philscomputerlab wrote:

How did you "get in contact" with the seller?

In your "My eBay" go to your purchase history. Next to the article is a button "return this item". Follow the process, if there is no resolve, eBay will side with you. Had this many times. Sick of sellers putting untested boards on eBay and letting you test it all for them. Don't muck around or take it personal, it's business, follow the process and you should be ok.

That is what I did.

This Ebay shop sells large volume and has 1000+ feebacks with 99.9% positive rating. The shop has a VERY long "Terms and conditions of the sale" in German which I cant even be bothered to Google translate. Im rather new on Ebay and I only have about 40 feedbacks (all positive) so far. Im not going to involve Ebay for a few euros when Im not even sure of winning and risking a bad feedback, it just isnt worth it.

Well you've already started the process. There should be a message with a deadline, at which eBay will step in if you and the seller haven't come to an agreement.

You will not receive bad feedback.

I've got going at the moment it states "If there's a problem, you can ask us to step in and help on 31 Oct, 2015." I asked the seller for a partial refund, he came with asking a question about the power cable (I took photos and made a short YT video of the machine not posting), to which I replied, and no answer yet. But I've done this many times, eBay will always side with the buyer. I never had a negative outcome against me.

Yep, and sellers can't give buyers negative feedback (which is annoying if you're the seller and the buyer is an ass), so you really have nothing to lose here. Come on, you're in the right, do the right thing 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

Well you've already started the process. There should be a message with a deadline, at which eBay will step in if you and the seller haven't come to an agreement.

You will not receive bad feedback.

I've got going at the moment it states "If there's a problem, you can ask us to step in and help on 31 Oct, 2015." I asked the seller for a partial refund, he came with asking a question about the power cable (I took photos and made a short YT video of the machine not posting), to which I replied, and no answer yet. But I've done this many times, eBay will always side with the buyer. I never had a negative outcome against me.

I had one choice, "return this item", there was a dead line for the seller to respond. After the seller responded the next thing that was going to happen was for me to return the item to the seller, there were no other choices at this point in the process and without this happening the case would not advance. I think perhaps some Ebay shops have slightly different terms than non shops? I could perhaps stall and just never return the item and by doing so advance the case further down the road but I dont feel its worth it. Other than this I have sent messages to the seller.

I totally understand your standpoint thinking Ebay sellers should not get away with selling defect items and if there was more money involved I would not give up. When substracting the value of the memory modules the amount is just too small for me to be bothered with spending any more time on this.

Ok, fair enough.

oerk wrote:

Yep, and sellers can't give buyers negative feedback (which is annoying if you're the seller and the buyer is an ass), so you really have nothing to lose here. Come on, you're in the right, do the right thing 😀

Im sure they can write nasty stuff in German in their positive feedback 😉

Now the Ebay shop has to fear my feedback, I will prolong their anguish indefinitly if I do not get any money back.

OK, the 16MB memory modules are hard to come by, so I understand your point.

Just an update regarding my recent eBay purchase. P4 board, CPU, cooler, 1 GB SDRAM and a GF2 type card. Packed poorly, some sheets and stuffed into a bubble wrap envelope.

No image on screen, turns out the GPU is faulty. Put in a dispute, back and forth, got a full refund and that was without eBay having stepped in. No need to send anything back just like with the "singing" GTX285 I got a while ago.

I got 25 euro back from the German Ebay shop.

In the end after Pay Pals fee I spent 44 + 10 euro - 23.8 euro = 30.2 Euro on two working 16MB 30pin simm modules and a broken AWE32. This was at least somewhat better than sending the AWE32 back which in the best scenario would have been a loss of 22 euro for nothing. Now I can at least clean the AWE32 thoroughly and with the help of a magnifying glass spend some time trying to find the defect along the signals path between the EMU8000 and the mixer chip.

I gave a positive feedback and I will not avoid this Ebay shop in the future but I will keep in mind that if some item has a defect they do expect to get the item back if they are going to give you a full refund so Im only going to buy things if they are "cheap enough" as shipping costs in Sweden are expensive when shipping to other countries.

This is a "little off-topic", but could we create a thread to post Ebay vendors that have treated us extremely well? I've dealt with one that I may/may not deal with again because it took 5 video cards to get a good one. (Most smelled very burnt out of the package.) and another vendor I bought an OEM AWE32 card from that was perfect. It would be nice to be able to share a list of those vendors that are highly recommended because of good transactions here.

Again, I apologise for being a bit "off topic" with the idea, but perhaps a moderator here with run with the idea.

I've found that you definitely have to be wary of "tested" parts on eBay, especially if it's something older and more complicated like the AWE32, where there are multiple separate functions and details that could exhibit defects, and which the seller might not even know about.

I think in many cases, sellers will just pop something into a machine and if it POSTs, they call it "tested working". Well that's a start, but it's not really an adequate test.
Some sellers will add the word "fully" tested, but it's really a nonsense word without some definition. There's no telling what "fully tested" really means from their point of view.

I like it when a seller actually goes into detail on exactly how and when they tested the item, and bonus points if they have screenshots of stress tests or whatever is relevant. Unfortunately, that's rare.
If the seller is an individual real human being, and not some major "recycling" outfit, then you can ask about their test process and you might get a real answer from the person who tested it.

I took a closer look with the help of my 10 year old digital camera too see if I could find any defects, I started at the EMU8000 chip and... I diddnt get far until I found something that looks odd.

Look at the pin going from the EMU8000 chip to the lower leg of cap C29, it looks like its shorted with the pin below.

Here is a picture with the flash reflecting on the pins which makes it look like its shorted with both pins below, I think its only shorted to one though. The question is how has this happend if this is the defect muting the EMU8000? These pins are hard to scratch as the chips protects them, if there is some other defect or short circuit on the card thats the cause this could just be an effect from heat build up making the solder melt.

I could not find a good enough reference image showing the EMU8000 on the CT3900 but I stole this pic from member FGB showing the EMU8000 on his CT1920 AWE32 upgrade card. The area looks similar but not the same with the C15 cap responding to the C29 cap on the CT3900.

I also found this picture on Wikipedia showing what I think is a CT3990. Here there are even more differences but the C22 seem to be the same as C29 on the CT3900. The pin from the EMU8000 going to the lower pin of the C29/C15/C22 cap should clearly not be shorted with the one below.

Short circuit fixed and now the sound output from the EMU8000 and OPL3 is working!

The card suddenly only detects 24MB of the 32(28)MB sound font memory, perhaps I need to reseat the memory or perhaps two memory chips have died but even if I have managed to kill some memory chips while fixing the short circuit this is a minor problem compared to the EMU8000 and OPL3 synths beeing mute! 😀

Great outcome 😀

Great catch! What a strange thing the problem turned out to be. Enjoy your CT3900. It's one of my favorite pieces in my collection.

AFAIK the AWE32 limited to 28MB of RAM. Congratulations on your fully working card =)

alexanrs wrote:

AFAIK the AWE32 limited to 28MB of RAM. Congratulations on your fully working card =)

That is why I wrote "32(28)MB".

I have reseated the memory, switched the memory modules with eachother and moved the card to my 486 DX4-120 system and it still only detects 24MB memory. The card did detect the full 28MB when the synths diddnt output any sound so it looks like I have managed to mess something up when fixing the the card, hopefully its only one of the memory modules. In case the memory module really is broken this is the fist memory module or other hardware I have managed to damage with static electricity ever! In retrospect I should have removed the modules while working on the card.

Im very glad I kept the card in any case. 😀

Edit.

The AWE Control Panel finds the full 28MB but diagnose.exe still only finds 24MB. Its a bit strange as Im pretty sure diagnose.exe found all 28MB at one time so perhaps it depends on the system, I only have use for 2MB in DOS anyhow.

/Edit

Good job Skyscraper! Great to see you stuck with it until the issue was resolved 😀

Looking at the pics you posted, it appears the solder pads got scratched/scraped by something small (most likely a jumper block/pin or capacitor). It's not uncommon to see this kind of damage on long expansion cards like the AWE32 (Voodoo 2 cards are another example).

Once again, congratulations! Enjoy your newly fixed AWE32 ^^.

Wow.. Excellent catch! I'm not sure I would have thought to spot something like a short between pins. Nice going!

Thanks everyone 😀

Im glad the card could be repaired and "saved" and not returned and trashed, there are too few CT2760 and CT3900 left as it is 😀.

I have tested the SCC1T2.SF2 SoundFont found on http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/. It only uses 3MB out of the 28MB but as Im moving files with floppys at the moment I diddnt want to spend all night copying. This SoundFont sounds pretty good with many of my MIDI files. 😀