RAM On RTC chips ... Just out of intrest ...

[Hodgkinson]

Im wondering wether anyone has ever tried to make the 26x4 bits of internal battery backed RAM in the RP5C01 RTC IC (As used in A4000's and can be used in RTC's on the A1200) accessable by the system?

Perhaps the RAM wont be of much use as general system RAM, but im wondering if anyone has ever used this to store information between cold reboots on, say, floppy only systems where disks are write-protected?

Just thought this might be of intrest to someone.

Hodgkinson.

[hardlink]

Very good question.

I have an SGI Indy, and they cleverly/foolishly use the RTC ram for the unique system ID, which just happens to be the ethernet MAC address. There are ways to manually write to it, so you could counterfeit any possible MAC address and really confuse the RIAA trackers

If the A4K can read from there, and set the clock, I imagine there is a way to write.

[Piru]

Consult battmem.doc

IIRC some bigbox amigas store SCSI related settings to battmem.

[BinoX]

Really?

I didn't know that... as far as I remember the A3000 has some special NVRAM to store SCSI settings... Of course I'm by no means an expert as I only got an A3000 a few days ago, but that was my understanding of how it worked..

If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me...

[Hodgkinson]

Consult battmem.doc

Where might I be able to find this document, Piru? I'd be interested to have a read...

Thanks for the replies (I thought something might have made use of the memory...)

Hodgkinson.

[hardlink]

http://cataclysm.cx/random/amiga/reference/Includes_and_Autodocs_2._guide/node05B8.html