VOGONS


First post, by Meatball

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Before I send this away for fixing, I thought someone here might be able to tell me something obvious I am overlooking.

This Obsidian2 has only output and no passthrough - it's from an Arcade unit. Windows sees the card and drivers for Voodoo2 or Obsidian install OK. The drivers which work best are Obsidian2 Release 6C or Fast Voodoo 4.6, and that only means I've gotten the furthest functionality with them. Others probably work fine, but I'd have to reformat the system each time to try a different driver, OS, and DirectX combination.

Monitor 1 (LCD) is connected to a Riva 128ZX (which looks plain awful on an LCD, but fine on CRT.. I digress..)
Monitor 2 (CRT) is connected to the Obsidian 2 90-2440.

Anyway, all the control panel items show up for Voodoo2 drivers. When I activate 3D, I can see the card doing "something" from monitor 1. When I run DXdiag, the spinning cube runs, but I can't see anything - monitor 2 never engages. When I tried Turok in Benchmark mode, same thing. Monitor 1 shows "Glide 3D DLL initialized..." but nothing shows up on monitor 2. I can hear the game running, though.

10MB Total memory
2MB Frame Buffer
4MB per TMU (2x)

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on or what I am missing?

Thanks much!

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Reply 1 of 8, by weedeewee

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That bodge transistor doesn't look very well. Is it the photo angle or... ?

Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
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Reply 2 of 8, by sdz

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Looks weird indeed, like it's missing 1 leg. Maybe it's a diode and doesn't need the third leg.

@Meatball do you have an oscilloscope? If the card doesn't throw any errors it's probably mostly OK. I had a card with the exact behaviour as yours, it was missing hsync or vsync, don't recall which one.

Reply 3 of 8, by Meatball

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weedeewee wrote on 2022-05-29, 18:36:

That bodge transistor doesn't look very well. Is it the photo angle or... ?

I'm not quite sure what a Bodge Transistor is, but if you're talking about the goofy-looking fix near the RAM, it seems it was from the factory to address a bug.

https://thandor.net/object/105

Reply 5 of 8, by Meatball

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sdz wrote on 2022-05-29, 19:00:

Looks weird indeed, like it's missing 1 leg. Maybe it's a diode and doesn't need the third leg.

@Meatball do you have an oscilloscope? If the card doesn't throw any errors it's probably mostly OK. I had a card with the exact behaviour as yours, it was missing hsync or vsync, don't recall which one.

I don't have one. I see them on Amazon for less than $50. Are these good enough? Is it good to have one around, in general?

Reply 6 of 8, by Meatball

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pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-05-29, 19:08:

Make sure this bodge fix's transistor's third leg is not broken off.

Cheers,

Thanks for the suggestion - I have checked with a magnifying glass, and I tapped each leg to check for any movement. All 3 legs are secure.

Reply 8 of 8, by rasz_pl

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Meatball wrote on 2022-05-29, 19:12:

I don't have one. I see them on Amazon for less than $50. Are these good enough?

no

Meatball wrote on 2022-05-29, 19:12:

Is it good to have one around, in general?

no if you have to ask

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