trying to remove the neck board.

With the neck board unplugged, we can now locate and unplug the degaussing coil and yoke wires from the monitor chassis. The degaussing coil runs around the monitor tube and plugs into the monitor chassis via a two prong connector. The yoke wires come off the monitor tube and attach to the chassis via a four prong connector. The connector for the yoke wires is usually keyed with a wider space between one of the outside pins and the rest to make it easy to hook up. If your monitor chassis has two places where the yoke wires can plug in, make sure to remember which set of pins you removed it from. Locate and unplug both sets of connectors.

Next, we are going to located and detach the video wires coming from the board or PCB. These wires are responsible for making sure that your monitor gets the image the board is sending it. Sometime these wires might be split into multiple connectors. Make sure that you notice how these connectors are plugged in before attempting to remove them. Locate this connector and remove it from your chassis.

After all of these steps have been completed, you should be able to unscrew the chassis from the mounting bracket and remove it from your arcade cabinet. If your ground wire was not attached to your neck board like we talked about earlier, make sure that you detach it from the chassis before attempting removal. With your chassis removed, you can now take steps to repair it or send it off.

Installing the chassis back into your arcade cabinet is as easy as doing these steps in reverse. One item to note is that your neck board is keyed and only goes one way. Make sure that you look at both the back of the tube and the neck board so that you can line them up correctly to each other. If you have any questions or suggestions about this post, please leave them in the comments section below.

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 solve the issues caused by these fields.

Using A Degaussing Coil

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xboO2JUvtBM

Before we get started, let’s talk about what a degaussing coil does. The job of the degaussing coil is to demagnetize the shadow mask which is similar to a metal mesh plate located inside your tube. The holes in this plate are aligned to ensure that the electrons from the red, green and blue cathode guns reach the same colored phosphors on the monitor. Should this plate become magnetized, the color and focus of your screen can suffer. Hopefully by demagnetizing the shadow mask you can solve some of the discoloration and focus problems you might be having. Please see our links below for more information on purchasing a degaussing coil.

Buy a Degaussing Coil (CRTs Less Than 19″) from Amazon.com now!

Buy a Degaussing Coil from Arcade Shop now!

Once you have purchased a degaussing coil, you can begin the process of degaussing your monitor. First off, make sure that you have the degaussing coil plugged in and that the power to your arcade game is on. Take the degaussing coil and hold it to the center of your monitor screen. Press the button to active the degaussing coil and move it in small circles across the front of your monitor. Slowly begin to widen the circles as you back away from the monitor. As you do this you will notice the degaussing effect on the monitor start to dwindle. Keep repeating the circles until the coil has no effect on the monitor then release the button. You have now completed the process of degaussing your monitor.

At this point, you might want to check your screen to see if it made a difference in your picture. We sometimes repeat this process if we didn’t get the desired effect the first time. Remember that this process can be used for any CRT based screen not just arcade monitors. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions about degaussing a monitor please leave them below.

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? In this post, we will discuss how to check diodes on your monitor chassis to make sure that they are in working order.

Checking Diodes On An Arcade Monitor

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4l-kosl0vg

The diodes we are talking about are located in the power supply section of your monitor chassis. There are usually about 4 or so located right in a row in this section. Examine your monitor chassis and see if you can find them. In the video, ours were located near a large capacitor. Once you have located these diodes, you can check to see if they are shorted or not.

Before we begin, you might want to refer back to our post on Checking Fuses With A Multimeter to get familiar with the diode test settings on a multimeter.

The process of checking a diode is very similar to checking a fuse except that the indicators are reversed. When we checked fuses, we wanted our meter to generate a long beeping sound or a 0 (ZERO) ohm reading. If our meter reads this while we are checking a diode, this indicates that it is shorted and is not working properly. Shorted diodes can be caused by many things including hooking up power to an arcade monitor that requires an isolation transformer. Always be sure that you are using an isolation transformer on monitors that require it.

If you find a shorted diode, you need to replace it. Desolder it from your board using your desoldering iron or solder wick and solder the new one into place. Always make sure that you replace the shorted diode with another one that has the stripes oriented exactly like the original diode. Also, be sure that all of your power wiring to your monitor is correct before turning it back on. Doing this will save you from damaging another diode and having to repeat this process over again. Once you have replaced these shorted diodes you are finished with this part of your repair.

Sometimes a black monitor screen can mean more than just a power cord or HOT issue. Knowing to check your diodes before moving on to more complex repairs can save you lots of time and effort. Please feel free to leave any questions or suggestions in the comments section below.

When you get your arcade game home for the first time, you might notice that your power plug is in rough shape. Frayed wires, loose connections and missing ground prongs are just some of the issues you might encounter. In this post, we’ll discuss how to replace a plug on a power cord so that you can ensure the playability and safety of your arcade game.

Replacing A Plug On A Power Cord

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAzTC1TFqyQ

Let’s start off by determining if we should replace the power plug or not. Obviously if our plug is in good shape we don’t want to take valuable time to replace it. A couple of things to look for when making this assesment are exposed or frayed wires, missing or bent progs (including the ground prong) and loose connections. Please see the image below for some good replacement candidates.

Once you have determined that your plug is damaged, we can now begin the process of replacing it. Let’s talk about what tools you will need. You will need a screwdriver (phillips or flat depending on your plug), a pair of wire cutters and a pair of wire strippers. We have also found it helpful to have a pocket knife or razor blade handy in case you have to cut the jacket (or outside cord wrapping). If you have any other questions about these tools please refer to our post on Your First Arcade Toolbox.

Now that we have assembled our tools, let’s move on to removing the original plug. Depending on the shape your current plug is in, you might be able to remove it without cutting the wires. We recommend removing your plug this way but there is no harm in just cutting it off either. With the plug removed from the wires, start to inspect the wires for any damage. You might have to cut your wires back further down the cord if they are currently damaged near the end. Once you are satisfied with your wires, remove the insulation and strip the wire ends. We have now successfully prepared our cord for our new plug.

When you have completed removing the original plug and preparing your wires, we can move on to installing our new plug. New plugs can be purchased from a variety of places. We typically purchase our plugs from Home Depot where they run around $5 a piece. Wiring up your new plug is pretty simple. Most of the power cords you are going to encounter have 3 color coded wires: a black wire (hot), a white wire (neutral) and a green wire (ground). The plug that you bought might tell you where to put each wire but if not it should be indicated by different color screws. A copper/bronze screw is typically for the black wire, a silver screw is typically for the white wire and the green screw is typically for the green wire. Insert the correct wires under each of the correct screws and screw each wire down using your screwdriver. Once you have done that, close up your plug enclosure and you are done.

Replacing an old, damaged plug with a new plug is an easy repair that can prevent damage to your arcade game in the long run. It also prevents electrical shocks to people plugging in the game and perhaps electrical fires from shorts in the wiring. Please feel free to leave any questions or suggestions in the comments section below.

With most current arcade games being powered by computers, arcade cabinets can get quite hot these days. Making sure that you have adequate cooling in your cabinet can help prevent your game from overheating. In this post, we’ll discuss how to install a fan in your arcade cabinet so you can increase the longevity of the components inside.

Installing A Fan In An Arcade Cabinet

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JePurpFQ6Kk

First, we must decide what size and type of fan that we want to use. We typically like to use a 4″ fan that uses either 5 or 12 VDC. Since DC voltage is commonly used in arcade games, it is usually easy to locate some power wires to tie the fan into. Also, we recommend getting a fan that has ball bearings if you are worried about the noise level of the fan in your cabinet.

Buy a 4″ Cooling Fan from Radio Shack now!

Let’s take a moment to discuss the concept of cooling. It is the job of a fan to move air through your cabinet. The idea is to draw cooler air in and exhaust warmer air. Most of us learned in high school that hot air is less dense than cold air which causes it to rise. So if you install a fan in the bottom of your cabinet, you probably want that fan to draw the cooler air in. Conversely, if you have a fan at the top of your cabinet, you probably want that fan to exhaust the warmer air out.

With the concept of cooling in mind, let’s pick a location for our fan. The most important thing is to make sure you pick a location where you can easily wire up power to the fan. A fan is no good unless you can get power to it. It’s also good to place your fan somewhere inconspicuous where it doesn’t interfere with other components in your cabinet. If you have small children, make sure that it is difficult for them to gain access to it. If the fan exhausts out, make note of what it might be blowing on. Some people don’t like hot air blowing on their legs.

Once we’ve picked a location, it’s time to trace the fan. With the fan in place, take a writing utensil and trace around the fan. Please note that we will not be cutting out this line. This is just to give you an idea of where to cut your ventilation hole. We typically use a 4″ hole saw with a corded drill to cut our ventilation hole out. Line up the hole saw in the middle of our traced outline of the fan and begin to drill till you have made it all the way through the material you are cutting. You have now successfully made a ventilation hole for your fan.

Buy a DEWALT 4-Inch Standard Hole Saw from Amazon.com now!

Buy a DEWALT 7/16-Inch Shank Quick Change Mandrel from Amazon.com now!

After we have cut our ventilation hole, we can now mount the fan into place. Place the fan inside the traced area we marked before we drilled our ventilation hole. If you have a fan cover, place it first before the fan. Take some screws and screw the fan down to the cabinet. Remember to get screws that are long enough to go through the screw holes on the fan and make contact with the cabinet. You have now successfully mounted the fan in your cabinet.

With the fan mounted, we must now wire power to the fan. Take the wires coming from the fan and strip them. If you are getting voltage directly from the power supply we suggest putting the fork type terminals on the ends. These easily slide under the screws of most switching power supplies. Once you have wired up your fan, you are ready to test. Plug the game in and see if you have a spinning fan. If your fan spins then you have successfully installed a fan in your arcade cabinet.

Before we finish our project, you might want to place either gutter mesh material or a perforated aluminum sheet over your fan to keep people from putting objects in it. This also has the added bonus of making your fan installation job look more professional. You can get these items at most major hardware stores. It’s not a necessity that you do this but it does add a nice finishing touch to your project.

Buy an Aluminum Perforated Sheet from Amazon.com now!

Installing a fan in your arcade cabinet can increase the longevity of your arcade components. Keep your cabinet cool and it should help you enjoy your arcade game for years to come. If you have any questions or suggestions please post them in our comments section below.

When you start troubleshooting your arcade monitor, remember to always start off with the simple fixes before moving on to the more complex ones. Many of us want to install a cap kit before giving the adjustments a tweak or two. In this post, we discuss how to adjust an arcade monitor to achieve the best possible picture.

Adjusting An Arcade Monitor

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUL5TiUYAss

Before you get started, you want to identify what’s wrong with your arcade monitor. The most common problems that can be solved with the monitor adjustments are out of focus, dim or dark picture, scrolling screen and bleeding colors. Obviously if your monitor is not getting power then no amount of adjusting will help you. We recommend checking the power and video wires before making adjustments to make sure that there are no problems in these areas. Also, we would recommend either getting a friend or a mirror to help you with the adjustments. This makes it much easier to know what’s going on with the monitor when you turn an adjustment knob.

First, we’ll start off by locating the focus and brightness controls on the flyback. Locate the flyback on your monitor chassis. It is usually a big black cylinder attached to the anode (located underneath the suction cup) by a red wire. On the flyback there should be two knobs. The top one is usually the focus and the bottom one the brightness. Please see the diagram below.

Some monitors have three knobs on the flyback. If this is the case with your monitor, try turning the knobs just slightly to identify which knob does what.

While there is a brightness on the flyback, there is typically a brightness adjustment on the control board as well. The control board usually contains adjustments for horizontal and vertical hold, brightness and contrast among other things. Control boards can come in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are a separate board attached directly to the chassis or by a group of wires. Other times there are just pots, or potentiometers, soldered directly to the chassis. Please see the diagram below.

If you are having scrolling screen or sync issues, you might try to adjust the horizontal and vertical hold. Everything else on the control board is pretty self explanatory. The contrast is very important if this monitor is located in a light gun game. Light guns depend on a bright monitor to work so make sure that this is adjusted correctly.

Next, let’s take a look at the color adjustments. Color adjustments are usually located on the neck board. The neck board is a small board attached to the back of the tube. Look for some adjustments located either on the top or the edges of this board. These are the color adjustments. Please see the diagram below.

There are typically two adjustments for each color: a drive and a cutoff. The drive affects objects on your screen that are the color of the knob you are adjusting. For instance, if the life bars on your Street Fighter II arcade game are not red enough for your liking, you would want to adjust the red drive. You can think of the cutoff more like the “tint” on your monitor. If there are no red objects on your screen but you see sort of a reddish tint on your monitor then you need to adjust your red cutoff.

One thing to keep in mind is that many games have monitor test screens in their test mode that allow you to easily see adjustments that need to be made. Check your arcade game manual for more information. We also recommend marking your pot and your board with a magic or permanent marker once you have found the adjustments to be to your liking. Some people like to put super glue or silicon on these knobs at this point. We discourage this practice because monitor tubes can change over time and, as such, these adjustments can change. Adding super glue or silicon to your knobs will make an adjustment that should take just a second or two take ten minutes or more.

Taking time to adjust your arcade monitor before doing a cap kit can save you time and money. Make sure you adjust your monitor on a regular basis so you can continue to enjoy your arcade game in the future. If you have any other comments, questions or suggestions about adjusting arcade monitors feel free to leave a message below in our comments section.

While marquee and coin lights do not effect the gameplay of an arcade game, they do provide a more authentic arcade atmosphere and experience. In this post, we will discuss the steps that you can take to troubleshoot your arcade lighting issues.

Replacing Lights In An Arcade Cabinet

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZQI5nOHI5w

Before we get started, we would like to thank all of you that gave your hard earned money to our HD Camcorder fund. Through your generous contributions we were able to purchase a new pocket camcorder with high definition capabilities. This post contains the first video that we’ve shot with the new camera and the results seem to be very good. Thanks again and enjoy our new high definition videos.

The first type of arcade lighting that people think of is typically the marquee light. This is the light that acts as a backlight for the glass or plexiglass marquee. In most games, florescent light bulb fixtures are used; however, older games such as Pac Man have regular filament light bulb fixtures. We prefer florescent light bulbs as they are brighter and tend to give your marquee a much better look when lit up.

Getting to your marquee light fixture in most arcade games is pretty simple. You can start off by removing the marquee. The marquee typically has two metal pieces of angle iron that are screwed into the cabinet that hold it in. Unscrew either the top or the bottom piece and remove it and the marquee from the cabinet. This should give you access to your marquee light fixture.

Once we have access to the light fixture, we can start our troubleshooting. We usually start off simple by trying to replace the bulb. If you replace the bulb and it still doesn’t work, check the wiring going to the marquee light to make sure you are getting power to the fixture. If it is a florescent light fixture, you can also try replacing the starter which is a round metal piece that looks like a capacitor. Just twist it out of the holder and take it to your local hardware store to find a suitable replacement. If a new starter doesn’t work, we usually just buy a new fixture. We highly recommend ordering your florescent light fixtures from twistedquarter.com. They sell the newer style florescent light bulb fixtures for about $10. A very good deal from an excellent retailer.

Now that our marquee light is working, lets move on to our coin and button lights. You can gain access to your coin door lights by opening your coin door and taking a look at the lights behind your pricing labels. If they are not working, take them out and give them a good inspection. If they look burnt, see if they have a number on them before throwing them away. This number will help you identify what type of bulb you need to replace them with. The most common bulbs are typically 161 for 12-14 VDC and 555 for 5-7 VDC. Please check out the chart below for other bulb numbers and their voltages.

If you suspect that you have bought the wrong bulbs, an easy way to tell is by the brightness of the bulb. If the bulb is super bright then your bulb’s voltage rating is lower than the voltage going to your socket. The same goes for if your bulb is super dim except for that your bulb’s voltage rating is higher than the voltage going to your socket. You can, of course, always check the lamp sockets with a multimeter to find out the voltage.

Push button lights use the same type of holders and bulbs as the coin door lights except for they clip behind a push button. These lights are usually removed by either pulling or twisting the holder from the back side of the push button. You can check the voltage just like you did with the coin door lights. If you don’t get a voltage reading then check your wiring. You can also check to make sure you have the voltage wires and not the push button wires.

A well lighted arcade cabinet typically increases the number of plays you get in an arcade and gives your cabinet a more authentic feel. Please let us know if you have any question or suggestions by posting in our comments section below.

Molex connectors can provide a handy way to easily remove or replace items (such as a monitor chassis or control panel) without rewiring. In this post, we’ll discuss how to install a Molex connector into your preexisting arcade cabinet wiring.

Installing A Molex Connector

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftm_oSztTrA

Most people tend to use Molex as a term for any and all types of connectors, however, Molex is actually a brand of connector. The brand Molex has become so popular that, like Kleenex, it has become the name by which all connectors are called. Molex connectors are great to use in places where you might have to disconnect wiring in the future as it eliminates the need to rewire and solder. Today, we’re going to discuss how to install a Molex connector into your arcade monitor power cord.

Before we get started, it’s important to have the Molex connectors and pins you’re going to use on hand. For this job, we will be using size 0.93″ Molex round pins and 2 pin Molex connectors. There are more sizes (such as 0.100″ and 0.62″) and types (such as flat) available but we have found that 0.93″ is easier to work with for jobs that require round pins. Make sure you order both male and female Molex connectors and pins as you need both to make the connection.

Once we have our Molex connectors, we can begin our project. Take the wires that you want to place the Molex connector on and strip them about 1/4 of an inch from the top. This should give you enough wire to make a good connection with the Molex pin. Pick up your D-Sub Pin Crimper and one of your Molex pins. Place the pin in the correct slot of your crimper with the open part of the pin towards the floor. A good way to remember this is to use the tee pee and indian analogy from the video. It sounds silly but it really does help you remember.

Now that you have correctly placed the pin in your crimper, place the wire you stripped earlier into the open end of the pin and then squeeze the crimper. It’s good to squeeze the pin using the crimper a second time from a sideways position to make sure that it’s making a good connection to the wire. This is known as Tim’s Patented Double Squeeze method.

Let’s now place our Molex pin we crimped into the correct Molex connector. Take a look at your pin and see if it’s male or female. A good rule of thumb when placing your pins into connectors is to place female pins into the male connector and vice versa. While this is not a requirement, this is a very common configuration. Push your pin into your connector and you should hear a snap. This snap indicates that the pin has been successfully installed. If you do not hear the snap, you can take a small flat head screwdriver (such as a jeweler’s screwdriver) and push on the pin until you hear it snap.

If you screw up on a Molex connector or if you just need to repin it, you can use a Molex pin extraction tool. The Molex pin extraction tool allows you remove the pins from a connector without damaging the connector or the wire. You can order it from the Amazon.com link below. To use it, push the extraction tool into a connector with a pin in it and gently pull on the wire connected to the pin. The pin should pop out of the connector allowing you to repin the wire. The alternative is to cut the wire but you might have limited length to work with.

Buy the Molex Pin Extraction Tool (0.093) from Amazon.com now!

Installing Molex connectors is a valuable skill for any arcade repair technician to have. For more information on Molex connectors, please visit http://www.marvin3m.com/connect/index.htm. Please feel free to leave any questions or suggestions below.