Need help with incredibly-cursed AST Advantage 824

[NightSprinter]

As the title says, this thing I got from a thrift store years back in Orlando is just.. Something. I've had issues where it corrupted the harddrive it had, and a 4GB CF card (and neither can be repaired or recovered). The original CD drive was also having issues with files appearing corrupted. Win95 still shows serial and parallel ports as active, even if disabled in the bios. On-board Mach64 hard-crashes on anything but Mode13h/X and VESA resolutions (or really any STANDARD resolutiotn, so no Ms. PacPC fullscreen mode), despite said crashes don't happen with an actual PCI Mach64 (though I've had to use a Trident for now). Is there any hope for this thing? Especially since it looks that the board can be modded to take a VRM card for later Pentiums up to the MMX line if one's installed. Plus, it seems as if the IDE ports only work if one device is plugged in each channel. Two devices on the same channel are a no-go

I just wanted to get this thing up and running and upgraded, so I could have an MMX machine with a Voodoo1 to run everything prior to my Slot-1 build (and is too new for the Tandy 1000 line). Especially as I wanted to put my GUS PnP Pro into it so I had that and a card with WSS and SBPro2 compatibility.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

All of those random issues to me point to power problems. Have you done any restoration work on the machine? From the few pictures I can find online, it looks like the motherboard is peppered with SMD capacitors, which from that era are notorious for leaking and failing, causing all matters of havoc. Since they can wick their own electrolyte between the plastic foot, it can be hard to determine if they're leaking without damaging or destroying them, it's best to just replace them.

I would also inspect the power supply and check for bad capacitors.

 

[NightSprinter]

I sadly lack any tools for doing so, but I can see about having someone I know locally look into it. Also, would capacitor/power issues result in the on-board Mach64 just crashing for the custom modes in games like Ms. PacPC?

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Yes, power and capacitor issues can cause hardware to malfunction. If the Mach64 ASIC/RAM is getting dirty power, it will cause all matter of erratic behavior. The RAM for the Mach64 could also technically be bad itself, but that usually just manifests in rendering errors.

You don't need any specialized equipment for doing SMD capacitors. You can get the job done with a soldering iron, some small needle pliers, tweezers and some electronics parts cleaner to wipe up the leaked electrolyte and rosin residue.