Jepael wrote:

Just curious, you said you are going to repair it, so in which way is it broken? Or are you just doing a full recap just in case?

Well, I put in my 486 and installed the drivers, but it didn't get detected. Windows didn't detect it neiter did Warcraft 2 which I installed cause it has suppport for the card natively. Will do the recap and test again. There is also some weird sprinkeld stuff betwenn the one ensoniq and the motorola chip (you can see it on the pictures in the first post rather well) which I would check on next. I did some pocking with the multimeter and I couldn't find any shorts between the traces, but I will take a closer look at it when needed. I couldn't find a picture of my card with this stuff on it, so I guess it doesn't belong there.

@gdjacobs

Thanks for the advice, will probably come in handy at some point 😀

I can't really tell from the picture you posted, but it looks like someone may have already tried to repair the board. The IC with the sticker on it (U13) seems to have a few leads that may not be soldered down very securely, particularly toward the top left corner. It looks like there is a different type of solder on a few leads (shinier). It may be worth poking very gently with electronics tweezers or even a toothpick to see if they are connected; they shouldn't flex much, and especially shouldn't move where they meet the board.

You mean those on the third picture ? I tested all the ones which look bent, but they all make contact (tested with the multimeter).

Unrelated I even found some exposed cooper on the back side, this card wasn't handeld nicely before I got it.

To me, it seems like some leads on the IC are barely on their corresponding pads, and at least one on the left seems to be close enough to almost short to the neighbouring lead. Also, perhaps someone with electronics experience can chime in, but I've almost never seen a surface-mount capacitor with those solder blobs on its ends (like C16) make proper contact.

The other, less appealing, possibility is that the previous attempts to repair the board caused heat damage to the IC. The only way to know for sure would be to properly re-flow that IC and repair other trouble spots and try again. Perhaps contact the member who did the previous repair job for some tips, if he's still around.

@640k!enough

Thanks for the hint with C16, didn't see that before. It does look suspiciously hand repaired.

Anyway as I said, I wanted to recap the whole card, which I did. I won't show you how the back looks but since this was my first recap of anything ever I guess you guys can imagine 😉 Card looks a little funky now with the staked caps but my replacement caps where nearly 4 times the size, so this was the only way to get them all on there. To my surprise, the card actually works!! Well she did one time, actually twice.

After installing the card temporarily in the PC and installing the spea media fx drivers, I fired up warcraft 2 again. And lo and behold the card got detected and played the sample sound. So I shut the PC down, put everything back together properly, plug all the cables in and start the PC again. And shes dead. Well not quite:

- the card now makes the plob noise when the PC is turned on and also once or twice again when the cards get initialized during boot.
- when headphones are plugged in I can hear some background noise, also the hard drive activity.
- the cards gets detected during initialization by its driver successfully
- the card once play like 10 seconds of midi music using the bundled media rack software by spea media

So question is wtf? Why did it work once and than stopped working again (twice) (sort of)

Anybody got any idea and/or input ? Would be greatly appreciated.

It's probably not the solution you're looking for, but may help get the board working again. Look closely at the other surface-mount capacitors; C18 looks strange too. Whatever you find, apply a little flux and try heating briefly with your soldering iron, so that it flows properly and the results look a little more like the factory-soldered devices (no large blobs). That should allow it to make proper, reliable contact. Then test the board again to see if there's any further improvement.

Especially if the board has been roughly handled, broken or fractured solder joints are a definite possibility.

I gave the card another go today. I heated all the joints which looked suspicious and put the card back in the 486, installed the drives again and rebooted.

-The system now freezes a short while after drawing the wallpaper and even before any UI appears. This might be driver related stuff since I choose custom driver install this time around instead of express, so this might be just an IRQ, DMA etc. problem.
- Most importantly: I now get some sound when the computer should play the windows intro doodle which is a first! Well it did it once (see a pattern here?) and it already sounded squeaky, the next time it froze even before any sound could play, the third time it just made loud electronic noise which turned on and off until I shut the PC off again.

What you guys think of putting it in the oven? Like 10-15 min at 150-175 degree Celsius. I had success with this technique with my modern graphics card, namely my HD 6870 and my HD 7970. Is there a reason it shouldn't work with older cards or is even harmful? The stickers should be fine since the temperate isn't high enough to ignite paper, right?

Any input, experience or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Meanwhile I will give the card a good rub with a toothbrush and some isopropyl alcohol.

Eleanor1967 wrote:

What you guys think of putting it in the oven? Like 10-15 min at 150-175 degree Celsius. I had success with this technique with my modern graphics card, namely my HD 6870 and my HD 7970. Is there a reason it shouldn't work with older cards or is even harmful? The stickers should be fine since the temperate isn't high enough to ignite paper, right?

Modern video cards have BGA mounted chips where the solder joints are inaccessible to the soldering iron. If you can, always use an iron instead of trying an oven reflow. It's healthier for the semiconductor chips.

Alright, some progress has been made. I didn't put in in the oven, instead I reflowed some of the funny looking spots again, removing some more excess solder, including removing the sprinkled stuff between ensoniq chip and the motorola chip (see photos for what I mean) and put the card back in the PC. I reinstalled the driver which fixed the freezing (well it froze once again, but it worked the other like 15 starts).

So:
- I now always get the windows start up doodle, but no shutdown sound (which has never worked so that is at least not something new). EDIT: the shutdown sound has now worked too a few times.
- MIDI is now working perfectly!! I tested the warcarft 2 setup programm and settlers 2 and the midi music works perfectly, very clean sound, no background noise. I'm pleased.
- Soundeffects in both games don't work
- I also tested Command & Conquer 1, which works, but sounds quite horrible. I made a recording of that so you can guess with me whats causing that (don't mind the picture, could figure out in movie maker how to put a blank video in and this is the first picture I stumbled across on my harddrive). I can tell that the card plays all notes/effects twice, but I have really no idea how that is happening.
- in the windows mixer both wave channels are still grayed out, cant move the sliders.

As always any input is welcome 😉

I don't know if I fixed anything, but I recently installed pure DOS on another SD card and put it in the 486. Installed all the drivers for the card and everything just works! It was my first time really messing with pure DOS so it took a while, but everything I tested so far works reliably every time, even SB emulation. I'll have to check if my problems in Windows have also fixed them self, but right now I'm really happy with my DOS setup so I will test that later.

Thanks again for all your help.