Ahh...the venerable emu10k1 chip, one of my favs way back when ...in linux you have to load firmware for these (emu1010b.fw) to get them working. The Audigy 2 ZS stopping POST doesn't bode well...

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-27, 00:07:

Ahh...the venerable emu10k1 chip, one of my favs way back when ...in linux you have to load firmware for these (emu1010b.fw) to get them working. The Audigy 2 ZS stopping POST doesn't bode well...

Okay, so assuming that my random Ubuntu flash drive is missing that firmware, then that would be... encouraging... about the Audigy 2 Value's health. But if that card is... less than ideal for 98SE, that doesn't really get me very far, does it? (The goal is to use this card for a not-yet-built 98SE system)

As for the 2 ZS... I found another thread with someone reporting the same problems, but it looks like that person just ended up getting another 2 ZS card.

I really have had the worst luck with sound cards - I pulled out this machine from the closet after years, only to find that the X-Fi died after a day. Now this...

One other thing I might try - this board has built in firewire, and of course, so does the 2ZS. Maybe that's not playing nicely... so I might try to disable the onboard firewire.

I think the pinnacle for emu10k1 based cards for '98 was the SBLive! (explains why I have 3 of the things =) .... and not all mobo's/bios' would play nicely if there was onboard sound chip... YMMV as it were

No luck turning off the 1394 on the motherboard...

Given my limited (i.e. non-existent) skill set at board-level stuff, soldering, etc, I think that's probably the end of the road for this 2 ZS. 🙁

I wouldn't discredit the 2ZS as non-working.... yet. As I mentioned, particular bios/board combinations didn't play 'nicely' when there were 'competing devices' onboard ...like I mentioned, even with just sound devices ...ie; anything from not working at all, having to disable onboard sound in bios...which either would or wouldn't work, to some boards where both the onboard & the sblive are available (and this is in linux where you can see what's going wrong)... having 1394 further confounds the issue...ummm... iirc, I had one bios wherein disabling onboard sound did that, but didn't release registers and ended up in a no sound device at all conflict..

This is promising - I tried another slot (which I would have done sooner, except this disastrously annoying case has those one-time-only slot covers) and now I've at least made it through POST. Time to boot up the Linux flash drive and see what it picks up...

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-27, 01:03:

No luck turning off the 1394 on the motherboard...

Given my limited (i.e. non-existent) skill set at board-level stuff, soldering, etc, I think that's probably the end of the road for this 2 ZS. 🙁

Given that there are usually 4 cheap capacitors drying there (just don’t say “oh, they look great”, they are drying) next to the AMC1117 regulators, you’ll probably give up very early.
There is no need for developer-level skills.
Audigy 2 ZS Crackle Fix

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-27, 03:02:

This is promising - I tried another slot (which I would have done sooner, except this disastrously annoying case has those one-time-only slot covers) and now I've at least made it through POST. Time to boot up the Linux flash drive and see what it picks up...

Well, this is a bad sign... not seeing any trace of it in lspci or anywhere else...

have you tried cleaning the edge connector of the card (very slightly with ipa and/or a pencil eraser)?

I have a lot of old cards that stopped working after 2 years of storage... and it was the connector in 90 percent of the cases.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-27, 12:06:

have you tried cleaning the edge connector of the card (very slightly with ipa and/or a pencil eraser)?

I have a lot of old cards that stopped working after 2 years of storage... and it was the connector in 90 percent of the cases.

I will try that next. The seller did say that the cards had been in storage for a while...

So it's interesting... in the PCI slot where it POSTs, if I then try to boot my friendly Linux flash drive, the OS is... completely broken. Erratic timeouts, random things breaking, really slow performance. Kinda like the card is just spewing junk into the PCI bus and largely frying it.

Tried cleaning edge connector with an eraser, no improvement...

M'kay ... first observation is that if you're aiming for a win98 build, seems there is no (official) 2ZS driver support ~ winXP and up...

....if I knew the linux kernel version and had the kernel boot log (output of dmesg) I could probably divine what's going on (error message texts, if any, are helpful)...

....main question is, which brand/model of mainboard are you playing with here?

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:37:

M'kay ... first observation is that if you're aiming for a win98 build, seems there is no (official) 2ZS driver support ~ winXP and up...

Not true, the official Audigy 2 ZS driver CD does support Win98SE

By default, it installs WDM drivers, but you can switch to VxD using a utility program which Creative supplies.

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:37:

M'kay ... first observation is that if you're aiming for a win98 build, seems there is no (official) 2ZS driver support ~ winXP and up...

That can't be right - the 2 ZS seems to be in many, many people's Win98 builds. Could it be that there's a driver CD for 98SE and Creative never released an update on their web site?

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:37:

....if I knew the linux kernel version and had the kernel boot log (output of dmesg) I could probably divine what's going on (error message texts, if any, are helpful)...

I've tried various versions of Ubuntu with various kernels, and... honestly, with the card in the slot where it POSTs, I can't even make it to a command prompt 90% of the time to run a dmesg. Just random errors, timeouts, the one time I made it to a GUI the cursor movement is crazy slow, etc. Take the Audigy 2 ZS card out, boot the same Linux distribution/kernel, and... it boots right up and works fine.

Bottom line - with the 2 ZS in one slot, the machine won't POST. Fans turns on, then turn off, then turn back on, then nothing happens. In the other slot, it POSTs, but three Linux distributions won't actually successfully boot.

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:37:

....main question is, which brand/model of mainboard are you playing with here?

This is my trusty Asus P5QL-E that I've had since, oh, 2008. Not the board I intend to use for the hypothetical 98 SE project, obviously (I am looking at a Biostar K8M800 for that, though my thread asking for advice on that didn't get much in the way of replies), but it's a board with PCI slots that I figured would be a perfectly reasonable place to test whether a card works or not. (Of course, when I came up with this plan, I didn't realize the creative cards also need firmware for Linux, which is another little complication, but I think I should be able to at least boot up and do an lspci without the firmware. Or at least the Audigy 2 value goes that far... and boots... )

I don’t want to interrupt this discussion of the magic driver. I myself am following it with interest.
Considering that most BIOS remove clocking from a device that has not been initialized.

To quickly come to the realization that the card does not start, I recommend checking it on a board with an Award BIOS.
At the end of initialization, it produces a table with devices, vendor ID Creative = 1102, device class = multimedia

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:50:

Not true, the official Audigy 2 ZS driver CD does support Win98SE

By default, it installs WDM drivers, but you can switch to VxD using a utility program which Creative supplies.

I stand corrected, thanks for pointing that out =)

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-28, 03:59:

I've tried various versions of Ubuntu with various kernels, and... honestly, with the card in the slot where it POSTs, I can't e […]
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I've tried various versions of Ubuntu with various kernels, and... honestly, with the card in the slot where it POSTs, I can't even make it to a command prompt 90% of the time to run a dmesg. Just random errors, timeouts, the one time I made it to a GUI the cursor movement is crazy slow, etc. Take the Audigy 2 ZS card out, boot the same Linux distribution/kernel, and... it boots right up and works fine.

Bottom line - with the 2 ZS in one slot, the machine won't POST. Fans turns on, then turn off, then turn back on, then nothing happens. In the other slot, it POSTs, but three Linux distributions won't actually successfully boot.
.
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This is my trusty Asus P5QL-E that I've had since, oh, 2008. Not the board I intend to use for the hypothetical 98 SE project, obviously (I am looking at a Biostar K8M800 for that, though my thread asking for advice on that didn't get much in the way of replies), but it's a board with PCI slots that I figured would be a perfectly reasonable place to test whether a card works or not. (Of course, when I came up with this plan, I didn't realize the creative cards also need firmware for Linux, which is another little complication, but I think I should be able to at least boot up and do an lspci without the firmware. Or at least the Audigy 2 value goes that far... and boots... )

Yeah, lspci shows the device ID regardless of fw being present ... but meh, what you describe is either end of a stick, your version of senseless gibber on the pci data lines and/or pulling same down because something's gone terribly wrong .... as in the terribly wrong happening of some physical damage (mission critical component knocked off resulting in open circuit)....or internal IC failure.. so hard to call ...

... the fuller monty version reads like ... if after concerted deep & meaningful visual inspection you see nothing, well, you've got 2 of the things, and the pci interface on both will be largely the same, and you know whatever's awry is hitting horrowshow at low-level (hardware), so you consult the PCI slot signal tables (http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_PCI_Pinout.html), start with power & grounds, multimeter in diode mode, obtain known good value readings from working card by probing connector fingers, and compare with readings you get from the 'bad' card ... maybe you find it there, if not, and in consideration behavior changed dependent on PCI slot, probably the interrupt pins would be the next port of call... followed by most everything in the A/B 1 thru 19 range plus a few others that aren't AD lines ...and you hope you get lucky and find an errant reading that lends you a clue ... and if that yields no clue, an old fogie like me reaches for the PCI slot breakout board, and from there I can power the card up and measure current draw... and if it's not there, 'scope what's happening on the pci control pins at initialization time ...

That's real, but nah... I'm too old for that now ~ toss it in the donor/for later attention box =) After some 6+ decades on this planet, I recently found that I've lost that feeling of 'reward' in discovering the 'actual culprit', compared to the ease of confirming your suspicions with a few deft pokes of multimeter probes, and being able to say "I've seen this before" ...figuratively -- the modern version is being able to see a hotspot in the IC package right where the pci-interface-controller section would be ...(which confirms why you saw low resistance on one of the power rail fingers =)

giantclam wrote on 2023-09-28, 05:40:

and if it's not there, 'scope what's happening on the pci control pins at initialization time ...

In fact, Audigy 2 Value will definitely not be detected with dried capacitors across from 1117 LDO , which are indicated in my first post.
1.8V - power supply for E-MU DSP and 3.3V - power supply for i/o of card, including EEPROM.
This is a typical malfunction with significant statistics of Audigy sound cards. Just like the drying out of the largest capacitor on PCI X-Fi (Not PСI-e, it's a different circuitry), with exactly the same symptoms.

The second typical malfunction of Creative sound cards is erasing the first byte of the EEPROM, then the E-MU processor is visible in the device manager, but the drivers are not installed.

These are statistically typical malfunctions that you don’t need a $100k LeCroy WaveRunner to diagnose

shevalier wrote on 2023-09-28, 06:32:

Just like the drying out of the largest capacitor on PCI X-Fi (Not PСI-e, it's a different circuitry), with exactly the same symptoms.

And, of course, I also have an X-Fi that appears to have exactly that issue...

(Different symptoms than on my newly-acquired Audigy 2 ZS at issue here, though)

I really need to learn some soldering skills, don't I?