Holy ****, a useful reply… honestly wasn’t expecting that on this forum. Log in to see images!

(It makes sense too)

Well, right now I’m fighting another problem. I pulled off the fried old chips, but forgot that surface mounted **** usually has ****ing dobs of SUPER GLUE under them… serving what purpose, I do not know. But I pulled two pads off the board I need to reconstruct when I get the new part. Meanwhile I was expecting to use two backlights on the lower part of the screen, which should work just fine (yay, LCD screen on my workbench again, instead of a 15-year-old piece of **** CRT!).

Problem I encountered… after putting the screen back in and powering it up, no backlight at all. Euh. I found that one of the pads that got pulled off interrupted a circuit, so I just bridged that back together, hopefully it works. If not, well, ****.