Saitek Mephisto Exclusive Senator - Repair / Fix!

My older brother bought one of these rather nice chess computers a few years ago and it has seen a good number of games over the years; then recently it had developed a fault; the fault appeared intermittent at first but soon got to a point where it was unusable, so I offered to take a look at it.

After stripping it down and then some inspection I noticed that the ribbon cable had actually fractured, this was probably due to design fault by the original designers / manufacturers. I can only assume that after years of use of the pull-out tray stressed and wore out the ribbon cable.


After purchasing a new ribbon cable from Ebay and a lot of soldering later, it was back to it's old self, I also replaced the internal backup battery while I was at it.

Below are a few pics showing the repair and the inner workings of this top-end chess computer.