A3000 clock fails under 1.3, but fine under 3.1?

[Warty]

I have a 3000 with some battery damage. I have removed the battery, cleaned up as best I can, and soldered in a replacement from AmigaStore (but with wires, not directly on MB because I also have an Indivision ECS v2 in this machine, and it eats some of the battery's space.

So under 3.1, this works fine as far as I can tell. It remembers the date/time, for example. (not sure if there is other stuff I could test?)

Under 1.3, I get a startup message Could not find battery backed up clock. This happens whenever SetClock is attempted.

I found an older post on the interwebs, and tried this suggestion:

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Perhaps it's just stuck. Open a shell window and enter Setclock Reset. If it still does not work, try this: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online...startClock.lha
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Neither set clock reset nor the RestartClock utility seem to have made any difference (although, perhaps relevant, it did reset the date/time as far as 3.1 was concerned). Under 1.3, still get the error every time.

If I run SysINfo under 1.3, it detects the clock.

It's not a big deal obviously, but just curious if there's anything (relatively simple) I could do to get it working under 1.3?

[thomas]

Of course force-cleaning the clock address space does not help. If the clock works with 3.1 but not on 1.3, then it's a software problem.

There are two different clock chips used on various Amiga models and it might be that the older SetClock command only supports one of them. Apparently your Amiga has the other one.

Try if the SetClock command from this page makes a difference: https://www.amigaforever.com/classic/download/

[mark_k]

The A3000 Install disk apparently contains a version of SetClock which works with the A3000 clock chip.

[Warty]

Originally Posted by thomas

Of course force-cleaning the clock address space does not help. If the clock works with 3.1 but not on 1.3, then it's a software problem.

There are two different clock chips used on various Amiga models and it might be that the older SetClock command only supports one of them. Apparently your Amiga has the other one.

Try if the SetClock command from this page makes a difference: https://www.amigaforever.com/classic/download/

That fixes it! (Presumably the error message about clock not found was just a factor of the error handling in the old version not knowing what to do with its Y2K problem? certainly nothing in the readme that would indicate the upgraded version does anything else, but who knows...)

As always, thanks Thomas!

[Warty]

Originally Posted by mark_k

The A3000 Install disk apparently contains a version of SetClock which works with the A3000 clock chip.

I might not have that version of install. What I have is a 2.1 install, 370166-01, and it doesn't have ANY version of SetClock on it.

There is an A3000 install disk ADF around, for 2.0, and that has a 688 byte version of SetClock on it. The one commodore's readme said to replace was if you had between I think 4-7k version. The new one was bigger than 7k though. Wonder what got cut out for the tiny version that is in later versions of OS.

[Matt_H]

Expanding on Thomas's post, the standard 1.3 version of SetClock only works with A500/A2000 RTCs. The original A3000 Install disk (the one for the 1.4/SuperKickstart ROMs to dual-boot 1.3 and 2.0) includes a special 1.3 version of SetClock that's compatible with the A3000.

The version on Cloanto's site is a further improvement of the A3000-compatible version.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Warty

Wonder what got cut out for the tiny version that is in later versions of OS.

Well, the code to read the clock was removed

The new Kickstart has battclock.resource which does all the hardware handling. The new SetClock command only needs to call system functions to do its job.

The older version of SetClock contains all the code to find and read (and write) the clock chip. Probably the Y2K version is so big because it can handle both clock chips.

[Jope]

Battclock.resource also exists in the superkick 1.3 bonus.

$ romtool scan bonus.1.3-37.175 
@000006c8  +00000758  NT_UNKNOWN    +101  rom_addmem  rom_addmem
@0000079c  +0000330c  NT_DEVICE      +10  scsi.device  scsidisk 37.19 (10.5.91)
@00003318  +00003d54  NT_RESOURCE    +45  battclock.resource  battclock 37.3 (11.3.91)
@00003d68  +00003f64  NT_RESOURCE    +44  battmem.resource  battmem 37.3 (4.3.91)
@00003f9e  +00004944  NT_LIBRARY    +103  utility.library  utility 37.3 (13.2.91)
@000049b8  +00004a30  NT_UNKNOWN    +115  _The Permissor_  _The Permissor_
@00004ac0  +00005004  NT_UNKNOWN     -45  Magic 36.14  Magic 36.14 (25.7.90)

The version of SetClock that the A3000 V36 installer copies to the WB_1.3 partition seems to be aware of battclock.resource based on a quick hex dump. 6916 bytes, md5 149bd28e05509fd5b16c12134fc410dd

[Warty]

ah. So I could actually copy that 688 byte version onto my 1.3 partition, and be fine. I'll try that today. When I switched to SCSI2SD on this A3000, I set up the 1.3 directory by hand, because I didn't have that installer disk. I probably copied a non-A3000 version of 1.3 WB onto the partition.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Warty

ah. So I could actually copy that 688 byte version onto my 1.3 partition, and be fine. I'll try that today. When I switched to SCSI2SD on this A3000, I set up the 1.3 directory by hand, because I didn't have that installer disk. I probably copied a non-A3000 version of 1.3 WB onto the partition.

The updated SetClock is basically the only A3000 specific thing there, so don't worry. :-)

I just checked, the 688 byte SetClock wants to open V36 of dos.library for readargs, so unfortunately it won't run on 1.3 and you need the modified 1.3 compatible SetClock.

There is a suitable one on TOSEC: Workbench v2.0 rev 36.102 (1990)(Commodore)(A3000)(Disk 3 of 3)(Install)[m].adf in :Copy2WB1/c

[Warty]

ah, thanks for the explanation. I think I'm just going to relax: the modified one I put in there works just fine, and if there aren't other differences, there's not much to do "better".

[Jope]

Ah yes, the one at amigaforever.com is of course the superior choice. :-)