Replacing DreamCast Battery with AAA?!

[WhereEaglesDare]

Im looking online for DreamCast Battery Replacement and why is it that so many people are using Rechargeable AAAs instead of getting a specific replacement???

[HaRuMaN]

rechargeable AAA are much easier to find?

[WhereEaglesDare]

perhaps, but it includes soldering.  If it was out of ease, wouldn't a direct replacement be better?

[Samstag]

perhaps, but it includes soldering.  If it was out of ease, wouldn't a direct replacement be better?

Have you found a direct replacement?  It can't be easier or better if it doesn't exist.

And the original is soldered in, so it's not like you're going to save yourself much effort with the real thing.

[ChadTower]

It's a $3.30 battery that is not hard to find.  Console collectors tend to be very nontechnical and this makes sense to someone who only sort of understands what they are looking at.  The direct replacement is easier and costs about the same.

[ChadTower]

2032 would probably leak because it's a recharging circuit.  You'd have to add a blocking diode.  I'm pretty sure there is a rechargeable version of the 2032, though.

[ChadTower]

I don't want to get email from some angry Dreamcast owner 4 years from now because they put a 2032 in there and it leaked all over the place.   

[ahofle]

Was this pretty common to have a rechargeable coin battery designed into a console just to retain the date?  Seems like they would have saved a lot of money and design grief by just having a simple lithium coin cell in it like every PC motherboard does.

[ChadTower]

The Saturn has a regular 2032 in it.  Not sure about the PS1 but I can't think of a console before the Saturn that retains a date.  The N64 doesn't.  Obviously only consoles with user configurable bios of some type would need it.

I guess the real question is how do Naomi boards do it?  That's probably why the Dreamcast does it this way.

[danny_galaga]

As an experiment a while back, I replaced an N64 cart battery. I measured the voltage of the old battery before I started, and the new battery, which was the exact same part (brand and all). Once I'd finished soldering it, the new battery was actually flatter than the old one!

I mention this because you wanna be real quick when soldering directly onto a watch battery. Bigger ones like aa's, aaa's etc won't lose as much of course provided they are appropriate (no comment on the dreamcast situation)

[danny_galaga]

Don't solder direct onto a watch battery.  Either buy one with leads already or get a battery holder.

We all make the mistake once.

 

Yeah, I actually had battery holders too. But even if ground down, it wasn't going in the cart 

[danny_galaga]

Conductive epoxy.   

wow! never heard of this stuff. Sounds useful. I wonder how hot it gets when it cures...