> > I have bought a nba play by play pcb and there is an odd modification to the time
> > keeper (a lithium battery has been plugged on the top of it). So I want to know if
> > the game will stop running if the battery runs out.
>
> Yes.
hehe. sorry to be a smart ass but it wont stop.
The process isn't emulated so you may not know about it..... although if you check my readme's it is documented :-D
I have all of the (dumped) Hornet games here. All of them except Silent Scope and Silent Scope 2 have a tiny SOIC8 chip next to the Timekeeper chip (the position is unpopulated on those 2 games). This re-initializes the data if the battery dies. The only loss is the high scores on power-off and a slightly longer boot-up sequence to re-initialize the data. Unfortunately I don't know what type of chip it is but I suspect it's probably a secured EEPROM (X76F041?)
Even if the data in the Timekeeper is bad/corrupted it will work. If the Timekeeper is good but for a different game or region the special chip just writes the correct data for that game and it boots.
Silent Scope etc is a different beast because the special chip is not populated. It's a pain in the ass to get it to work once the Timekeeper dies. If you don't have the matching Timekeeper data to suit the main program ROM and the hardware revision it'll never work. Some versions of Silent Scope use the video boards from Silent Scope 2 and different Timekeeper data and vise versa for Silent Scope 2. Mismatched data will result in the dreaded 'Hardware 11P' error, then a reset.
Unfortunately all of the Silent Scope games will die if left unattended but the data can be backed up. However you have to be careful when backing up the Timekeeper chip as many EPROM programmers scramble the data and corrupt it, rendering the PCB unbootable.
I keep a special archive of NVRAM data for these games so I can repair them when they come along and I bought 100 Timekeeper chips (a special bulk deal) just for that purpose :-D
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