it's the fate of old hardware, it just dies... it could die just sitting in an anti-static bag in the cupboard... had many failures with amiga hardware (and most of them REALLY expensive) for no reason too, it's one of the things that made me sell everything related and not keeping locked money in hardware that could suicide... 🤣

keropi wrote:

it's the fate of old hardware, it just dies... it could die just sitting in an anti-static bag in the cupboard... had many failures with amiga hardware (and most of them REALLY expensive) for no reason too, it's one of the things that made me sell everything related and not keeping locked money in hardware that could suicide... 🤣

That is quite a thing to do, selling everything. You mean the amiga related hardware or the PC hardware as well? Well I can understand that. When You have assembled something near perfect and something just dies it makes you think "what is next? Do I now need two of everything to feel OK?"

My retro hardware is not that expensive when I bought it. The maximum I ever paid for a single CPU, card or board was E 50 excluding shipping. But it took time and effort to research and obtian it. But that last bit is also the FUN(tm) of course.

These sound cards work fine in a Pentium 2 or 3. The only Sound Blaster that might give you issues is the Sound Blaster 2.0 because it requires -5V. But apart form that you shouldn't have any issues.

I was lucky with my parts so far. But you are right, it could die at any time. I think that's why I like to have 2 or 3 cards just in case something goes wrong. Prices also keep going up, so it's smart to get a few while they are affordable.

Especially my Roland gear. They will be hard to replace in a few years.

gerwin wrote:

That is quite a thing to do, selling everything. You mean the amiga related hardware or the PC hardware as well? Well I can understand that. When You have assembled something near perfect and something just dies it makes you think "what is next? Do I now need two of everything to feel OK?"

My retro hardware is not that expensive when I bought it. The maximum I ever paid for a single CPU, card or board was E 50 excluding shipping. But it took time and effort to research and obtian it. But that last bit is also the FUN(tm) of course.

I mean the amiga hardware... had cpu cards that costed 600+ eur, graphic cards that costed 300+ etc... I already spent some 450+ eur in repairs from qualified amiga repairman in France and I was beginning to feel really uncomfortable when 2 of the machines I was working almost daily failed due to caps between one month's time... Adding to that the fact that setting up those expanded amigas was SUPER cool (you won't believe the crazy expansions there are - pc hardware is just boring compared to the amiga one) but their actual usage was limited to classic software that ran fine on a stock machine 😁 Also it was not a secret that my heart belonged to pc's... having a 386sx from 12-13 years old contributed to it as you can imagine 🤣

So one day I kept a nice stock A1200 one and sold my gear for some 5-6K eur in total (yep I had so much stuff that were rare - in the true meaning , not eBay "rare" or even lapc-i rare) in known amiga community members, they got a deal and I got part of my money back. win-win.
As for pc stuff I tried to thin down the hardware too by giving almost half of my stuff, no point having a clutter of hardware you won't use IMHO...

I have developed a crazy theory 😁 , things that sit doing nothing end up broken. This is true to machinery like cars, press plate machinery, hydraulic machinery and I started believing that electronics behave the same , it just takes more time... 😜

In my old computer it was the PSU i think. My guess is that it was sometimes giving voltage spikes or so. Fried me loads of cards. Guess i should not have saved on the PSU.

Could also be electrostatics.

And yeah, could also be that they just died because they were frigging old.

the problem in 90%+ of the cases is the electrolytic capacitors in some part of the computer. Most all of the other parts work for extremely long periods when properly cared for, the second most common failure being connection breaks due to heat expansion over and over from repeated use and powerdown cycles.

electrolytic capacitors are the bane of computer equipment. I buy as many solid-cap computer parts as I can, but that's not exactly an option with the older hardware. If you learn to solder and get good enough to replace caps that are mounted through 6 layer PCBs reliably you can refit all your classic hardware with solid caps and be far, far more secure about it lasting as long as you do.

And yes, the power supply fries so much old hardware, and guess what is the part that makes power supplies go rogue? electrolytic caps in them.

That's why my retro rig has a brand new Antec power supply, I have seen them take entire system's out for good when they fail. The new clean power should also help extend the life of the motherboard caps too.

That's a big reason why I ended up going with a Super Socket 7 solution for my time-machine PC.

Many parts are brand new (ATX PSU, ATX case, IDE DVD-RW, CF cards for storage, PS/2 mice, PS/2 keyboards. The mainboard, CPU, RAM and sound cards are the only vintage parts.

I'm certain that Pentium boards will just keep going up in price and follow the way of 486 boards. So time to start collecting 😁

keropi wrote:

it's the fate of old hardware, it just dies... it could die just sitting in an anti-static bag in the cupboard...

I can personally attest to this. A similar thing happened to my AWE64 CT4500, except this AWE64 died IN THE COMPUTER IT WAS PLUGGED INTO! I shut the computer off, then turn it back on later in the day and the sound card was no longer recognized by the computer (and I got no sound, either). After that, no other computer would recognize the card, and no matter what I did to it, the AWE64 CT4500 simply would not work. Oh well, at least I have two CT4520 AWE64s (although the CQM in these cards is MUCH quieter than in the CT4500).

I hope my second SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 doesn't do this (it's currently sitting in a bin with other sound cards). I need it for my future 486 build (if I can find a damn 486 board for a good price, that is).

There is something wrong, it is not just the age. Yesterday evening I wanted to test the SBPro on another mainboard, and at some point the whole flash disk that is used as the Main Disk drive no longer boots, And the partitions are unreadable. The Master boot record was erased!
Well that is fixed now, but I cannot have any more jokes like that.

I suspect something is wrong with earthing, and electrostatics are messing things up. I've already thrown away the power extension socket.

A year+ later and I managed to Resurrect the CT1600 Sound Blaster Pro 2 model 1992 of the first post!

What made it possible was the arrival of a 1991 model SB Pro 2, which takes the 14,3 MHz 'OSC' oscillator signal from the ISA bus.
The broken model 1992 card has an on-card 14,3MHz oscillator instead, which I somehow suspected of being broken.
I measured out to where the working model 1991 routes the ISA bus OSC signal. The signal goes directly to CT1336 through a 80 Ohm resistor, which is called R8. Model 1992 also has this 80 Ohm R8 in a somewhat similar setup. So I lifted R8 on the broken card and connected it with a blue wire to the OSC signal of the adjacent ISA slot, model 1991 style. And behold the soundcard works flawless!

Now it may be neat to just replace the oscillator instead, but why is the max temperature for an oscillator just 260 degr.C? My solder iron works best on the 450 degr.C setting.

Past week I also managed to fix a DOA asus P2B revision 1.04 mainboard. The Mosfet closest to the DIMM slots (next to the 3 capacitors) did not make proper contact at the back of the Mosfet. It took me a while to notice this, as you could not really see it without pushing it.
Before the fix: No post with just blinking power and HDD LED, no Fans spinning up, no Beeps, and the 'Fault' pin of the VRM chip being 'high'.