CD-i member Dani Velasco Jurado installed a 'new' Digital Video Cartridge in his brand new CD-i 450 player, which previously played perfectly without DVC. The only problem is that the Timekeeper battery is dead, it ran out of power. Dani: " We think the problem might well be the defective timekeeper battery. From
the CD-i FAQ: "Every CD-i player is equiped with at least 8 Kbytes of
non volatile memory (NV-RAM), that is used among others to store game
scores, player shell settings, favourite picture selections, etc.
I thought this video card could be introduced into my brand new philips cdi-450, into the video card input, so that I put the card and I turned on the console and it didn't work. The console reads the discs but doesn't show an image, the only thing you see sometimes are white lines on the screen, but other times you can see some green lines. Definitely, the console worked perfectly and this one had no problem in the image, the console was brand new and I only used it once... The only problem this console has is that the internal battery is dead." What is happening here?
One
other important usage of the NV-RAM is to store the CSD (Configuration
Status Descriptor). When a CD-i player is turned on, the operating
system kernel is initialized and one of the startup routines includes
the creation of the CSD. The CSD contains information about a certain
CD-i system, such as the amount of NV-RAM available, which kind of
pointing device is connected, the version of CD-RTOS used, but also
wether a floppy disk drive is available, if a printer is connected, etc.
If the CSD cannot be written, for example when the NV-RAM memory is
full, the player should present the user with an option to delete some
items at startup, and should then proceed by loading the player shell."When the timekeeper battery is dead, the CSD can also not be written anymore. The CSD that was written the last time when it was possible, determines what state and form the CD-i will still work and what problems it will give when something changes (different controller, different disc, different DVC).
The
CSD also detects whether a DVC is present. If the last time when it
could be written, a DVC was not present, it will stay that way. Now that
the CSD cannot be updated anymore because the battery is dead, it won't
recognize the DVC anymore. I'm afraid Dani needs to replace the battery
in order to make it work.
[Thanks, Dani Velasco Jurado, Retrostuff]