Since it's soldered in place and it's an Award BIOS, it should be possible to reflash it still. There should be a part of the BIOS that doesn't get reflashed called the boot block which is a segment reserved for recovery in just this way.

Have a read through this: https://www.oocities.org/rrbhaius/recoverbios.pdf
Essentially you'll need to make a bootable floppy that's set up to run the award flash utility with the correct BIOS. The Autoexec.bat would be set up to run that and on boot it should start running the award flash utility and more successfully flash the BIOS.

edit: apparently you may even get working video if you use an ISA VGA instead of PCI/AGP

If that does not work...then Cannot be done without expensive gear ! Even the TL866plus or better cannot program a "parallel" eeprom on a board (but can do some serial eeprom's (like 8 pin 24LC512) with a special adapter+cable+clamp made for the TL866+)

Horun wrote on 2023-06-01, 00:01:

If that does not work...then Cannot be done without expensive gear ! Even the TL866plus or better cannot program a "parallel" eeprom on a board (but can do some serial eeprom's (like 8 pin 24LC512) with a special adapter+cable+clamp made for the TL866+)

At that point it would be cheaper to buy a non working FIC VA-503+ and just swap the BIOS chips.

There is some work being done on a opensource solution for this issue here https://github.com/wagiminator/ATmega-EEPROM-Programmer, but no idea if they will be expanding this down the road.

This page is also very interesting http://danceswithferrets.org/geekblog/?p=496 and offers yet another possibility to program a EEPROM.

Cheapest way is to unsolder the chip, solder in a socket and use a programmer, yes.
The XGeku TL866II+ and better can program 18000+ diff types of eproms and eeproms. The XGeku T48 and T56 can do 34000+ diff chips.
That is what most of us old farts use but you have to remove the parallel eeprom from the board.

cheapest would be finding another motherboard with similar vintage parallel socketed bios chip and hotswap flash yours 😀 uniflash usually works great for that purpose

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-05-31, 23:15:

Since it's soldered in place and it's an Award BIOS, it should be possible to reflash it still. There should be a part of the BI […]
Show full quote

Since it's soldered in place and it's an Award BIOS, it should be possible to reflash it still. There should be a part of the BIOS that doesn't get reflashed called the boot block which is a segment reserved for recovery in just this way.

Have a read through this: https://www.oocities.org/rrbhaius/recoverbios.pdf
Essentially you'll need to make a bootable floppy that's set up to run the award flash utility with the correct BIOS. The Autoexec.bat would be set up to run that and on boot it should start running the award flash utility and more successfully flash the BIOS.

edit: apparently you may even get working video if you use an ISA VGA instead of PCI/AGP

He is alive! Thanks a lot for the help!
I'm in Brazil. Where everything is expensive (for the remuneration we receive monthly ;-( )
You saved me a lot of money!!

robersonnaves wrote on 2023-06-02, 12:05:

He is alive! Thanks a lot for the help! I'm in Brazil. Where everything is expensive (for the remuneration we receive monthly ;- […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-05-31, 23:15:

Since it's soldered in place and it's an Award BIOS, it should be possible to reflash it still. There should be a part of the BI […]
Show full quote

Since it's soldered in place and it's an Award BIOS, it should be possible to reflash it still. There should be a part of the BIOS that doesn't get reflashed called the boot block which is a segment reserved for recovery in just this way.

Have a read through this: https://www.oocities.org/rrbhaius/recoverbios.pdf
Essentially you'll need to make a bootable floppy that's set up to run the award flash utility with the correct BIOS. The Autoexec.bat would be set up to run that and on boot it should start running the award flash utility and more successfully flash the BIOS.

edit: apparently you may even get working video if you use an ISA VGA instead of PCI/AGP

He is alive! Thanks a lot for the help!
I'm in Brazil. Where everything is expensive (for the remuneration we receive monthly ;-( )
You saved me a lot of money!!

That's great news 😀
If the chip's soldered on there and it's from the fairly early days of Flash-based EEPROMs then it should have some recovery method in place so it's great that that worked for you. Certainly much easier than replacing or reprogramming by removing it.
With the older boards it's probably easier than newer ones since they still have ISA slots and floppy drives, newer legacy free boards make this type of recovery tougher.