If you could see it, Ie with another card installed, you're most likely going to see the 9x equivalent of code 43.

Generally this means the ram is bad.

I don't know if there's an ancient version of mats/mods, but it can't hurt to search.

In the mean time, post some very high res pics of the naked card here, and the hive mind will perform a visual inspection.

What tools and skills do you have? Multimeter? Soldering?

Edit

It's also probably a good idea to flash the bios just to rule out bitrot. It's quick at least.

BIOS for Diamond Viper V770 Ultra video card
Read it all.

myne wrote on 2024-10-11, 10:38:

If you could see it, Ie with another card installed, you're most likely going to see the 9x equivalent of code 43. […]
Show full quote

If you could see it, Ie with another card installed, you're most likely going to see the 9x equivalent of code 43.

Generally this means the ram is bad.

I don't know if there's an ancient version of mats/mods, but it can't hurt to search.

In the mean time, post some very high res pics of the naked card here, and the hive mind will perform a visual inspection.

What tools and skills do you have? Multimeter? Soldering?

Edit

It's also probably a good idea to flash the bios just to rule out bitrot. It's quick at least.

BIOS for Diamond Viper V770 Ultra video card
Read it all.

Thanks for the direction! This gave me somewhere to start troubleshooting.

I have a reasonable stock of tools (digital solder iron, dmm, single probe scope, hot air station, desolder gun). If I had to replace a ram chip or two it would be difficult but reasonably sure I'd manage.

I thought I'd start with a bios update as it should be easy.. booted in to XP and ran "nvflash -b my.rom" to dump the current rom, this froze up at "your monitor might flash as we flop prom" so I left it for 20 minutes hoping something would happen but nothing did. End task'd nvflash.exe and chucked in a floppy to create a boot disk, copied over nvflash and rebooted but the machine booted with a totally corrupted display which I haven't seen before out of this card, I can't get any video at all now, just a corrupted display.

Found a PCI VGA card and chucked that in along side the AGP TNT2, can boot with a display again, went ahead with the boot floppy and tried several versions of nvflash but all reported non-supported EEPROM. The TNT2 has an Atmel AT49BV512-15JC which isn't listed by any version of nvflash I could find. A bit of googling led me to DFLASH for Diamond Viper V770 which explains there's a custom flasher for Diamond cards. The dflash utility won't let you specify which GPU to use though so it only detects the PCI card I've installed and fails. Pulled out the PCI card and booted with the now corrupt TNT2, blindly typed out commands to dump the rom and let it go for 10 minutes. Chucked the floppy in to another PC and seem to have a successful dump which looks like version 202C4A02, the other VOGONS thread has version 203A5A02 so I'm currently trying to work out how to blindly flash that to the card without being able to see the display.

Oh dear.
Autoexec.bat is the best way.

Just make sure you hit enter at the end of the line!
Otherwise it'll sit waiting for you to hit enter

I've managed to flash new bios but unfortunately no better result 🙁

For reference: https://www.romulus2.com/articles/guides/nvid … a/nvidbios3.htm

dflash /disable_sdp
dflash /force_flash a:\biosname.bin

Would love to fix this card as it sits perfect for the era of this machine, but GPU repair isn't something I'm skilled in and I've sunk several weekends in to this already. Might be time to look for an alternative card 🙁

Flash the original back?

Iirc dos has the beep command.

Maybe put some beeps in your autoexec.

Eg

Beep
Flash command
:beeploop
Beep
Goto beeploop

That way you'll know the program exited

https://wiki.flashrom.org/Supported_hardware

Might give you more control (Ie flashing as a second card)

myne wrote on 2024-10-12, 06:11:

https://wiki.flashrom.org/Supported_hardware

Might give you more control (Ie flashing as a second card)

Thanks for that! I'll give it a whirl.

The display corruption started before I changed the BIOS (I was trying to dump with nvflash, maybe that utility caused problems, maybe the card finally totally failed at that point in time) so I'm not hopeful the original BIOS will fix the corruption problems.

I'm leaning toward a hardware issue outside of my troubleshooting level.

Yeah. Could be.
Could try washing it.
Dishwasher no soap or handwash with dish soap.
Sun dry, or inside dry for a few days.

Then take pics

It looks like there was a mechanical impact. You can check RP7

Postman5 wrote on 2024-10-12, 16:24:

It looks like there was a mechanical impact. You can check RP7

Great eyes spotting that!
Up close the resistor pack has some extra paint on one end which makes it look odd, tested OK on multimeter.

C315 was indeed missing, one side went to AGP ground. Not knowing what value it should be I took a capacitor from another card that was in a similar position and soldered it on but without any luck. Still getting garbled output.