I checked continuity on points leading away from the bridges on either side for both of them(if that just made any sense)

. Would this be a false reading?
^^ You need a 29 wire chip like the xray3 to repair the tsop, or just put the ms bios on the chip and you will be safe for live.
nhe doesnt need a 29 wire chip, he should be able to fix it with the three wire trick, assumign the 256k bios is a good flash
an in the future use raincoat .7, it will resize a biso to fit your chip
^^ Good call, didn't catch that. Now that I'm thinking, if the 3 wire trick doesn't work, you can also reflash it with a cheapmod based chip. The 3 wire should work tho.