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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: barney on August 19, 2009, 12:56:23 PM
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I hear from people that a real time clock is important to have on the Amiga 1200? What does the Real Time Clock do and why is it so important to have? Thanks.
Barney
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It keeps the time.. in real time..
No seriously it maintains the time and date over reboots. Handy for an OS that creates timestamped files.
There is no other use than that.
Maybe someone is confusing the "clockport" which is different.
The RTC has nothing to do with CPU or mainboard timing. Its just a clock.
Gertsy
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if you dont need the machine to remember date and time you dont need it more convence thing these days when ran a bbs it was important other wise ever time started the machine or restarted it l have to change the time to corect time and date .
which you can do i prefs
the amiga 1200 if it standred machine with nothing in trapdoor expansion bay underneth
doesint have battery for the clock on mainboard
but any expansion ram card or cpu card expansion has them also they do need replacing though havent had to on my owns yet
there just a round flat battery simalar to watch battery only bigger
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if you dont need the machine to remember date and time you dont need it more convence thing these days when ran a bbs it was important other wise ever time started the machine or restarted it l have to change the time to corect time and date .
which you can do i prefs
the amiga 1200 if it standred machine with nothing in trapdoor expansion bay underneth
doesint have battery for the clock on mainboard
but any expansion ram card or cpu card expansion has them also they do need replacing though havent had to on my owns yet
there just a round flat battery simalar to watch battery only bigger
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Leaving out battery backed RTC was CBM's way of saying "This is a toy!", it would barely have increased the price of the system at all.
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It can be important to know what files were saved when. If you do so little work on the machine that file management isn't important, you don't need it. On the other hand, if you do save a lot of files, this is a very handy feature. It can be confusing if all your saved files have the same (useless) date stamp.
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And it keeps time when the machine is completely off, unpluged. Not just reboots.
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I hear from people that a real time clock is important to have on the Amiga 1200? What does the Real Time Clock do and why is it so important to have? Thanks.
Barney
You don't actually need it but that said, I wouldn't be without one. Having your computer know what day it is is such a fundamental convenience to take for granted.
If you use your computer for anything even remotely serious, you should have a crealtime lock in there.
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Like everyone else stated, it just keeps timestamps accurate, and is also handy if you have a date/clock organizer. (limpidclock and tinymeter in my case) If you want to maintain accurate system time, and you have no/a bad RTC, you could also use a tcp/ip based NTP system to "set" the clock when you log onto the net. (Only useful if you log in every time you would boot your Amiga and use it as a clock) I can't remember any specific proggies offhand, but there's a few on aminet that will do that. If you use Miami, the TCP/IP "side menu" has a Get time [checkbox] from [blank textline], which you can use to do the same, I'm sure MiamiDX and Genesis would have the same option somewhere. (Just need to google an NTP server)