Apollo 1240 Battery not holding time

[Jope]

Originally Posted by StompinSteve

Long story short, I can't use his RTC module. I must now find one that works with my version of the 1D4 board.

You won't be able to use any clock port device until you solder the pin header into the correct position. The rest of the pins are just ram expansion pins and can't be used on any production a1200, since they already come with 2MB of Chip RAM.

[jbenam]

You can just find a TV technician or someone handy with a soldering iron (beware of friends with $5 soldering irons that say "this is easy, I can do it", lifting contacts is very easy unless you have experience with old PCBs) and let him/her solder the missing pins. Afterwards your RTC *should* work.

[Chucky]

there is no other "clockport" on the amiga. so if you had one that had the connector located on the wrong place. you need to desolder and put it in the correct place.
period.

[StompinSteve]

So what you guys are saying is that my A1200 motherboard, currently, effectively, has NO clock-port ?

[Chucky]

technically all A1200 have a clockport. but commodore of some stupid reason did solder the connector at the wrong pins on a series. on those boards. this connector needs to be moved.

[StompinSteve]

Well I have definitely don't have the skills for that. I will have to go back to my Blizzard 1230 mk4 as it has a working RTC with battery.
Will need to sell my Apollo 1240 as it's useless to me without a battery backed RTC (battery & RTC are removed from the board now).

[Chucky]

why is RTC important? it is not that you write mail etc on it..
well I use a NTP server on the internet instead of RTC more exact and no damn batteries to think of.

[rabidgerry]

I had a similar issue with my Apollo 1260 (it was converted from a 1240). There is a thread here knocking about somewhere. I gave up basically.

I swapped the chip out for an epson equivalent that apparently doesn't need a crystal to get around the issue of perhaps a dodgy crystal and still the fucking thing will work for a little while and then just gradually start losing track of time literally.

I totally gave up. Although I bought some oki chips and had the idea of perhaps trying to swap out the epson for the original kind (the oki) and then swap the crystal out as well. I spent a lot of time trying to fix it. Thought it was a battery to big with and of course it isn't.

[StompinSteve]

Originally Posted by Chucky

why is RTC important? it is not that you write mail etc on it..
well I use a NTP server on the internet instead of RTC more exact and no damn batteries to think of.

At every system start, it's somewhere in the year 2007. Workbench is gonna freak out when the date and time are not set correctly. Errors like "file has date in the future" etc. mess up filesystems. I don't have a Network card in my machine and don't intend to have one.

As I wrote before, I'm after the original Amiga Experience. Having an actual Amiga 4000/40 again is not possible due to the insane prices being asked. And 99% of the time these machines are complete Frankenstein machines that have little to do with the original machine.

For me, things like 68060 CPU's and networked Amiga's have no business being in an original Amiga. Nor does AmigaOS 3.1.4 or higher. I use plain WB31 without any pretty icon sets or stuff like that.

WHDload borders on acceptability as it's basically impossible to play games from floppies nowadays (try to find DD floppies which have not rotted away, have mould-spores all over and have more bad sectors than the government has bad officials).
Things like CF cards as hard-drives are an undesired necessity. My HDD broke and I don't expect other IDE hard-drives to last. There are plenty for sale on eBay but they won't last either when used regularly. So a CF HDD is the only realistic option even if it's completely out of place.

I don't expect anyone to agree or understand. I'm not seeking to start an almost religious discussion here

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by StompinSteve

I don't expect anyone to agree or understand. I'm not seeking to start an almost religious discussion here

All that is fine, whatever you feel like/prefer. I just thought I might learn something about this issue you have as I've something similar. Totally shit that you don't have a normal clock port though on the motherboard.

[Irek´72]

Well, I had similar problems with my 1240 Apollo card. The time could be set and it remained stable after switching off the computer (so far so good) but the date always remained on September 2007. I asked my friend if he could help me. After a long search he managed to find the cause of my problem. One of the tracks from the clock battery was minimally damaged after the fix with a little bit of wire everything was okay again.

There are a few people in the forum who are very familiar with Apollo's cards and with a little luck can fix it again.

[jlin_au]

Hi StompinSteve,

With the Apollo 1240 card removed from the Amiga 1200 and your replacement battery installed on the card check the voltage across pins 1 (gnd) and 18 (Vdd) of the 18 pin RTC IC (e.g. a OKI MSM6242 or equivalent IC).

The backup voltage Vdd from the battery needs to read greater than 2 volts across pins 1 and 18 on this RTC chip to power it so it keeps time and settings when your Amiga is powered off. The crystal needs to be connected between pins 17 and 16 of this IC and should have two capacitors connected one from each of the two crystal legs on these same two pins to the backup voltage Vdd supply.

When the Card is powered by the amiga Vdd is driven to 5V to charge the RTC battery.

see https://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datash.../MSM6242B.html for details on this RTC IC