it's a surface mounted LT2399s - I will definitely try to fix it, i need a solder remover also if i'm going to achieve anything here.
Yup. Braid is good. Don't worry about the chip if it's definitely fried, just carefully cut the legs away with very very fine snips or gently with a scalpel, then use solder braid to suck up the solder and snipped-off legs. You'll need a steady hand, a good light, and a fine-pointed soldering iron.
When you go to stick the new one down, solder a diagonally-opposite pair of legs (pin 1 and pin 9, or pin 8 and pin 16 for a 16-pin chip - the latter are good because they're often power pins on logic ICs). Get the chip square on the pads and flat on the board, and then solder up the rest.
By the way Gordonjcp, after reading about 100 posts with you stating 'find datasheets on your ic's' I started doing it recently and it's significantly improved my bending experience
Yup. There's a reason why I say that ;-)
It's often worth looking on the manufacturer's site for other chips that they have. Sometimes companies will send you samples of all kinds of wee chips that do stuff like voice playback and sound effects.
I thought about trying to find another LT2399s to replace the one on the board, but it seems near enough impossible if you're not going to bulk buy them, however I did find the LT2399 (dip version) on ebay really cheap from hong kong and if you find and download the data sheet it pretty much explains how to build your own delay, it states on the sheet that you can only get like 380ms of delay though, so I was thinking of reverse engineering the fab echo to try and build my own from scratch.
also in my web wasting, I came across the FE-7 which seems to be a pretty self contained reverberation effect ic - it has some preset settings and you can control some parameters like decay with pots, also you can hook it up to a computer and program your own effects, I think it works like a phasor and some similar delay-based effects. Will post back on here with project results
You might find the same chip under PT2399 by Princeton Technology. They definitely have things like sound effect chips. Another company to look at is CML. They do mostly chips for radio, tone generation and decoding five-tone beedlybeep, CTCSS, DCS and so on - but one interesting one is a frequency inverter for scrambling audio in cordless phones and walkie-talkies. I can't remember the name offhand but at work tomorrow I'll dig it out of the workshop manual where I spotted it. CML128 or maybe CMX128, I really can't remember.