Reply 26140 of 27784, by Thermalwrong
Gonna be packing stuff into storage real soon.
Made some time today to fix one of my 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee cards while I've still got the hot air station and test computer ready. In the process of doing this however I learned a ton about testing video memory that I did not know before, using VMTCE I managed to pinpoint the exact fault on this Elsa Victory II card - it actually had 2 faults, the first I fixed through dumb luck and an incomplete understanding of the memory layout / tools, but I got there in the end.
The second fix took some time, swapping multiple chips and finding at each point that nope, that wasn't the problem. Eventually pinpointed it down to a single damaged trace that I was able to locate through a software tool and isolating memory pins 😀
Also I was able to disable half the memory to help with separating the primary fault, which caused graphical errors in VGA mode. From the secondary fault which only showed up in games. A single little resistor controls whether the card is going to use 8MB or 16MB.
Here's how the memory errors looked until I got the exact point:
My test rig which now has a dedicated VMTCE compact flash card. I got so sick of waiting for the floppy version to start up and this avoids cards without heatsinks from heating up too much: