Thanks all for the well wishes, sympathy and support as regards the monitor problems. If it was lightning related last time, it nearly got to be again today, we had a storm blow in fast and there was a near miss, or near hit down the street this morning, felt the heat of the flash on my skin through the blinds. So far, touch wood, everything okay.
After that had left me in peace, I got back to the BX-6VP2, just stick the flash stuff on a disk hook up a floppy and reboot.... nah... didn't see the disk as bootable... tried another drive... nope, another cable... nope... double check the disk, all good, try a MSDOS 6.2 boot disk, no-go... well what then you POS??? ... okay... strip it all back down... visual inspection with a magnifier... hmmm floppy header lines go past first PCI slot, is the vid card I'm sticking in there too noisy?... then get to the i/o chip, there's a patch of dust all over it... I thought it had just got missed with the air duster, but nope, it was stuck there, something a touch sticky, okay, cleaner and brush and scrub, get most of it off, odd dust, short fibers, reminds me of some types of wood dust, or what happens to the parcel shelf in a 1970s car when it's had too much sun. That seems really stuck and packed, scraped it out from between the pins on the i/o chip with a sharp point. It's a little humid lately, so if it's an organic kind of dust I wonder if it had swelled with moisture and got low enough resistance tight between the pins to pull pins high or low when they shouldn't be. Get it all out, still looks a bit dull around those pins, which aren't just any part of the i/o chip but are the floppy lines... hokay, give this a try, fire up a micro torch and run it over the pins briefly, see a few orange sparkles as a last few specks of that stuff burn up, and the pads turn shiny instead of dull. Well whatever, that looks better now. Then popped out the BIOS chip, cleaned pins and reseated just in case.
Now reassemble the test configuration, but just to be sure, stick the PCI vid and POST card in the slot furthest from the floppy lines... and fire it up and it boots off the floppy, yay.... but awdflash says the bin file ain't right.. and the keyboard isn't working to manual launch/override... gah... so swap keyboards around retry, retry, doh, there's another capless header I missed, it's the keyboard voltage selection, 3 pin, one or the other, just get some volts to keyboard (Standby or regular 5V) ... yes, keyboard working.... awdflash 7..37 don't like that file though, might be because it saved as a longname ... okay fix that... also, you know what, get the awdflash off the redfox archive since that should be mor guaranteed, turned out to be 7.33 so you thin 7.37 would be fine, but anyhoo, okay. got the flash floppy reconfigured got the kb working, rebooted again, flash chugged away happily, appears successful, is it? YISSSSSS, 3 boards out of 4 now, and what a cool logo, almost worth the trouble 🤣...
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.