To my suprise the card works and in glide also. I ran some benchmarks. The chips are getting hot though. I might try to get some green heatsinks in the future for this one.

Procomp G111 Voodoo 2
-Another experiment or was it used for parts? Half of the FBI memory is gone. No damaged pads. The card works though.

Would be great to just add the missing ram and get a fully working card.

Provideo PV830 Voodoo 2
-Lots of missing passive components, bracket and the FBI is gone too. At least the pads are unharmed. Looks like this card was cannibalised for parts.

More info on the progress soon.

I was looking for replacement capacitors for the Gainward card. This card has aluminum can 22uF 16V electrolytic capacitors where other brands used non polarized ceramic smd caps.
Took off one to see it's capacitance and esr values after 25 years. They don't seem to be worn.

What I have in the same size are some chineesium VT series that have varying esr.

Or some polymer that has lower capacitance and might have unnecessarily low esr.

I'd like to have the card look as authentic as possible so I'll go with the 22uf VT caps probably.

The Gainward after replacing the capacitors.

It still works, so it's a win.

Placed new 512k rams on the Procomp.

Under DOS Mojo reports 4MB of FBI memory and all seem ok. In Windows there are issues with TMUs. Opening display properties hangs the system entirely.

I'm curious what could be wrong. The card worked fine with only 2MB of FBI memory. I suspect that someone removed that 4 memory chips so that card would work thought somewhat compromied.

Mojo diags "bogus number of TMUs"

Very cool to see your progress. Keep sharing!

Thanks! I have time on weekends to do these kind of repairs and usualy post the results next day. Stay tuned if you're interested.

Though I used new 512KB SOJ40 chips on the Gainward. I started to dissasamble the PV830 card since I wanted to test the rams on it.

I used a S3 Trio64V+ vga that has sockets for ram. I inspected and cleaned the chips and the sockets too. I used 3M Novec degreaser and flux remover.

The results were always the same. Some chips test good and others bad. This could have been caused by heat that previously damaged them. I know I couldn't have damaged them 😁
So it occurs that with the bad ram the image is corrupted or has artifacts or the S3 can't even address them and the pc just fails during POST.
Swapping between bank 0 and 1 or pairing good chips with bad ones on the card changes the pattern of the corruption but bad chips always mess up the image obviously.

Cool, love these bring-back-dead-stuff-to-life-threads 😀

Some thoughts:

If you want to remove that heatsink, it usually works reasonably well to weaken CA glue by heating it, and twist the heatsink off. Just be careful to avoid melting the solder joints.

It's said that acetone dissolves CA glue. In my experience, it doesn't. Heard the same about ethyl acetate, haven't tried it myself though. Graffiti removal solvents and label removal spray often smells like they mainly contain ethyl acetate, if you want something commonly available to try.

If you know how to handle them and can get hold of them, many chlorinated hydrocarbons are safe bets to dissolve CA glue.

I'd try to fix that bodge cap to the board somehow, perhaps some hot glue would do the trick. If it catches something when you handle the card, chances are that you rip the cap with copper traces off the PCB by accident as it is now 😀

kaputnik wrote on 2023-02-01, 11:56:

Cool, love these bring-back-dead-stuff-to-life-threads 😀

Some thoughts:

If you want to remove that heatsink, it usually works reasonably well to weaken CA glue by heating it, and twist the heatsink off. Just be careful to avoid melting the solder joints.

Thanks for the tip, kaputnik! The heatsink will have to stay for now. First I want to see if the Rush works properly in 3D. I screwed up win98 by trying all kinds of glide and 3dfx drivers. Now whatever vga I'm trying to install it's stuck as generic video adapter in 16 colors. I'll restore windows form a 'fresh installment' backup and start from there.

kaputnik wrote on 2023-02-01, 11:56:

I'd try to fix that bodge cap to the board somehow, perhaps some hot glue would do the trick. If it catches something when you handle the card, chances are that you rip the cap with copper traces off the PCB by accident as it is now 😀

I have replaced the bodged capacitors with proper smd ones here.

DAVE86 wrote on 2023-02-01, 21:06:

kaputnik wrote on 2023-02-01, 11:56:

Cool, love these bring-back-dead-stuff-to-life-threads 😀

Some thoughts:

If you want to remove that heatsink, it usually works reasonably well to weaken CA glue by heating it, and twist the heatsink off. Just be careful to avoid melting the solder joints.

Thanks for the tip, kaputnik! The heatsink will have to stay for now. First I want to see if the Rush works properly in 3D. I screwed up win98 by trying all kinds of glide and 3dfx drivers. Now whatever vga I'm trying to install it's stuck as generic video adapter in 16 colors. I'll restore windows form a 'fresh installment' backup and start from there.

One thing that helps a LOT with troubleshooting multiple cards in Windows 98 is to make multiple copies of a fresh Windows folder (just the folder). Then rename each one something like win_v3, win_rush, win_v2 etc. Have have the system always boot to the command prompt by editing the following line in msdos.sys:
[Options]
BootGUI=0

Now, when you start the computer it will give you a command prompt. You can simply type:
ren windows win_old
(now the original windows folder is stored as win_old)
ren win_rush windows
(now win_rush is the windows folder)
win
(boots to windows)

Now you can set up that Windows folder with Voodoo Rush drivers and software.

When you're done and want work on a Voodoo 2, just reboot:
ren windows win_rush
ren win_v2 windows
win

Done. 😀

And if you just need to reboot, you just type "win" at the prompt and it boots right up. It's a minor inconvenience.

I have about 20 Windows folders on my test bench for various devices and this works amazingly well. I have done a lot more steps to simplify the process (like a .bat file that runs at startup which identifies which folder is currently being used so I don't have to try to remember each time I boot the system up).

Obviously, installing things to Program Files or to C:\ will make them available to every Windows install, but I have had almost zero conflicts from this over the past several years since the majority of issues come from incompatible drivers, runtimes, registry settings, DirectX or other system files sitting in the Windows folder.

It's been a long time, so I can't remember how I copied the Windows folder the first time... I don't recommend doing it in DOS for various reasons, and I don't believe Windows 98 will let you copy the folder while the OS in use. I probably did it on another system the first time and I made sure to have 2-3 extra copies of the fresh Windows folder. Once you've got a fresh folder that isn't in use, you can copy and rename them as many times as you want on the Windows 98 machine. Oh, and make sure the systems are set to show hidden and system files or some things won't get copied.

Thanks, Ozzuneoj! It's great. I was thinking to just use several drives. And some time ago I had win98 and xp set up on different partitions, so that was my second idea...