EPROM [BIOS] Programmers - What's good?

[larrymoencurly]

Re: EPROM [BIOS] Programmers - What's good?

There's http://FlashROM.org , which supports not just regular programmers but also lets you use motherboards as programmers but also Nvidia graphics cards, 3com and Intel network cards, and Silicon Image disk controllers. BTW many Silicon Image cards are built for both parallel and serial EEPROMs, and the company shows what parts to add for serial chip support.

[japlytic]

Re: EPROM [BIOS] Programmers - What's good?

I bought a no-name unit (Atmel AVR8 with a USB stack, with two parallel-connected SOP8 posistions) from a Hong Kong eBay seller, and after asking what software is used for it, I practiced using it on an SPI flash which didn't matter if I stuff up.
Later, I programmed PVR-enabled firmware into a set-top box with USB which did not have PVR functionality with good results.
Before I did that, I compared the two boards (of which had very subtle differences), and these differences did not affect the PVR functionality at all.
There was only one small penalty, which was that you cannot use the front panel Ch +/- buttons (they are used very rarely, since many use the remote). The Ch - button had to be shorted out, since it would keep activating Vol -.
This required SMD soldering skills (the flash was a SOP8 device near some very fine resistors; I managed to do finer TSSOP packages in the past!)

I later dumped the contents of SPI flash devices in DVD players and found where the background image is (I have to get the header and filesize right to change it).