Hi, Watching all the recent activity about the bad memory battery replacements scared me sufficiently to go ahead and open up my M-102 and M-100 to check them. I did, and sure enough the battery in the M-100 had started to corrode but luckily with very little reaching the motherboard, so I whipped that puppy out, and I'll hit up arcadeshopper for some replacements :-) The M-100 is back together (minus a battery) and working great.
The battery in the M-102 looked OK but I think I'll go ahead and replace it as well. Cheap insurance. However, I messed up the re-assembly of the ribbon cable for the keyboard. I agree with Josh that they cheaped out on building the M-102, although it was still working after 30 years so I guess I can't really complain :-) I have not succeeded in re-installing the ribbon cable into the edge connector on the keyboard end. It turns out that it's difficult to get a straight-line force to insert the edge. Some metal tracks on the end of the ribbon have moved and I'm concerned that if I keep fiddling with it I'll tear it up even further. I've left it disconnected while I think about it some more. I'm wondering if I can glue the tracks down on the ribbon or something similar? The keyboard connectors on the M-100 are much more sturdy and I had no trouble at all getting that back together. Any thoughts about how to proceed from here? The keyboard ribbon cable on the M-102 is the only problem at this point. All the caps in both machines looked good, no sign of swelling or leakage. Cheers, Bert p.s. the REXCPM is going into the working M-100. That was always the plan since the M-102 has a REX classic in it.
