Interestingly this has been going on since before the PS1 era.
Many PCs from the early 90s and late 80s had battery backed RAM to store CMOS settings, and some wouldn't boot at all if it was dead. The battery was integrated into a Dallas real-time clock chip, so there was no way to replace it without desoldering the entire thing and putting a new one in. Fortunately brand new ones are available even today, or third party replacements with socketed batteries.
Some games consoles had them too. The Philips CD-I,
This was many years ago but my 386SX-33 with C&T chipset and (I think) Award BIOS would start up with "CMOS checksum fail: press F1 to continue". Once I replaced it, it was fine. Which was good because I somehow ended up with 8 of these BabyAT boards from an auction and they all ended up with the same issue. I replaced a few with a 2xAA battery holder from RadioShack, cleaned up and sold the rest AS-IS. Honestly I should have kept them, people pay bank for retro computers now. Back then everyone wanted to run Linux on them and it didn't run all that well, even though I had 8MB to 16MB of RAM in each. (4MB 30-pin SIMMs, another thing I found at that auction). Turning on Vim syntax highlighting made it noticeably slow. SSH2 handshake was a good time to take a few sips of coffee.
Headline almost gave me a heart attack (Score:4, Insightful)
I was worried my library of classic favorites for PSX and PS2 would cease working. Crisis averted!
Re: (Score:2)
Interestingly this has been going on since before the PS1 era.
Many PCs from the early 90s and late 80s had battery backed RAM to store CMOS settings, and some wouldn't boot at all if it was dead. The battery was integrated into a Dallas real-time clock chip, so there was no way to replace it without desoldering the entire thing and putting a new one in. Fortunately brand new ones are available even today, or third party replacements with socketed batteries.
Some games consoles had them too. The Philips CD-I,
Re:Headline almost gave me a heart attack (Score:2)
This was many years ago but my 386SX-33 with C&T chipset and (I think) Award BIOS would start up with "CMOS checksum fail: press F1 to continue". Once I replaced it, it was fine. Which was good because I somehow ended up with 8 of these BabyAT boards from an auction and they all ended up with the same issue. I replaced a few with a 2xAA battery holder from RadioShack, cleaned up and sold the rest AS-IS.
Honestly I should have kept them, people pay bank for retro computers now. Back then everyone wanted to run Linux on them and it didn't run all that well, even though I had 8MB to 16MB of RAM in each. (4MB 30-pin SIMMs, another thing I found at that auction). Turning on Vim syntax highlighting made it noticeably slow. SSH2 handshake was a good time to take a few sips of coffee.