Could be old leaky capacitors.
Can you solder? If so, try replacing the old capacitors with newer ones.
Inspect the board for any that are bulging or leaky. Use an old toothbrush and 90+% isopropyl alcohol to clean the mess up too.

Do the stripes change when you press on the chips?

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Do the stripes change when you press on the chips?

Finding it hard to tell. When I first tried it seemed as though pressing on one of the memory chips and/or the Rendition Verite chip caused the screen to change to a mass of random characters. But it seems like it might just be touching the board or minor components can cause this.

I'll clean the board with alcohol and see if that helps.

If nothing else work u could try a reflow on the card before u trow it out

Rendition cards sometimes used weird frequencies so you could have trouble getting a display. I don't know if this could be the case for text mode, though.
With the TFT I can easily imagine that it might have trouble syncing. How high can the CRT sync?

It's Lacie electron iv so that makes it a Mitsubishi Diamondtron under the hood, so I think it should be easily capable of displaying whatever the rendition outputs.

Ok cleaning it off makes no difference, but I wonder if one of the small components is kaput - see picture, one of the corners of one of these 8-legged components [RP3] seems to look like it's puffed out a white lump. Not very clear I guess but it's the best picture I can do.

Could that be the cause of the failure on this card?

None of the other similar components [RP1 etc] look like this, they are all intact.