I had a slimier problem with an S3 Trio64 card, a black screen and all sorts of artifacts. After inspecting the card I found out that one of the RAM chips has a broken solder joint.

I should mention I did conduct a physical inspection including pin testing. Everything seems solid. The card is in otherwise immaculate shape.

You could try applying pressure on the memory chips while running to see if anything changes. The memory isn't super expensive, so you could just replace the entire TMU memory in one go. However, installing sockets might not work as the memory chips are so close to each other on the Righteous 3D.

Not 100% sure, but looking at the TMU pinout, the first MB should be U10 and U13.

TL/DR: Card appears fine. Should have tested it in another system before reflowing all the TMU chips. 😓

Longer version:

After hours of additional testing, I can update on this. The card appears to be perfectly fine. The problem was how I was testing the card.

I should have mentioned originally that I was testing in a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 setup. This is admittedly well past the normal spec of system with which one would use a Voodoo 1 card.

My original diagnosis appeared to be purely coincidental. When I restricted the TMU memory to 1MB and the card started launching Tomb Raider, I assumed it was the TMU memory chips. I further tried the suggested pressure test and after clamping the chips, the card subsequently launched into Tomb Raider with the full 2MB TMU just fine. All of this pointed to an issue with the TMU memory.

I figured it was a faulty solder joint. On subsequent tests the card started behaving intermittently. Sometimes it would freeze on the 3D logo as before, sometimes it would launch just fine.

I opted to do a full reflow of all the TMU memory pins. This did not improve things as the card still would fail to launch most of the time. When it did launch, I was able to use it without any issues in-game. Zero artifacts, freezing or other glitches.

Finally I did what I should have done in the first place: I put tested it in a more era-appropriate Pentium 200 system. In this setup, Tomb Raider would launch 100% of the time and worked with no issues.

My conclusion is that an Orchid Righteous 3D + Pentium 4 + Tomb Raider is just not a good combo. Curiously the Diamond Monster 3D works fine with Tomb Raider even with the P4. Not sure exactly what Diamond did, but I'm going to leave that latter card in this P4 system and save the Orchid Righteous 3D for something else.

edited: Upon further testing I'm now getting the same issues with the Diamond Monster 3D. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Evidently I got lucky with my early testing, as it worked without issues upon several tries. But I clearly hadn't tested it enough.

It is well known that above a p2 350-400mhz cpu a voodoo1 can give problems ranging from glitches to some games not starting to even black screens.

Some people have them running fine on faster systems but it can give lots of problems.

So indeed, aways test them on slower systems first.

Here is log from my old repair 3dfx VooDoo1 PCI 4MB (ORCHID Righteous 3D) , maybe you'll find there smth useful: http://3dfx.pl/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1617221455/83#83.
Unfortunatelly to see links/images registration on forum is mandatory, also Polish text, but this shouldn't be a problem to auto-translate 😉