Is it black magic, or just voodoo resurrection? (3dfx repair)

[Music] hello and welcome today i would like to talk about voodoo magic and if it is possible to raise something from the dead some time ago i got a box full of electronics crap and some parts which had huge impact on the history of 3d graphics and computer games in particular i guess i don't need to explain why i was so glad to find multiple 3dfx voodoo graphics accelerators there so let's take a look first of all there was this plano name 3dfx voodoo card the 3dfx company didn't have own factories in the beginning so they sold their ics and licensed other companies to produce the 3d graphics accelerators the product itself was such a huge success that countless companies all over the world jumped onto the train and flooded the market the snow name card is probably one of the countless examples however most of the 3dfx voodoo cards were more or less similar even the pcb layout was pretty much the same as well as the performance one of the more popular manufacturers of the 3dfx voodoo cards was diamond and they produced the famous diamond monster 3d which was the second card which i found in this crap as you can see the cards do look very similar despite that they were produced by different companies anyway 3dfx voodoo got very hot and it was a common practice to put some heat sinks on the ics as you can see on the glue residues probably a heatsink was glued at least on one of the ics and obviously removed later the third and the last card which was in the scrap is another diamond monster 3d this one is from slightly different revision but looks again very similar as you probably already noticed the first two cards do not have a slot bracket but this third one has well the thing is i already took a look on these cards and made some pre-analysis all three cards didn't have the slot brackets and were not working at all as i got them but as i already mentioned these cards could get very hot and due to permanent heating up and cooling down the 3dfx voodoo cards were notorious to fail due to broken contacts or on the main ics since this issue is so common i already tried to reflow the solder off camera just as i showed it in my last video if you don't know what i'm talking about please feel free to take a look well reflowing this holder resurrected this card and now it is fully working i already added a 3d printed record and this card is ready to use however the other two are still failing this diamond monster 3d is unfortunately completely dead as i was soldering i realized that some of the legs of the ac were twisted and according pads were damaged probably someone removed the heatsink with a lot of force and unfortunately damaged the card physically the snow name card was also completely dead at first try but after reflowing the solder it was halfway back to life it works but it shows a lot of visual defects and in this video i would like to take a closer look at it first let's take a look at the test hardware my standard test pc for pci cards is a pentium 3 500 megahertz system based on intel bx 1 main board like this one however i run into huge problems trying to test voodoo 1 cards in this system the cpu seems to be just too fast the voodoo card runs very unstable and with a lot of weird graphical glitches so i switched to this super socket 7 main board with k62 at 450 megahertz and this time the 3dfx voodoo ran rock solid since the 3dfx voodoo 1 is an addon card it needs an additional 2d graphics card for the test this agp-80i rage did the job very well so let me show how the image of this working diamond monster 3d looks like on this machine i have only dos and a tomb raider demo which works with 3dfx this is not too much but sufficient for today's topic i'm sorry for interferences of the screen with my camera but i hope that you can see that the rendered image is clean all textures are rendered properly and also no damaged surfaces are visible in the game menu now let's try the other no name 3dfx voodoo card and see what we get you can see the problems already in the shadow of the 3dfx logo which has holes in it also in the main menu you can see a lot of damaged rectangles and flickery also the text letters are mostly affected in the game itself all textures are broken there are a lot of white and black spots all over the place take a look at the plant's textures they seem also to have broken pixels where transparent pixels are to be expected one important observation is that there seem to be no broken static areas on the screen can you see when i rotate the camera the glitches move together with related polygons this means that only textures seem to be affected what could this mean for our test object well take a look at the 3dfx card once again let's go through the ics and see what they are responsible for the largest i see is named fbi or frame buffer interface as the name implies this ic is responsible for the frame buffer usually all the pixels are drawn into one frame and then the frame is presented to the user so the frame is actually the image which you see well we probably don't have any issues with this ic on this card since if it would be faulty we would see broken static areas on the screen which are independent from the camera movement the second ic is named tmu or texture mapping unit and this one is responsible for the texture projection onto the polygons so this could be interesting for us because our broken textures could be a result of faulty tmu as in most of the 3d fixed voodoo cards this one has 4 megabytes of memory divided into eight ics with 512 kilobytes each two megabytes of this memory are dedicated to the frame buffer and another two megabyte are used by the texture mapping unit since we seem to have only texture issues we should probably concentrate first on the tmu and the coordinate memory block and since it should be easier to exchange the memory let's start with it unfortunately i have no spare memory which would fit into this voodoo card but i have a donor the other diamond monster 3d with the damage frame buffer interface can give us a bunch of memory ics i don't know if they work but well what do we lose so let's try i guess i'll try to replace only the texture memory and leave the frame buffer memory in place for now just to see if it makes any difference however i'll dissolder all the memory acs from the donor board i think it doesn't need them anymore anyway i will use some captain tape to prevent other parts from needless overheating ok the texture memory ics are off the pcb and i have a funny idea let's start tomb raider with all these chips and see if it works and how does it look like well it seems to work indeed but as you can see all the textures are gone and we can only see untextured polygons obviously lara seems to be not textured and contains only colored polygons okay the good thing is that at least what we can see has no obvious visual errors also in the menu i can't see any flickering anymore which is a sign that the theory about affected textures related part of the card could be true now let's solder the memory ics which we got donated from the diamond monster card i honestly have to admit that i'm not very experienced with this type of smd soldering i did this only once before but i guess the more practice the better the magic formula for smd soldering is as always a lot of flux when soldering smd especially with a little space between the contacts always clean the board with alcohol after soldering the flux can be conductive and will shorten the contacts resulting in various unexpected strange and complicated to analyze behavior time to test well this looks a little bit different but still quite broken in the main menu we have less flickering the in-game textures are still broken however in the outside area the textures look a lot better but the plants still have a lot of broken pixels in the transparent area well just in case off camera i replaced the other four memory modules which belonged to the frame buffer but just as expected it didn't bring any improvement well maybe the memory from the donor board was defective as well unfortunately i can't validate it now however i'm still quite sure that the issue is related to the texture unit and i guess we can go another step forward and try to transplant the tmu i see from our donor card it could be broken as well so it is kind of flying blind but what do we lose again yeah when desoldering such ics i always try to keep them from overheating with a layer of masking tape as isolator and a captain tape the temperature on the die can be drastically reduced i disordered the tmu from oh i know named voodoo card in the same way i did it off camera to not have it in my way because it is very easy to lift the pads and i need it to be more concentrated and again i covered everything around with captain tape to avoid the damage of the other parts soldering such a team uic is a little bit more complicated but very similar to the reflow technique which i showed in my last video first of all the pads must be really clean i am using solder wick to remove all the old solder from the pads you have to be very careful here to not to overheat and lift the pad now where the pads are free from the old solder i clean them with some ipa just as always with smd parts use a lot of fresh flux on the contacts or your soldering will end up in a disaster when putting the ic onto the pcb be sure about the orientation of the ic or say goodbye to your hardware i am very sorry for the bad camera but aligning the ac can be very tedious work you have to take your time enough light and maybe magnifying glass to be really sure it is quite complicated to align the ic from all four edges simultaneously and keep it in place so the best is to align it as good as you can and then solder some legs of the ic on one side and then realign it if needed and solder against some legs on the opposite side when done before soldering all the other legs take a magnifying glass and go over all edges once again and make sure that all the legs are aligned on the related pads as good as possible when everything is checked twice just put some solder on the tip of your iron and go over the pins of the ic in the same way as i showed in my last video and don't forget to clean everything with alcohol after you are done time to test again okay at least our voodoo card seems to be still working this is already quite a relief the image looks a lot better however i still can see some glitches in the main menu of the game there are still some decent black vertical lines the game itself looks much better however on the floor i can see some regular yellow spots but the plant's textures look now as expected this result is very promising i will take a looking glass again and see if any pins of the ic are shorted or were not soldered properly okay after some careful looking through all the soldering work i found two contacts of one texture memory i see to be shortened let's fix it and see if this solves our last issues again just adding some flux and short touch of the hot iron tip should reflow the solder towards the pins and remove the bridge here you go back to the test bench and finally the 3dfx logo doesn't have any holes anymore the image looks as clean as a skin of a baby we don't get any black stripes in the menu and the game itself looks clean as well all the textures are clean and the transparent pixels on the plants look also as they should great i'm glad to say that this repair was a full success replace the memory chips and the texture mapping unit i assume that the memory was not the culprit i guess it was the tmu from the beginning but unfortunately i can't tell definitely what exactly was bad about it if you know a way how to test the memory on a 3dfx without disoldering it i would be glad to know about it in the comments the memory ics which i took from the donor board are a little bit slower they are 45 nanoseconds against the 35 nanoseconds as before but well as far as i know everything below 50 nanoseconds is sufficient for a 3dfx voodoo one so it shouldn't be an issue maybe i will put some heatsinks on the ics to prevent them from overheating in the future but for now there is only one last thing i can do for this card the slot bracket i don't have a metal bracket but i designed and printed one on my 3d printer and here it is one glorious item of the computer history reasoned from the dead and waiting to be used in a retro gaming machine and if you still don't believe in voodoo magic there is nothing i can do for you well at this point i would like to thank my brother for the cool intro for my channel i hope you liked it and enjoyed the video as well just as always please leave your comments likes and dislikes below if you like my channel please consider to subscribe to share and support it in any way you wish so far thank you and goodbye

Channel: Necroware

Views: 34,250

Keywords: retro, hardware, soldering, repair, review, nerd, 3dfx, voodoo

Id: sWdpb5mw_zQ

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020