Echo II speech card - need help

[ct92404]

Hi,
I've had an Echo II speech synthesizer card installed in my Apple II+ for a while and until now it was working fine. It's been a while since I used it, and a couple of days ago I wanted to play around with it (make the computer say "Do you want to play a game?" like in the movie "Wargames", HA!). But when I tried to run the Textalker program on the disk, the computer keeps freezing up on the copyright screen. It doesn't respond to any keys or even the reset button. I have to turn off the computer and restart it.

The disk is not an original that came with the card. I bought the card on eBay a couple of years ago and it came with a disk that looks like someone just copied at some point. But it was working fine until now. I also made a backup copy of the disk. The disk reads fine, but the card itself doesn't seem to be doing anything.

I've opened the computer and cleaned it, and added cards, etc since I last used the Echo II. I was always very careful when handling it and I don't THINK I could have damaged it. All the other cards are working fine. Is it possible the ECHO II has to be in a specific slot to work? Or could it be having some kind of conflict with another card or something? I've tried moving it to a different slot but still can't get it to work. The card itself looks in perfect condition, no bad traces or contacts,etc.

Here are the cards I have installed:
Slot 0: Language Card
Slot 1: Super Serial Card
Slot 2: Grappler printer card (installed but not connected to a printer)
Slot 3: "Wizard-80" 80 column card
Slot 4: empty
Slot 5: ECHO II card
Slot 6: disk drive controller card

I feel like I'm missing something. It seems like when I first got the card I had trouble getting it to work at first then too, but I don't remember.

I'd greatly appreciate any help!
-Chris

 

[VERAULT]

Have you tried running the floppy apple II plus diags? IF they pass run the program with the minimalist amount of cards in place. I have one of these cards but havent tried to use it yet.

 

[ct92404]

Well, I just ran "Machine Status" on the diagnostic disk, and there definitely seems to be something wrong with the card.
It showed that slot as "open." All the other cards seem to be ok and show as "Occupied." I tried moving the Echo II card to different slots and it kept showing "open."

I hope it could be fixed. Could a bad capacitor prevent the computer from detecting the card? If one of the chips is bad, that's way beyond my experience to try to fix.

How rare are these Echo II cards, if I were to try to find another one? And are they usually that fragile? I honestly don't know what could have happened to this one.

 

[T-Squared]

Well, it can either be one of 3 things:

• A bad capacitor
• A bad logic chip
• or the worst one, the logic chip marked "GAL16V8A" could have failed, because that was programmed at the factory, and the programming could be unknown.