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

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 :)

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.

Glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

Glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks, glad you found it interesting.

Glad you liked it, thanks!

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

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

Glad you enjoyed it, thanks!

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

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!

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.

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!

@@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.

Hmm good question. Perhaps the bus is floating so the card reads random noise from the floating bus. If the faulty RAM is completely broken, then it might as well not touch the output bus, which would result in the same type of random noise.