Every three years the CPS-III game cartridges have to get new backup batteries or else you risk the battery dying. What happens when the battery dies? The battery powering the hash table on the cartridge that unlocks the game dies and the hash is erased, making your game unplayable and turning a piece of arcade hardware into a big paperweight. It’s original purpose was to prevent piracy, but I don’t see how it helped to curb piracy myself. What you’re supposed to do is send your cartridge in to Capcom and they take it apart, replace the batter, and send it back to you. Well the game is pretty dated now and what are individual owners supposed to do? In my case my 3rd Strike cartridge was specially modified by a previous owner to make changing out the batteries a snap, literally.

Step 1: Pick up a new 1/2 AA battery. Radioshack carries them, even though the employees at the store weren’t aware of their existence.

Step 2: Power on the machine and allow it to finish booting up.

Step 3: Locate old backup battery on the CPS-III game cartridge.

Step 4: Remove the old backup battery with a small flathead screwdriver.

Step 5: Pop new battery into place, making sure you use the same +/- orientation as the last backup battery.

There you go, I’m good for another three years. Speaking of three years, I can’t believe it’s been three years since I picked this machine up and brought it back into working order. You can check all that action out from early 2007 right here. Thanks to the dedicated mod and arcade cab community. The original battery swap involved the same battery, but you had to solder positive and negative leads into place on the cartridge. I have no idea how common this snap-on battery modification is, but it squashes a lot of headaches for sure.