BIOS flashing with the TL866 programmer

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[thetaleteller]

I deeply suggest to backup the existing BIOS to a file before overwriting it. Old boards can be very picky with BIOS versions, newer is not necessarily better. Its also not guaranteed to find the working version on the vendors homepage. For vintage boards in general: Only update if you have issues to work around.

[dfx]

The LEGENDARY BH6!!! Great board, looking forward to more videos with it!

[Heru]

A new video from Phil. Couldn't ask for a better birthday present. Thanks Phil! :D

[petieken]

An EPROM programmer is indeed a must have if you're into retro stuff. I have been using an old Wellon programmer for more than 10 years now. Before that one with a parallel port connection. These have helped me reprogram many BIOS'es for various stuff and many EPROM's for my arcade PCB's over the years.

[ceed]

I hate that pretty much everyone uses soldered in BIOS chips these days. One of the worst so called improvements in technology. I saved a lot of old boards by using an Eprom burner something like this, or hot swapping bios chips back in the day. Excellent video. I'll have to pick up one of these if I ever bet back into retro computing again.

[georgez]

Thanks Phil, looks like a handy tool to have.

[AladimBR]

I just used this (May 31st, 2023) to update BIOS on a ECS P6LX-A+. The normal way (via awdflash pure DOS) was not working (wrong type error). I saw this video 2 years ago, after going through a hot swap to recover a motherboard... and decided to have this gadget in order to not go through this again. Worked just like in the video. Thanks Phil.

[marco]

That programmer is really slick, I have the A version (the one with icsp port) myself and I love it.. flashed plenty of bioses. It also tests 74 series chips!

[phlosopher]

I've been using one of these tl866 boxes for a few years now, they're surprisingly good. Works well in Linux too.

[AladimBR]

This just saved the day again. I just recapped an Epox 8K7A+ that had several Teapo capacitors ( I had it since 2000/1 and it was my main computer at that time, with Athlon 1200), I couldn't boot after the recap job. I was afraid something was damaged, when I realized perhaps it needed a BIOS update, as I no longer have the original Athlon 1200, just a 2000 XP, I could no longer boot and update it. I pulled the BIOS chip (EON EN29F002NT) and followed your script. It worked perfectly once more. One thing though, don't know if you ever faced it: PIN 1 was showing as "open contact", which I checked over and over with the multimeter, everything was OK physically with the chip and adapter. After reading the datasheet, I found out that PIN 1 is not applicable on this P/N, so I went ahead and flashed it anyway. I advise anyone with such issue to check the datasheet for a similar case, just don't go and do it without confirming it first. After the flash, the mainboard is alive again, with fresh japanese capacitors and the latest BIOS.

[hikari_no_yume]

The nice thing about using a programmer is you can make a backup image of the existing chip contents, right? So if you flash a bad BIOS or flash it wrong, you can revert it to exactly how you found it.

[FaSMaN]

I use a TL866SC for all my flashing, it works amazingly well, but be careful there is a lot of clones and fakes out there, its a must if you want to get into bios modding.

Edit: Couldn't resist its only 4 minutes long, just some advice allways dump the bios first and make a backup of it incase something goes wrong or you have a board revision that doesn't have a exact bios out there or the board revision is different (Oems like doing this).

[FullMetal-Tech]

ha!!! I am reprogramming the Cmos chip for this very board! Just got it off ebay to find bios rev JJ on it and tried flashing SS to be greeted by the error unknown flash type, checked the DMI and found it was cleared which means it was hot swap flashed before. So once I get my very same flasher, I'll be following along this vid.

[az_tinkerer_gamer]

Awesome video. As soon as i saw the bios chip on my mobo i figured i could use a programmer.

[TheSynrgy]

Bricked my Socket 7 Baby AT board with the wrong version bios recently, sadly it's soldered to the board, Should really get myself one of these, going to remove the old chip and put a socket in, (board is an FIC VA-503+ V1.2) moral of the story is, don't flash bios files at 3am while tired and always check to see if there's multiple revisions of the board you're flashing.

[thescriptergeek]

I have no idea what's happening, I just know this is really cool :P

[Skelefits]

If you are cheap you can always try the CH341A Programmer. A few dollars for the black version and I was able to fix the corrupted ME on my Asrock Z77 Extreme4-m.

[dabombinablemi]

This is more interesting to me in regards to GPU BIOS flashing.

[retropcscotland]

Where's the bios chip removal video? Want to see how "easy" it was to remove that chip.

[Habbababba]

I use the same programmer and all my retro mb are resurected from time to time thanks to tl866 :)