94 ranger issues

A buddy of mine has a 94 ranger with the 2.3. He is having some issues and he went down to Autozone to see if they could hook it up to a diagnostic machine to see what kind of codes came up. They told him they could only go back as far as 96. Is there any other way to run it on a machine to figure out his issues without throwing money at parts "hoping" it will work?

All Autopart stores probably won't have the reader, you should have it diagnosed by a Mechanic, and fix according to his/her recommendation.

96 they switched to the obd2 systems i think thats whats its called.