VOGONS


First post, by MrSmiley381

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Good morning from scenic and foggy northeast Ohio, everyone. I started a Super Socket 7 project and I've been having loads of fun. Perhaps you folks can help me troubleshoot why I can't even get my machines to POST.

Primary Machine (New Build, old parts):
Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Gold
Gigabyte GA-5AX Revision 4.1 (Super Socket 7)
128 MB PC133 RAM, single stick
AMD K6-3+ 450ACZ

Backup Tester (HP 4550Z, all original parts):
100W PSU
Asus MEB-VM (Socket 370)
64 MB PC100 RAM, two sticks (Total 128 MB)
Celeron 466 MHz
IDE Hard Drive
IDE CD Drive
Floppy Drive
RAGE IIC AGP onboard chipset
W98 SE

Problem GPU:
3dfx Voodoo 5 AGP, Revision A, 1.06 BIOS (according to sticker)

You'll notice in the primary machine that I didn't list any parts aside from motherboard/CPU/RAM/PSU. I'm really trying to get it to POST before anything else. The backup machine is something I got off Craigslist a while back and it's a tiny little thing with barely any clearance for me to work, but another available tool is better than nothing. I also got a Matrox AGP GPU on loan from a friend and that actually got the GA-5AX to POST and even install Windows before the machine mutilated the OS drive.

So with those initial notes out of the way, I would like to describe the issue. Whenever I try the GPU is either machine, I get a long beep followed by two or three short beeps. It's probably three, but the speaker doesn't always sound like it's separating the beeps. I'm also at wit's end over this thing so I'm probably not hearing anything right. Regardless, this should indicate that there's something wrong with the GPU's seating, its RAM, or its BIOS. Maybe the capacitors. But whenever I boot the machine, the fans on the card kick on just fine.

Things I've tried so far:
Reseating the GPU. No change.
Removing as much hardware from the GA-5AX as possible. Nope.
Disabling video RAM shadowing on the GA-5AX. Nothing.
Using a Seraphic recovery boot disk with the 1.06 BIOS in the HP machine. No idea if it did anything because it was running blind and not even successfully POSTing.

Any idea what I could spot or test on the board to troubleshoot it? The eBay seller said it last worked in 2015 before he pulled it from the machine. The board is incredibly clean. I'm a little boggled at this point.

I can provide more details as I'm sure I've overlooked quite a lot in this initial post. The good news is that I live right behind a Micro Center so I can grab just about any newer equipment I could need for testing. I appreciate any insight on this.

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I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 1 of 13, by Justin1091

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Hi!

You could take a look at this forum topic, this guy had bad capacitors on his voodoo5 and had similar issues. I understand recapping it is the first thing to do if it has issues like this.
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP Compatibility Problem

I also had a topic on issues with my voodoo5:
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP freezes PC (maybe something there can help you, has some multimeter voltage stuff too if you want to compare).

Did you plug in the molex connector? (just asking to make sure 😀) Maybe reset the BIOS of the PC? Put AGP to 1X or 2X in the BIOS?

Reply 2 of 13, by MrSmiley381

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Justin1091 wrote:
Hi! […]
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Hi!

You could take a look at this forum topic, this guy had bad capacitors on his voodoo5 and had similar issues. I understand recapping it is the first thing to do if it has issues like this.
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP Compatibility Problem

I also had a topic on issues with my voodoo5:
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP freezes PC (maybe something there can help you, has some multimeter voltage stuff too if you want to compare).

Did you plug in the molex connector? (just asking to make sure 😀) Maybe reset the BIOS of the PC? Put AGP to 1X or 2X in the BIOS?

Thanks Justin. Your thread looks like it gets a lot more technical and pretty crazy. Hopefully things don't come to that.

I did see AkBKukU's thread and video earlier as well. I was initially hoping to avoid recapping, but I've got some updates on this. Even though I took a good scrubbing to the board, I noticed that a lot of the contacts on one of the chips near the 4-pin power connector looked a little white. Obviously, those pins should have a little bit of black between them. Hit that spot again and no surprise, the bits of board between the pins looked black. Pretty high chance that's capacitor leak, so I gave the board an alcohol bath for a couple hours, let it dry with the aid of a fan overnight, and then tested it this morning. I was hoping that if there was just a little leak cleaning any contacts would help, but it looks like the capacitors are dried to the point of being ineffective. At least, I hope that's the case, because I'm prepping the Mouser order shortly.

I did manage to do a BIOS update and full reset on the board with the aid of the secondary PC. My IDE SSD came yesterday as well so I managed to get 98SE running and I've been having loads of fun with everything but the Sound Blaster Live driver CD. Don't even bother putting that thing in your machine. It's a monster. Unofficial Service Pack 3 has been much better, despite crashes.
I also have a PCI video card coming sometime soon. If I still have problems even after recapping I'll see if the Voodoo 5 has any sort of device profile while the PCI video card runs the system, assuming it'll POST at that point.

It also doesn't look like the GA-5AX has an AGP 1X or 2X option, though the manual for both the 4.1 (my revision) and 5.2 (latest revision) has this line:

GA-5AX Manual wrote:
The AGP port can be used either as fast PCI port (32-bits at 66MHz vs. 32-bits at 33MHz) or as an AGP port which supports 2x dat […]
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The AGP port can be used either as fast PCI port (32-bits at 66MHz vs. 32-bits at
33MHz) or as an AGP port which supports 2x data -rate, a read queue, and side
band addressing. When the 2x-data rate is used the port can transmit data at
533Mb/sec (66.6*2*4). The read-queue can be used to pipeline reads – removing
the effects of the reads -latency. Side band addressing can be used to transmit the
data address on a separate line in order to further speed the transaction.

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 3 of 13, by MrSmiley381

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Hey everyone, I've got an update on this.

I ordered a PCI Radeon 9250 off good ol' eBay. Brand new and CompUSA-branded for good measure. I installed it on its own in the GA-5AX successfully. Whether the BIOS is set to boot from AGP or PCI, it will find it and load the machine. Windows sees it, which is also good. Diablo II doesn't see it as a valid video adapter, but I'm fairly certain that's just the OS conflicting with the Matrox drivers and all the other weird stuff going on.

So then I installed the Voodoo 5. If the board is set to boot from AGP, I get the beeps. If I set it to boot from PCI, I can see the BIOS so long as I've got the monitor plugged in to the Radeon. All right, that's another step forward.

When the Windows 98 splash/loading screen appears, I get the three beeps again. Weird, but Windows keeps loading.

Windows 98 boots up, and recognizes new hardware! It was at this point that I realized I didn't have any drivers, so I grabbed them off Phil's site and burned them to a CD. Popped the disc in, and Windows lets me load the drivers. It recognizes it's a Voodoo 5. If I enable the monitor linked to the Voodoo 5, then swap the VGA cable out from the Radeon 9250 to the Voodoo 5, it will even display a 640 by 480 extension of my desktop!

I'm still thinking there's something wrong with the BIOS on the card. I was going to try and flash it last night, but I couldn't find the exact right tool, it was late, I had to clean up, etc. Any recommendations about where I should go from here?

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 4 of 13, by PunishedSnake

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MrSmiley381 wrote:
Hey everyone, I've got an update on this. […]
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Hey everyone, I've got an update on this.

I ordered a PCI Radeon 9250 off good ol' eBay. Brand new and CompUSA-branded for good measure. I installed it on its own in the GA-5AX successfully. Whether the BIOS is set to boot from AGP or PCI, it will find it and load the machine. Windows sees it, which is also good. Diablo II doesn't see it as a valid video adapter, but I'm fairly certain that's just the OS conflicting with the Matrox drivers and all the other weird stuff going on.

So then I installed the Voodoo 5. If the board is set to boot from AGP, I get the beeps. If I set it to boot from PCI, I can see the BIOS so long as I've got the monitor plugged in to the Radeon. All right, that's another step forward.

When the Windows 98 splash/loading screen appears, I get the three beeps again. Weird, but Windows keeps loading.

Windows 98 boots up, and recognizes new hardware! It was at this point that I realized I didn't have any drivers, so I grabbed them off Phil's site and burned them to a CD. Popped the disc in, and Windows lets me load the drivers. It recognizes it's a Voodoo 5. If I enable the monitor linked to the Voodoo 5, then swap the VGA cable out from the Radeon 9250 to the Voodoo 5, it will even display a 640 by 480 extension of my desktop!

I'm still thinking there's something wrong with the BIOS on the card. I was going to try and flash it last night, but I couldn't find the exact right tool, it was late, I had to clean up, etc. Any recommendations about where I should go from here?

Hey bud I've got a few ideas, first off flash your BIOS using FLASH.EXE from Seraphic's tools with this one below:

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 Bios 1.18 AGP mod DramINITO
http://www.3dfxzone.it/Voodoo5/bios/1.18%20AGP%20mod.zip

This is just the very last BIOS rev modded with the more lenient memory timings that your card initially shipped with, fixes A LOT of bugs, you should be able to flash it fine via command line using your Radeon by tapping F8 before the Windows splash screen and then hitting Shift+F5 to get to the DOS prompt.

Now check the interrupts set in your BIOS, ideally you want this card on IRQ 11 or 10 with NO OTHER active devices sharing this interrupt other than the usual ACPI busmastering interrupts, if you can't get either of these free, turn off your parallel and serial ports to free up IRQs 3-7 and see if you can shuffle some other devices into those.

It will also work on IRQ 5 and 9 but these aren't great choices if you have a Soundblaster on IRQ5 and in the case of IRQ9 it MIGHT conflict with your ACPI system control interrupt.

Now I'm assuming FSB and whatnot is set to defaults and theres no overclock there whatsoever? If there is set it to defaults. Try toggling Video BIOS Shadow and/or C8000 - CFFFF Shadow / D0000 - DFFFF Shadow, set Graphics Aperture Size to it's minimum, set Primary Frame Buffer to ALL, try toggling VGA Frame Buffer, turn off Spread Spectrum. Let me know how you go.

Reply 5 of 13, by Justin1091

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MrSmiley381 wrote:

Hey everyone, I've got an update on this.

I'm still thinking there's something wrong with the BIOS on the card. I was going to try and flash it last night, but I couldn't find the exact right tool, it was late, I had to clean up, etc. Any recommendations about where I should go from here?

Did 3dfx tools (it's the driver's control panel) get installed along with the drivers? If so, maybe you can take a look at the '3dfx info' tab. It should show the current BIOS. You can also download HWinfo32 (latest version works fine with 98, check summary only on startup) and check the card there, it should show the clock and memory speeds (166mhz).
Anyway PunishedSnake is right, try his steps!

@PunishedSnake I use 1.18 on my card, does that mean the memory timings are stricter than normal and thus I'm stressing i.e. overclocking the card? If so maybe I'll also flash mine to 1.18 mod dram!

Don't forget to disable VGA BIOS shadowing when flashing the card, I once broke mine when I forgot this and had to use another card to reflash it again.

Reply 6 of 13, by PunishedSnake

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Justin1091 wrote:
Did 3dfx tools (it's the driver's control panel) get installed along with the drivers? If so, maybe you can take a look at the ' […]
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MrSmiley381 wrote:

Hey everyone, I've got an update on this.

I'm still thinking there's something wrong with the BIOS on the card. I was going to try and flash it last night, but I couldn't find the exact right tool, it was late, I had to clean up, etc. Any recommendations about where I should go from here?

Did 3dfx tools (it's the driver's control panel) get installed along with the drivers? If so, maybe you can take a look at the '3dfx info' tab. It should show the current BIOS. You can also download HWinfo32 (latest version works fine with 98, check summary only on startup) and check the card there, it should show the clock and memory speeds (166mhz).
Anyway PunishedSnake is right, try his steps!

@PunishedSnake I use 1.18 on my card, does that mean the memory timings are stricter than normal and thus I'm stressing i.e. overclocking the card? If so maybe I'll also flash mine to 1.18 mod dram!

Don't forget to disable VGA BIOS shadowing when flashing the card, I once broke mine when I forgot this and had to use another card to reflash it again.

Yup though I noticed no issues with the tighter timings, I just prefer to minimise any potential complications as the performance gain from the lower latency is marginal at best.

Reply 7 of 13, by MrSmiley381

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I was able to download and transfer the required flash.exe and ROM image to my machine. Loaded up the DOS prompt and tried to run the tool.

"ERROR: Unknown flash EEPROM manufacturer. (Man. ID: 1Fh, Dev. ID: 00h)"

Tried it in a command prompt from within Windows and got the same result. Should I simply assume that there are dark forces in this world that conspire against me?

All kidding aside, this might explain why when I tried using a floppy Seraphic boot disk blind that it didn't do anything at all aside from reboot after a minute. It was probably stopping after the same result. None of the BIOS options made a difference either. Damn!

3dfx tools also only shows my primary display adapter, that still being the Radeon. So I guess that leaves me troubleshooting that message about the EEPROM. I suspect it's either that there's something weird about the chip (undocumented variant?) or that it's looking at the PCI card instead. I'm going to a cast a tiny bit of doubt on the latter because when I booted the machine without plugging the extra power cable into the Voodoo 5 the flash executable spat out an error saying to 3dfx card was installed. That means when I got the EEPROM error it was at least seeing the right card in the machine.

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 8 of 13, by PunishedSnake

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MrSmiley381 wrote:
I was able to download and transfer the required flash.exe and ROM image to my machine. Loaded up the DOS prompt and tried to r […]
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I was able to download and transfer the required flash.exe and ROM image to my machine. Loaded up the DOS prompt and tried to run the tool.

"ERROR: Unknown flash EEPROM manufacturer. (Man. ID: 1Fh, Dev. ID: 00h)"

Tried it in a command prompt from within Windows and got the same result. Should I simply assume that there are dark forces in this world that conspire against me?

All kidding aside, this might explain why when I tried using a floppy Seraphic boot disk blind that it didn't do anything at all aside from reboot after a minute. It was probably stopping after the same result. None of the BIOS options made a difference either. Damn!

3dfx tools also only shows my primary display adapter, that still being the Radeon. So I guess that leaves me troubleshooting that message about the EEPROM. I suspect it's either that there's something weird about the chip (undocumented variant?) or that it's looking at the PCI card instead. I'm going to a cast a tiny bit of doubt on the latter because when I booted the machine without plugging the extra power cable into the Voodoo 5 the flash executable spat out an error saying to 3dfx card was installed. That means when I got the EEPROM error it was at least seeing the right card in the machine.

Hey man did you check if Video BIOS Shadow and/or C8000 - CFFFF Shadow / D0000 - DFFFF Shadow were enabled? If so, turn em off and try again, otherwise it looks like the EEPROM of your card maybe might need replacing.

Reply 9 of 13, by MrSmiley381

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PunishedSnake wrote:

Hey man did you check if Video BIOS Shadow and/or C8000 - CFFFF Shadow / D0000 - DFFFF Shadow were enabled? If so, turn em off and try again, otherwise it looks like the EEPROM of your card maybe might need replacing.

Yeah, to be extra sure I booted it up, made sure everything was off, then tried again. No luck. A faulty EEPROM would be consistent with one long beep and three short beep error code. Man, what a headache.

I take it that's the Atmel chip in the top center area on the board? It doesn't look like the pins are that bad to solder, but I sure would like to rule out as much as I can before I try that.

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 10 of 13, by PunishedSnake

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MrSmiley381 wrote:
PunishedSnake wrote:

Hey man did you check if Video BIOS Shadow and/or C8000 - CFFFF Shadow / D0000 - DFFFF Shadow were enabled? If so, turn em off and try again, otherwise it looks like the EEPROM of your card maybe might need replacing.

Yeah, to be extra sure I booted it up, made sure everything was off, then tried again. No luck. A faulty EEPROM would be consistent with one long beep and three short beep error code. Man, what a headache.

I take it that's the Atmel chip in the top center area on the board? It doesn't look like the pins are that bad to solder, but I sure would like to rule out as much as I can before I try that.

You can try loading its BIOS via shadowing it, there's a DOS TSR that does it, you'll probably have to set it it up on a floppy via AUTOEXEC.BAT and have it run blind until it loads it.

Reply 11 of 13, by MrSmiley381

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Just wanted to provide an update on this. So far, none of the flipping of BIOS switches has helped. This is all a big doo-doo mess. Also got another nice Socket 7 board off Craigslist that also spat out the three disappointing beeps.

However, through my Googling I (of course) found a VOGONS thread where Robert B fixed the exact same problem on a Voodoo 4500. Looks like I'll need a programmer and my buddy's heat gun for some shenanigans.

Until that time comes, I might try using some BIOS shadowing or whatever else. I also started a similar project to this machine but using a Barton 3000+ as the basis instead. Diablo II ran pretty bad with the 9250 and the 98SE support is dropped for Battle.Net, other later Glide games will run better, 98 + XP dual boot should run a lot better, etc. If I end up with another working, stable 5500 and manage to resuscitate this one then it's going to be modded to hell and back for way better cooling options.

I'm glad there's all this trial and error that people have done before me. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute as well.

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 12 of 13, by PunishedSnake

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MrSmiley381 wrote:
Just wanted to provide an update on this. So far, none of the flipping of BIOS switches has helped. This is all a big doo-doo […]
Show full quote

Just wanted to provide an update on this. So far, none of the flipping of BIOS switches has helped. This is all a big doo-doo mess. Also got another nice Socket 7 board off Craigslist that also spat out the three disappointing beeps.

However, through my Googling I (of course) found a VOGONS thread where Robert B fixed the exact same problem on a Voodoo 4500. Looks like I'll need a programmer and my buddy's heat gun for some shenanigans.

Until that time comes, I might try using some BIOS shadowing or whatever else. I also started a similar project to this machine but using a Barton 3000+ as the basis instead. Diablo II ran pretty bad with the 9250 and the 98SE support is dropped for Battle.Net, other later Glide games will run better, 98 + XP dual boot should run a lot better, etc. If I end up with another working, stable 5500 and manage to resuscitate this one then it's going to be modded to hell and back for way better cooling options.

I'm glad there's all this trial and error that people have done before me. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute as well.

Hey dude, before you go fiddling with it, might be worth reaching out to a chap named Osckhar Barea, here's his site: http://www.3dfx.es/. He exclusively does 3DFX repairs, reballing, PCB reworks and modification of our cards including but not limited to voltmodding, 128mb VRAM upgrades and replacement of the VSA-100 chips with the Rev3 variant most commonly found on the unreleased 6000 cards, they're capable of clocking at 200mhz. If you're not planning on settling with a simple EEPROM swap, he's the man to talk to.

Reply 13 of 13, by Justin1091

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MrSmiley381 wrote:
Just wanted to provide an update on this. So far, none of the flipping of BIOS switches has helped. This is all a big doo-doo […]
Show full quote

Just wanted to provide an update on this. So far, none of the flipping of BIOS switches has helped. This is all a big doo-doo mess. Also got another nice Socket 7 board off Craigslist that also spat out the three disappointing beeps.

However, through my Googling I (of course) found a VOGONS thread where Robert B fixed the exact same problem on a Voodoo 4500. Looks like I'll need a programmer and my buddy's heat gun for some shenanigans.

Until that time comes, I might try using some BIOS shadowing or whatever else. I also started a similar project to this machine but using a Barton 3000+ as the basis instead. Diablo II ran pretty bad with the 9250 and the 98SE support is dropped for Battle.Net, other later Glide games will run better, 98 + XP dual boot should run a lot better, etc. If I end up with another working, stable 5500 and manage to resuscitate this one then it's going to be modded to hell and back for way better cooling options.

I'm glad there's all this trial and error that people have done before me. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute as well.

When I messed up a V5's BIOS, I used an ISA videocard to flash the V5. That way the flash program didn't detect the wrong PCI videocard. No idea if it will help you, I just remembered it.

Not sure but don't forget the capacitors. Given the caps are really old by now it's possible they may be causing problems.
Oh and screw blizzard for adding the useless 'systeminfo' file and breaking 98-2000 compatibility. I'm staying at v1.13!