Even after they have been snapped off, there is a DIL socket on-board for re-programming. Each chip has a 16MHz STM8 core with 8kbyte of flash. System-control features include watchdog, clock control, ...

Was [Jarrett] successful? After much fiddling and twiddling, he absolutely was! The old firmware was dumped from the STM8 processor and the new firmware could be flashed with impunity.