Universal Axial Model 6287A communication

Hello All We have a Universal Model 6287A that is estimated to be about 25 years old. It has run fine for most of it's life but recently has stopped communicating with it's host computer, whenever any commands were attempted to be sent to the machine, the display on the host computer would be the first letter of the command followed by a question mark then the ampersand sign. You could put numbers in sequence up to 7 and as soon as you hit 8 the display would revert to the question mark or ampersand sign. When the machine would be un palmed and the interlock button pressed the machine's table would travel all the way to the right then stop. After going through one procedure outlined from the Universal Knowledge Base, Case#IM-KB-00113, and ensured that we had a good ground between the machine and PC,, we were checking connections to the J-11 board and then checked the voltage on the 3.6 volt batteries on both boards and the one on the Serial Expansion Board was only reading 1.5 volts, basically dead. We put a battery pack together that read 3.1 volts and wired it to the dead one but the host computer would still not communicate. The only thing that changed is that when the machine would be un palmed and the interlock satisfied, the table would not move to the right, but the machine would not zero either. My guess is that when that battery failed the controllers exec was lost. There is an exec file in the host computer and when we tried to load it with our battery pack wired in, it would not load. They have also tried swapping out the Pc Cd, card,(the one with the run/halt switch on it), to no avail. They have ordered replacement batteries for the J-11, (I was only at that plant working on other equipment and only had a couple hours to trouble shoot the axial before going back to my own plant) Any suggestions for anything else to look at would be appreciated, Thank you.

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