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Beginner with question about seeing sparks
Question from Bebe: Hi there, I sprawled your blog and watched many videos which are all well done and informative. Thank you for posting. I am fresher than fresh in beginning to understand arcade units and the working components.
I have a restaurant and decided to buy a couple of games. One of them being a Tekken Tag Tournament which had a power cord that could also disconnect from the unit itself. So I have to plug it into the unit first then the wall outlet. The cord was missing a ground outlet and of course I watched your videos after knowing this is not a good thing. Also the cord and prongs were in a raggedy shape to begin with. I plugged it in last week (not a shared outlet) and it was working fine. I was off for one day and when I returned to work, I noticed the unit had the lights on but the screen was blank and flickered every so often as if it wanted to power up then it blanked out again. This repeated over and over in interludes of a minute or so. When the screen flickered it didn’t show the game home page it was mostly blocks or lines of lights.
I thought it might be the outlet so I tried plugging it into another outlet and it repeated the same unusual patterns. So I plugged it back into its original outlet and after 20 seconds or so sparks popped from the power supply on the arcade unit. I saw the sparks come directly from where the power cord is plugged into the arcade unit. That caused the breakers to kick in and I simultaneously unplugged the power cord from the wall. I want to fix my arcade but I fear it’s in vain. If it sparked at the power supply would that have caused more damage to circuit board? Did I fry my unit? Is there any hope that I would just have to replace the power supply unit itself?
Any help or advice is much appreciated. I saw on the website you guys service East Texas, would that include Houston? Sorry I did not keep this short and simple, I figured the more details the better it was to analyze initial problem. Help me please, just point me in the right direction. Thanks for your time.
Bebe
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Bebe,
First off, thank you for your kind words about our content. We are glad that you found it informative. Now on to your questions…
Yes, your power supply could have done some damage to your circuit board when it sparked. The only way to know for sure would be either to replace the power supply in your current cabinet with a new one or test your Tekken Tag Tournament board in another JAMMA cabinet to see if it works. Yes, there is a lot of hope that if you just replace the power supply unit itself that the game will work and that is what we would recommend doing first before suspecting the board.
Yes, we are located in East Texas but we are unfortunately not taking any repair jobs at the moment. We do have a lot of friends in the Houston area and would be glad to connect you with some of them if you would like to get some help repairing your game. In fact, our friend Erich (who has been on our Q&A Podcast several times talking about arcade repair) lives in Houston and I’m sure he would be happy to help you out. Let me know if this is the route you would like to go and we’ll work out the details.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your questions and good luck with your repair.
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