New Life Games Tech Forums

Hi All, odd question this time. Can anyone tell me definitively if there is a tie-in between a dead vision top box cmos battery and the game eating up the lower MPU battery? I replaced a dead MPU battery on a vision game a couple weeks ago with a fresh battery that showed 3.3v. Never bothered to check the top box cmos battery at the time. Have mostly left the game off the last couple weeks to see if the battery held up and it's down to 2.93v. Checked top box battery and it is dead. Game still works fine with that battery dead and that's why I'm wondering if maybe the top box was drawing off the lower battery to compensate for the dead upper battery. Any thoughts or suggestions? :103-

No takers??

Just to add a bit more history, this machine has had a battery issue on the MPU before, but due to the fact it was at my boss's house 70 miles away I haven't been able to track it well although I did swap the MPU out around 3 months ago.

I don't know if the top box battery has anything to do with it but I know I was having alot of trouble about 2 years back with batterys going dead a couple of months after I replaced them. I ended up going to a battery holder instead of the normal battery with the legs and haven't had any problems since. Also you can get the 2032 battery holder and battery for less than what the regular battery costs. 

I've wanted to do that on my machines, but had backstock of solder type batteries and now that I'm out I can't find the links that were posted for where to get the holders :60-

http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/29-1675 (http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/29-1675)

Ron (r273)

Cowboy
can't help you on the vision battery.
As far as the battery holders I don't know about you but I have a lot of old home computer mother boards that I have been harvesting battery holders from. Just an idea.

Rich

Thank you r273 and qbert for the suggestions, will likely pursue one or both. As far as the original question I posed on the topic, I replaced the dead top box battery and in the two weeks since then the MPU battery is no longer being drained at a faster than normal rate. In fact it has remained at 2.907v since the change. Keep in mind that with the dead top box battery the game still started and ran fine. The only indication of some type of issue was that the MPU batteries kept dying so it's reasonable to assume that there is some kind of tie in between the top box CPU and the game MPU. As a control I was only turning the game on every few days to see if it started ok and then I would turn it off and check the MPU battery voltage. Hope this helps someone in the future...

Cowboy, since the topbox mpu and the machines' MPU are separate -
I doubt that either battery can help the other computer retain info in the memory chip?
Something else could be draining the bottom batterys' charge.

As far as I understand it, the battery's are only used to retain memory data while the power is off.
But, only for the computer that they're being used for.