[LinuxBIOS] BIOS Saver discontinued

[Jeff Carr]

According to the manufacturer, they are out of the BIOS Saver's and do
not plan on manufacturing more. I tried to inquire about what quantity
was needed to get them to make more, but didn't hear back from them.

This is disappointing. Either the PLCC package was designed to protect
the motherboard socket, or it was designed to discourage people from
doing bios work. It's horrible. Every time you remove the chip it bends
the pins around. It's only a matter of time until the pins break off.
Despite being careful with a small screwdriver and even using a PLCC
chip puller. Fry's only has one and it's not well designed. I don't fish
so I don't have fishing string for that other seemingly troublesome trick.

It would be helpful if there was a chip socket that could be pulled
straight up with one's fingers. Perhaps there are enough engineers and
interest that we could cleverly design such a device (or something else
ingenious) and have a bunch of them made?

Along the same lines, has anyone tried using different size SST chips? I
tried to duplicate the 256KB bios by putting it in a 512KB chip (SST
28SF040A vs 39SF020A). This didn't seem to work (no beep or video but
didn't try port 80 parallel card yet). Perhaps someone knows if this
should work. Can someone recommend a good place to get a handful of SST
39SF02A PLCC chips for these experiments?

Thanks,
Jeff