I've found out that the BIOS from a SOYO 6KE is a perfect match for the ACHITEC ACHI-160 (Intel 440LX), since they seem to share the same I/O chip, kbd controller and pci mapping.
Having flashed a bad bios found on driverguide.com, me, UNIFLASH 1.32, my port 80h PCI card and my handy 256k Realtek ISA VGA brought it back to life

cheers,
Fowler