That is a factory bodge and definitely not the reason for the card not working.

Definitely looks like a factory installed wire to me.

There might be a couple bent pins touching on the ati mach 64 chip!

Oh your right, looks like there’s three dented pins on that corner. If I had a scope I could coax it back into place or at least enough so the pins aren’t touching.

Concerning the soldered wire, did some cards actually get sold like that with factory patch jobs or were they sold as refurb aftermarket products?

Factory bodge wires are sold in new-in-box products. Usually new revisions are issued to correct it later.

First of all you should dismount any other cards from your mainboard (incl. any IDE-controller, too, if present). So your VGA should be the only once card inserted into your board. If there is still no signal, try to use another VLB-socket. For better reference, you should test the same mainboard with another VGA at the same conditions, OR the Mach64-VGA with another mainboard. Some mainboards have jumpers to be adjusted in case of FSB-frequencies above 33 MHz (40/50 MHz), so please check this option, too.

Another idea is to use an old PC-monitor with different refresh rate (in Hz) - this can be a problem, too.

Jester wrote on 2023-09-17, 18:14:

Concerning the soldered wire, did some cards actually get sold like that with factory patch jobs or were they sold as refurb aftermarket products?

It's a more common thing in the electronics industry.
A small error in the PCB design slips through, that may cause anything from rare bugs to full loss of functionality, and doesn't get discovered until the production line is already in progress (QC would catch this during the testing of produced boards).

Rather than junking the already produced boards, they just have factory workers install wires and sometimes even components like resistors, and/or cut traces or desolder components/chip legs, as a "bodge" fix to correct that mistake.
Of course, that still costs them money, but not as much as completely restarting and retooling the production line in the middle of producing the first batch for the scheduled release date (which would likely end up needing to be delayed, which is also costly).

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-09-18, 08:09:

It's a more common thing in the electronics industry. A small error in the PCB design slips through, that may cause anything fro […]
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Jester wrote on 2023-09-17, 18:14:

Concerning the soldered wire, did some cards actually get sold like that with factory patch jobs or were they sold as refurb aftermarket products?

It's a more common thing in the electronics industry.
A small error in the PCB design slips through, that may cause anything from rare bugs to full loss of functionality, and doesn't get discovered until the production line is already in progress (QC would catch this during the testing of produced boards).

Rather than junking the already produced boards, they just have factory workers install wires and sometimes even components like resistors, and/or cut traces or desolder components/chip legs, as a "bodge" fix to correct that mistake.
Of course, that still costs them money, but not as much as completely restarting and retooling the production line in the middle of producing the first batch for the scheduled release date (which would likely end up needing to be delayed, which is also costly).

makes sense, because I noticed the board is an older revision. Most of the same cards I see online have a newer 1995 BIOS while this one says 1994. My other cards (Kelvin64 / Stealth64) post fine in the same VLB slot so I'm thinking it must be the dented pins in the corner of that mach64 chip I have to correct before it works. I am running a Kingston 586 cpu with the faster mhz front side bus, so I'll try putting a DX2-66 cpu in there to see what that gives.