Sound Blaster SB32 CT3930 Repair. OPL3 and AWE32 MIDI in one card!

Рет қаралды 3,915

Жыл бұрын

Repairing a faulty Creative Sound Blaster CT3930 ISA Sound Card. This is a rather special SB32 card because it has both an EMU8K wavetable Midi chip and a genuine Yamaha OPL3 instead of Creative's CQM. The card was generating white noise and also occasionally a high-pitched tone. The very end of the video at 21:17 shows a small part of the pinout of the CT1971 EMU8K chip.
CT3930 Manual PDF: www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile...
UNISOUND: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?...
Music: Track Stalker from the Duke Duke Dance Party Album by the Space Quest Historian, Troels Pleimert
spacequesthistorian.bandcamp.com
• "Duke Duke Dance Party...

Пікірлер: 38

@CandyGramForMongo_ Жыл бұрын

Flux is you’re friend. Flux wants to help. Trust flux. Feel the flux. Know the flux. Be the flux. Use flux! 😂

@segfault-berlin Жыл бұрын

That's some impressive debugging. Kudos for sharing your pinout, and findings on how the card actually works

@aspinx Жыл бұрын

The amount of work done here is just incredible!

@esc2dos Жыл бұрын

Brilliant work. You have a terrific understanding of electronics. Watching your process of logically deducing the faults is priceless. I've got the exact same card, thankfully mine was fully functional from the ebay seller, but I have a ct1600 that won't detect, and I'm thinking it's time to revisit it. Thanks for the incentive.

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed the video. I was lucky this time and things worked out in the end. Some other boards are just too broken! Good luck with your CT1600 :)

@Vanessaira-Retro Жыл бұрын

Great video! Incredibly insightful on how you went about investigating and troubleshooting. Thank you

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it :)

@Choralone422 Жыл бұрын

Excellent job! I had this exact sound card back in the mid 90's! I remember playing the original Diablo with it along with playing with General MIDI and so on. I never did add extra RAM to it but it still was a pretty good card for the time. I used the card up until the Pentium 3 days where I ended up going with a PCI based Creative Labs sound card which at times was a nightmare!

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Yeah, these Creative PCI sound cards were not great with older games, but some of them had fancy features like EAX which was great for newer games.

@BrassicGamer Жыл бұрын

A very satisfying outcome, and it was great to watch your methodical troubleshooting process. Helps people to learn!

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

@hugocosta4437 Жыл бұрын

I had problems in the past with the MFBEN jumper on an AWE64 Gold. The problem was a little bit of corrosion in the jumper itself. After a little bit of cleaning, all worked as it should again.

@dizzy_derps Жыл бұрын

Watching those audio tests is giving nightmare memories of trying to setup audio cards way back when.

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Haha yeah, and having to use the PC speaker whenever the audio card wouldn't work :)

@lexatwo Жыл бұрын

Wow what a fantastic job you've done! Excellent video, really entertaining and useful at the same time.

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it :)

@janpedersen9120 Жыл бұрын

thanks for your awesome video, your knowledge is great.. love it.. hope to see more soon

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

I am working on some other repairs, so yeah, I think I will make a couple more videos on them :) Thanks!

@tvhwssywp108 Жыл бұрын

This was very interesting, thanks for posting!

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Thanks, glad you found it interesting.

@HBAVHS Жыл бұрын

What a Job! Great work. Thanks for the Vid

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Glad you liked it, thanks!

@TheChimeraMan Жыл бұрын

Great video.

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it, thanks!

@noscrap 3 сағат бұрын

Nice Job! But what i dont understand, why the noise doesn't disappear after removing the faulty RAM and when you tested it without it.🤔

@Shmbler Жыл бұрын

Nice job. That card wasn't an easy job considering its terrible state. Also I like the background music. The output of the LS05 having a low voltage might indicate why it died in the first place. Maybe the output has some low resistance to ground for some reason. I'd check if it gets warm.

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Great point! It is not getting warm, but I will check it out. Thanks!

@Megatog615 Жыл бұрын

Looks like you could use an ultrasonic cleaner!

@tony359 Жыл бұрын

Nice! I have an AWE32 with a similar issue on AWE sound, RAM not detected (clearly shorted) and when replaced it would still play distorted sound. I am blaming the EMU chip in my case but I am still investigating. Did you find schematics for this card?

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

I could not find any datasheets for the EMU8K or the VIBRA chip. I did not look for schematics, but I would doubt there would be any, but I could be wrong. In the CT3930 there don't seem to be too many components between the EMU chip and the SIMMs. It is just the F244 buffers, the LS05 and LS27 for the WE signal and the resistor arrays. Perhaps replacing all of them could fix the issue:) Good luck fixing your AWE32, I hope you get it fully working soon!

@tony359 Жыл бұрын

@@scrap_computing Thanks for the hint. I'm still playing with it, I need to probe some signals, hopefully that will give me some clues.

@extalia Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the super informative video! I've got a CT3980 with a very intriguing issue: the card will output PCM audio perfectly on both left and right channels, however, MIDI through the EMU8K will only output on the left channel. Any hints? I love my card and would be sad to see it die a miserable death. Thanks!!

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

Mine had lots of bad capacitors, so I would start from that. Then I would check the DAC (TDA1387 in my card) or perhaps the op amp connect to it (3403 in my card). Good luck!

@clintthompson4100 Жыл бұрын

I have a question. Not about this video( I used the latest due to I don't know if you go back to previous videos to see comments) what do you have or going to make another update about your voltage blaster or the socket 3 CPUs. I do hope you have a final version to build or purchase. Also are you making one for older socket 5 and socket 7 motherboards that need the split voltage for MMX based CPUs for boards that don't support the split rail MMX CPUs like from Intel, AMD, Cyrix. Have a good one.

@scrap_computing Жыл бұрын

I have made a couple of small changes since. The last one was a slight increase in the hole diameter for some of the headers. There are still features that are missing, like a jumper setting for the write-back cache and perhaps some mounts for a CPU cooler. I have not looked into them yet though. Btw you may also be interested in a fork of the SocketBlaster project by CalamityLime at vogons who is building a board with an onboard voltage regulation circuit. Please checkout the thread: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=92036 . Socket 7 has more dense pins, so we can't use the same parts or assembly process. It might be possible to build one but it would require a very different approach.