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 uses light guns as its primary mode of user interaction (so hitting F1 or F2 to deal with the Terminator's problems is not really an option), the "Raw Thrills" on offer will likely come from attempting to change a CR2032 battery on the motherboard without attracting the ire of the arcade manager.

Then again, perhaps this is indeed a sign of an impending takeover by the machines, with the battery alert there to lull the foolhardy into a false sense of security. "Oho," a would-be player might say, "if the Terminator can't even get past the BIOS boot screen, humanity is likely safe from the perils of artificial intelligence."

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If the majority of the world's tech bros are to be believed, such confidence is misplaced. Terminator Salvation debuted in 2009, and things have moved on apace in the intervening years. OpenAI had yet to become a thing, and Nvidia's chips were boosting game frame rates rather than market performance. 2025 was a different story.

As such, a bit of wobbly voltage from the battery of a Terminator arcade game is a reminder of days past, when a leaky battery or aging hardware could bring down the machines. Popping a quarter or two into the slot was enough to bring the hardware to life temporarily.

Today's artificial intelligences have their own power problems, which are unlikely to be solved by a fresh button battery.

Considerably more than a pocketful of quarters will be needed to sustain the current AI revolution. ®