Hot Flashing Guide Rev. 2.0 (2004)

When I worked in the PC hardware industry, I used to do this all the time with certain machines of the small form factor variety where the chips were removable, replaceable. I still have one of those machines, e.g. Socket AM2+ compatible, though have not turned her on in over 12+ years.

I had to do this once, after a blackout during a BIOS flash bricked my motherboard. Fun stuff. I don't think the working motherboard donor knew what he was signing up for.

At some point in time, prom programmers were very proprietary and expensive.

Today, it's mostly a solved problem for the old chips (TL866 family + minipro[0]), but now chips tend to be soldered rather than socketed, without even some thought in the form of a nearby header.

So you'd need a clip for SOP8/WSON/whatever package used (they are cheap on aliexpress). Tigard[1] is a lovely, cheap, useful board for the interfacing.

0. https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro

1. https://github.com/tigard-tools/tigard