The DALLAS RTC battery finally was done for, on the 486 system that I rebuilt back in 2013. I’ve modified these before, to use an external battery solution, but I really didn’t want to deal with that again, so I decided to go for a modern replacement solution for the DS12887 Dallas RTC chip.
This specific solution is Necroware’s NW12887 RTC module which was fortunately available on eBay, which I picked mine up from this seller for this system. The installation went quite smoothly, since the RTC module was already socketed on the Elitegroup Computer Systems UM8810P-AIO motherboard.
Once I assembled the machine, putting the AWE64 Gold back in, I plugged it all in and I was able to re-configure the BIOS and finally boot into the system successfully!
I’m glad it all worked out in the end, the only other thing I needed to address was the faulty 2GB Compact Flash card, but I kept a backup of these things on my storage server anyway, so it was easy to restore on a new card and get going fully!
