Mega 65 - Known Hardware Issues; Real-Time Clock Issues

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CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

KNOWN HARDWARE ISSUES

Batch #1 of the MEGA65 hardware shipped to owners in May of 2022. Thanks to the tireless eﬀorts of the MEGA65

team over many years, the result was of satisfyingly high quality, a device that recalls the vintage 8-bit machines of the

1990’s while retaining modern advantages like quality key switches.

Being the ﬁrst batch, some minor ﬁt and ﬁnish issues were inevitable. Here are a few issues that were reported in the

community Discord, and some suggested remedies.

15.1 The Real-Time Clock doesn’t advance the time

A signiﬁcant percentage—but not all—of MEGA65 owners reported that the Real-Time Clock (RTC) stays stuck at the

time you set in the conﬁguration and does not advance, or advances slowly or erratically.

You can test this on your device in several ways:

• In the conﬁguration utility, set the RTC time, then navigate to another submenu, then navigate back. With a

working clock, the time value should have advanced by the correct number of seconds.

• From the demo disk, ﬁnd the Vector Clock utility and run it. Check that it advances the time correctly. With a

working clock, it should stay up to the correct time indeﬁnitely.

• From BASIC, use this command to print the contents of the clock: ?TI$ (That’s a question mark—a synonym for

PRINT—followed by the TI$ string variable.) Do this multiple times, or write a program to print it repeatedly.

With a working clock, the value should advance correctly.

The MEGA65 team is working on diagnosing and ﬁxing this issue. Join the Discord and search the

#announcements-only channel for instructions on how to participate in the investigation.

15.2 Case ﬁt issues

In some cases, the top and bottom pieces of the plastic case do not ﬁt snugly. A common symptom is a noticeable slip

when applying downward pressure to the back of the top case. One possible explanation is a mild manufacturing error

from when the limited run cases were commissioned years ago.

The plastic is bendable and with gentle pressure can be coerced into a tighter ﬁt. On the Discord chat, we discussed

the use of a hair dryer to soften the plastic for gentle reforming. Be careful not to apply too much heat! Do not use a

“heat gun,” and be judicious when using a hair dryer.

The issue was diagnosed by the manufacturer and will be ﬁxed for future batches. See Issue: The upper case does not

properly align with the lower case on the rear side.