Falcon 030 battery issues

[geoanas]

Hi all !
I have a Falcon 030 which has a dead battery.(no more clock )
I am wondering about the potential dangers by leaving the dead battery unchanged.Could it leak and damage vital chips (like A3000 motherboards) ? Does it affect basic computer's operations ?
The internal Conner HD seems to be dead (so it's been removed).Is it a dead battery consequence which affects BIOS operation ?
Hddriver 8.13 doesn't recognised it either.
My Falcon boots up from an external SCSI NEC HD whith Hddriver v8.13, whithout any problem.
Thanks for reading
George

[christos]

Falcon's battery is located within a chip, a DS12887 pin compatible one. If you have the technical know how or know someone who does it should be fairly easy to replace it. Mine is out of battery for about a year, so far no leeks. Having a falcon without the NVRAM battery though is a real bummer so it is best to replace it.
Search the forum for detailed guides about what you can do.

[Paolo]

The guide, along with lots of comments, is right at the top of this forum, as a pinned message

[geoanas]

Thank you both !
Yes I did noticed the post but I think is a real pain to change the battery (with a high risk to damage the chip), so I decided to leave it as is.
What is the greatest peril ? Leave the battery or to attempt an operation ?

I really hate these Dallas chips.I encoutered them is some arcade boards (CPS1,SEGAs system 16) and I ended to change the whole rom set with a new (hacked) one.These are called suicide batteries, because when the battery dies it erases the BIOS' data and destroy the arcade pcb as well

[karlm]

a much better idea is to replace the dallas chip totally. this is more easily done, and the replacement chips can be obtained for free.

http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.ph ... p&start=15

just make sure that you get the 'A' version, the non 'A' version doesn't seem to be able to be cleared electronically.

cheers

karlm

[Paolo]

I can assure you that changing this bad guy is a walk in the park.

Just be sure to have the right tools near you:
Soldering iron
the tinier cutting tool (scissors-like) you can get OR
a handheld vacuum pump to suck melted tin.

I made the mistake to buy the pump after I already cut the pins, and I understand that it could have been better to avoid cutting at all.

Ah, well... it took me some ten minutes more to do the job.

[Marakatti]

Tried to order a sample too and week later i've got two chips, thanks a lot for your tip Karlm

[FujiMan]

Hi all,

I have 2 dead batteries, and decided to see if I could remove the internal batteries and replace them with a external battery. They were both ST MK48T878-24 SRAM batteries. I cracked them open to see how things worked (before seeing Didier M's page). Below is a picture (albeit, a bad one) of the inner workings. One end has tabs for the oscillator (nearest pin 1), the other end, the battery.

The first one I removed nearly everything to see what was hooked up. It took about 20 minutes to carefully remove the potted part.

The second I only removed the battery part. This one only took about 5 minutes.

The saw works wonders. After cutting the chip in the middle, pry the top part (where the battery and oscillator are) and remove battery side. Carefully removing the remainder of the epoxy with the pliers and jewelers screwdriver. Solder connector using pliers. LOL. not fingers...

For tools:

saw - http://www.sciplus.com/category.cfm?sub ... tegory=129
Jewelers Screwdriver - http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN ... =100074336
klein d305-6 pliers - http://www.mytoolstore.com/klein/d304-6.html

very fine tip soldering iron and small header for battery connection. If you squint you can see the small header to the right of the chip.

Attached is the picture of the two chips...

[[ProToS]]

Nice work on your DIY nvram cell FujiMan.

going to put a link on the pinned topic to this msg.

[anachore]

Pour Protos:
As-tu perso déjà changé ces batteries?
Si oui, je loge entre toi et Toulouse, et aurais besoin d'encouragement pour mes travaux en cours (sur Falcon bien sûr).
Cordialement,