Hey, #retrocomputing people: I've got a DEC vt100 that reports ROM 2 checksum error (L3 comes on and garbled text is displayed).

I got it a while ago where I suspect it had been unused for a while, but it worked fine for a few weeks where I powered it on every few days. Then one day I was using it and it mistyped something on the screen and locked up, and then it reported ROM upon power cycling it.

As far as I can tell all voltages are good, so maybe the ROM really did just fail in the middle of using it, but I'd have guessed it'd normally fail at powerup.

My next step is to try dumping the ROMs, but I wonder if what experience other people have with failure modes of old hw like this.