Yes and no.

I have the card (two in fact, if I remember rightly) and also have an EEPROM reader/writer. Unfortunately I'm away from home until next Sunday evening. If no one else has been able to help in the meantime, I'll take a look then.

Btw those drivers are on Vogonsdrivers, just listed generically as "Terratec Promedia AD1816":
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=8 … &menustate=38,0

Thank you, dionb! There definitely is no hurry whatsoever, I'd just enjoy this card to become fully functional again at some point 😀

And, of course, you're right: it definitely helps to not just be looking for 'Terratec' in the tree view menu on the left side... 😀

OK, bad news. I was able to stop by home this morning and decided to take a look. On my card (could only find one) the 24C04 was soldered, not socketed, and two of its pins utterly refused any attempt at desoldering, to the point I may have damaged adjacent traces. Still need to see if I killed the card, but in any case can't dump the EEPROM with equipment I have.

Oh my, that shouldn't be the outcome of this! It actually wasn't socketed on my card either, but it had to come out since it was stopping it from working.

If you want, you could send it over here and I'll have a look at it, try and repair the damage and send it back after that - I really don't want another damaged card to be the outcome of this (and while doing so, I could also try and dump the EEPROM here). Maybe it's even possible to do it in place (which is something I could even try on my card).

Edit: typo.

Btw., I tried and reading it in situ is luckily very much possible:

I've verified it against the downloaded content of the directly read eeprom and it's 100% the same.

So, if you could maybe try it that way, it would help immensely!

Don't have the DuPont to clips you are using - but very much want to order them looking at this 😀

- in fact, just did so. AliExpress, so could take a while, but ordered two sets from different sellers to be sure.

Awesome, thank you, I'm very much looking forward to them arriving! I recall them being quite cheap there, but if you want me to Paypal you some Euros for them, I'll be happy to do that.

Oh, and when you try, you can make your life a little less complicated than I did in that picture and put all the cables on the reader side into a socket first, so you don't have to fiddle them in all at the same time... It did work, but it's supposedly always better to work smart, not hard... 😁

I've kept searching the net, but weren't able find any EEPROM content (or dev tool) for it, still. So, if Ali does come through, I'd still be very interested in a dump of your card's eeprom 😀

Maybe it is not the card but the card in combination with your specific setup that causes issues. What kind of Mainboard/CPU/ram configuration do you have? I remember having trouble with AD1816ADJ cards as well but I forgot if it was due to driver issues or hardware setup. I have at least two of these cards and maybe can simulate your setup to see if I can help somehow. Of course if it is really a defective card this won't help but as EPROM content was identical It may be another issue.
Anyway, I hope you can rescue the card! It's quite interesting with it's strange FM and the hardware layout with the dual opamp offers quite good and noiseless sound quality.

Thank you for the offer! I've tried it on 3 different systems - one being a 386SX SBC, another being a 586 with PnP and my regular testing rig (a 486 DX2-66) with DRAM sizes of 8 to 32 MB (mostly 30 pin FPM). I've tried both, the original drivers and unisound and only without the eeprom the card gets detected - so something seems wrong there already. The verify in the above picture was only against itself, not against a known-good content (I was just testing if reading and verifying it on the card would work, so that noone would have to desolder the IC for a dump of its content). I'm still missing this known-good content, just to make sure it's not simply some setting that's deactivating the audio out or configuring it wrong in its default state, without the eeprom.

Without the eeprom the card actually gets initialized by e.g. unisound and recognized by things like MODM and pretends to be playing music. But even checking its output right on the IC with an oscilloscope, it's completely inactive.

Since I got this card from a colleague (where it wasn't showing any signs of life either), I'm pretty sure it's not the hardware (or software) setup around the card, even though I would never rule this out, of course. The only common things would probably be a DOS 6.22 with HIMEM and Unisound.

The card itself came from Ebay before that, so it's pretty impossible to tell what it had to suffer through. I did check everything visually though and it seems to be in very good optical shape (no scratches, dented pins, etc).

As long as I can get the eeprom content, I'm pretty sure it'll be revived - even if it turns out to be the main IC in the end. I've already found a source for a suitable replacement part and have done replacements of similar size ICs on mainboards and soundcards before - so this won't be a show-stopper 😁

MJay99 wrote on 2022-05-23, 22:05:

Thank you for the offer! I've tried it on 3 different systems - one being a 386SX SBC, another being a 586 with PnP and my regul […]
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Thank you for the offer! I've tried it on 3 different systems - one being a 386SX SBC, another being a 586 with PnP and my regular testing rig (a 486 DX2-66) with DRAM sizes of 8 to 32 MB (mostly 30 pin FPM). I've tried both, the original drivers and unisound and only without the eeprom the card gets detected - so something seems wrong there already. The verify in the above picture was only against itself, not against a known-good content (I was just testing if reading and verifying it on the card would work, so that noone would have to desolder the IC for a dump of its content). I'm still missing this known-good content, just to make sure it's not simply some setting that's deactivating the audio out or configuring it wrong in its default state, without the eeprom.

Without the eeprom the card actually gets initialized by e.g. unisound and recognized by things like MODM and pretends to be playing music. But even checking its output right on the IC with an oscilloscope, it's completely inactive.

Since I got this card from a colleague (where it wasn't showing any signs of life either), I'm pretty sure it's not the hardware (or software) setup around the card, even though I would never rule this out, of course. The only common things would probably be a DOS 6.22 with HIMEM and Unisound.

The card itself came from Ebay before that, so it's pretty impossible to tell what it had to suffer through. I did check everything visually though and it seems to be in very good optical shape (no scratches, dented pins, etc).

As long as I can get the eeprom content, I'm pretty sure it'll be revived - even if it turns out to be the main IC in the end. I've already found a source for a suitable replacement part and have done replacements of similar size ICs on mainboards and soundcards before - so this won't be a show-stopper 😁

Here is a copy of the EEPROM content of my card. First lines are different already -I let you compare it but I think you are on the right track! 24C04 DIP8 Eeproms are quite cheap so I think it is definitely worth a try. Good luck!

You're awesome, thank you very much! The diff I now could do, did indeed show a significant difference that's suggesting a corruption of the eeprom content on this card (especially looking at the card's name in the eeprom):

Sadly, even with this new content, it didn't come alive again (still not getting detected by the original drivers, or unisound on my testing rig).
I'll start checking a couple of caps around the AD1816 next and then it's probably going to be a new main IC, as even without the eeprom, it's not giving out any audio.
Before that, I'll again put this card into a couple of different mainboards, just in case the selective issues you described before might also influence this.

Taking this card out of my testing system, I noticed the AD1816 to be noticably warm - far from being hot, but also not as cool as I'd have expected it to be after a rather short time (that's why I'll be checking caps, just for good measure).
In case your card is still in a system: does the AD1816 get noticeable warm also?

I'm still collecting parts and they'll have to be coming from China, so a change of the AD1816 is going to take a little time, but it will happen 😀

All checked and no shorts found. And just in a hail mary attempt (even though everything did look ok), a resoldering of the QFP:

The final step is gonna be a removal of the coupling caps to the amp and another view with the oscilloscope right at the line-out pins of the AD1816 (while it's pretending to play without an eeprom) and then it's probably gonna be replacement time, unless there's more and better ideas left 😀