Jasen Betts wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 RJT> *Anything* needs cmos right to boot...

 JB> I thing I saw something limp by on a default "autodetect hard
 JB> drive" setting once but I can't remember which machine it was...
 JB> (talking hardware now)

Yeah,  but the defaults do things like caching BIOS to ram and similar
nonsense that I'd rather not have to put up with,  even if it did get as
far as booting the OS.  And there are other problems with that board
besides,  it gave me kernel panics and all sorts of other nonsense.

 RJT> It's dead.  Tried another one,  measuring 3.12V (like new) and
 RJT> that still didn't work

 JB> you say it's a dual purpose CMOS chip  (ISTR a CMOS and keyboard
 JB> combo being used sometimes) ... I guess that's the end of that
 JB> motherboard. 

I'm not even sure what chip is what on there,  it's a Via chipset MB, 
first one I can recall having of those,  and I don't have any data on it. 
Perhaps at some point I'll get some and see what can be done with it,  if
anything.

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