Thought I'd post up this discovery in case other people might find it useful. I was playing with my Raspberry Pi the other day and wondered whether I could use it to program EEPROMs - I don't have a programmer (although I do have a bunch of LAN cards that could do it) so I thought this might be a cheap way to reprogram some ROMs. Apparently you can, and there are a number of guides on how to achieve it. Examples:

http://www.win-raid.com/t58f16-Guide-Recover- … spberry-PI.html
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2227

The main examples I've seen deals with 8 pin UEFI-based ROMs (SPI chips), so I'm not sure how versatile the application is - I have a model B Pi, which doesn't possess as many GPIO pins as the + model. Obviously the Pi only outputs 3.3v via GPIO (the 5v feed can't be used if it will be fed back into GPIO) so this is the main limitation as far as legacy hardware goes. I'm going to do more digging and give it a go myself and will provide feedback if I succeed (I've got spare EEPROMs to experiment with) 😀

Would be good to know if there are any other RPi enthusiasts out there!