ok, so started playing and patching bioses. my findings:
1 - I could not find many stocked DIP32 eeproms with mouser / tme.
2 - most I could find are on ebay.
3 - killed a motherboard by flashing a patched bios; I have reflashed it again using TL866 (and the appropriate chip). The bios and the board are back to life, BUT, at after each and every cold boot I get "checksum error" (weirdly enough, cold boot only); I changed the coin battery, same issue. Quite strange, not sure what the problem is, unless I did something to the bios chip when flashing it in the programmer. Any ideas appreciated.
4 - played extensively with BIOS patcher, to fix HDD recognition issues for >32GB. Not quite succesful:
- patched bioses do not recognize the CPU when PS2 keyboard / mouse is plugged in.
- patched bioses DO recognize the >32GB hdds, but hang with detecting other IDE channels.
- conclusion: not satisfactory.
5 - on a separate note, tried inline programming the 93C46 eeprom on an audigy - no luck, "over current protection" errors. Tried also rotating the pins - no luck again. My definitive conclusion is not the 93C46 eeprom on an audigy 1 cannot be fixed inline.