Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

Bork!Bork!Bork! The baddest of AI bad guys, the Terminator, has confirmed what the vast majority of IT professionals already know. The machines are not about to rise, not until they can deal with that pesky battery voltage.

Spotted by The Register's very own US editor in a New York arcade, an elderly Terminator Salvation arcade game is struggling to boot and reporting what is likely to be a borked motherboard battery.

In days of yore, arcade hardware relied on exotic custom silicon – this writer has a particular fondness for the Sega System 16 and OutRun chippery, for example – but the borked screen here indicates that Skynet runs on some decidedly prosaic PC hardware. The Phoenix BIOS message on boot will be familiar to many, and the battery error suggests that whatever is keeping the BIOS settings alive is not long for this world.

While the game itself ...