VOGONS


First post, by mitrynicolae

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Hello vogons community,

I have some voodoo 2 cards (from diamond and creative) on different stages of negation (because I want them to work and they keep saying no =)) ).
The one I will discuss today is from creative labs, a 12 mb model with ElectronTech memories.
Initially the board was in bad shape, with capacitors missing and FBI and TMUs pins lifted, so as you can imagine the board was completely dead. After adding the missing capacitors, resoldering the pins and fixing the created bridges (twice, because why not =)) ) there is a little sign of activity, but is still work to do. Based on the bellow Mojo logs, is there anyone who can give a hint to what is wrong?

I have already checked the resistors and they seem fine, traces, pins, whatever I could test on the first hand.

On my side at least, the creative ones seems to suffer more or less from the same issue. I have managed to make the boards see FBI memory and only partial memory for one or both TMUs, but then nothing and I have no clue where to search next. One board for example, with the same symptoms and similar logs (just the amount of seen memory on TMUs differ) had the entire memory swapped with chips from Silicon Magic. I highly doubt that memory chips from FBI were all good while the ones from TMUs were mostly bad or that some pins on TMUs memory were not soldered properly.

In any case, thank you for your time!

Reply 1 of 2, by MikeSG

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I believe memory problems are a common fault.

This is another thread with a similar problem: Voodoo 2 FBI memory issue?

If it looks visibly correct now (connections), I'd try replacing the memory. You might be able to find replacement FBI & TMU chips as well.

Reply 2 of 2, by mitrynicolae

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I come before you with victory. I have a fully working Creative Labs card with 12Mb Electron Tech memories. Since this repair worked well, the next plan will be to conquer the world, mu ha ha ha ha!

Now, joke aside, let me give some glimpse of the experience that I had. After the initial success with making the FBI chip see 4 MB and only TMU 0 to see 1 Mb I was stuck. In my head I did everything good and there was nothing more to be done. That was nothing far from the truth. It seem that after leaving the card in a corner, to think about why is a bad card, it provided me some answers to the question "Why it is still not working?". TMU 1 had some lifted pins. For this reason I have re-done the soldering job on both TMU 0 and TMU 1, rechecked the pins to not be floating anymore and quickly gone to test it. Aaaand it failed successfully. This time I had 1 Mb on each TMU. The funny part was that Quake 2 started, but it was greenish. Initially I believed that the chip near VGA connectors was to blame, but until I did not had the board fully working I did not wanted to switch to that tasks. So back under the microscope for more checks and discovered some bridges that I have done on TMU 1. Remove them and re-test. Still 1Mb for each TMU. Back to microscope more bridges found un TMU 1, retest fail, microscope, bridges on TMU 0, retest fail. Back to microscope, no more bridges. At this point was stuck again and I did not know what to do next. I still continued to check it with naked eye and found a missing capacitor on the back. Took it from a donor board, quickly mounted it, retest aaaand it failed again. Still 1 Mb seen on the TMUs with nothing changed after all the "fixes" I did. So I took one more chance to also check the FBI for the lifted pins. And because also Murphy wanted to play, on the last side, on the latest pins I found a very tiny bridge on two data pins. I have removed the bridge and rushed to retest it. This time both Windows and Mojo reported a fully working 3dfx voodoo2 card with 12 Mb. I have started Quake 2 just to check and surprise, the colors were now ok without any green tint.

So to summarize the experience,
- do you think you have done your solder properly, think again.
- do you think you don't have any solder bridges (on those tinny pins), think again. Have you checked and still found none, check again and again and again.
- do you think you have checked all the components, think again.

And only after you have exhausted all the above points you can check in other places.

Hope this post will be useful for someone.

I will post here the intermediate mojo logs, just in case someone will find them useful.

I have tried to pair the card with another resurrected Diamond voodoo 2 12 MB (in SLI), but somehow they hate each other because no matter what I tried I could not make them work. Still I have to fully restored voodoo 2 with 12 Mb. The journey continues on the other cards that I have.