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It's always humbling repairing a machine the same age as yourself. And some of them are in better condition than I am! How many other devices and appliances in your home are 38 years old? Not many, I'll bet!


Anyway. A quick call out to get a Jokerz up and running again. There was nothing happening at boot up except for an "adjustment" message on the display. However, you couldn't read all of it as only the top display was working. The full message should actually read "adjustment failure" which means that the battery backup has failed. One look at the batteries showed why... they were toast! New battery holder and new batteries installed. Thankfully they had already been relocated from the CPU board at some point in the past. A great idea as it saves the CPU board from death if the batteries leak like this.


Now onto the display. Voltages were all good and data signals all good. Took a closer look at the display to see what was going on. The display is actually made up of two separate glass panels. If you see white particulates and dark segments throughout the panel, it's a sure fire sign that it has outgassed, just like this bottom one had. New display on order.


Gave the game a clean, changed some rubber rings, fixed a bunch of non-working lamps, and adjusted a couple of switches. Playing very well; it's a pleasure when older machines are taken care of!