AppleSauce wrote on 2021-02-28, 19:59:

Thanks for all the help so far guys.
After going through all the posts I'm leaning towards biting the bullet and getting the proper Tl866 II plus programmer.

Got one a few years ago and had tons of use of it.
I mean flashing with it is just so much easier then finding floppys etc.
Also you can get more adventurous with the flashes, modding BIOS's and stuff like that WO any risk of "bricking" your hardware =)
All in all a great tool for us retro nerds.

Yeah so I swapped the bios with the duplicate motherboard after I got it.
And no dice unfortunately. Pretty sure the non working board might be completely toast.

Both chips work fine on the working mobo , so for now I think ill leave getting the rom flasher alone.
But maybe in the future I'll get my hands on one anyway.
Seeing as they are very handy pieces of kit.

Is there any obvious damage to the motherboard? Scratches, missing parts, corrosive battery juice, puffy electrolytic capacitors?

You might consider purchasing an ISA/PCI POST diagnostic card if you want to dig deeper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POST_card

There wasn't anything obvious that I could make out.