Motherboard schematic

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

Is it possible to write BIOS code which controls all the hardware components of a motherboard without having the schematic of that motherboard?

[edwin]

Nope, otherwise there would be one universal bios for all boards.

[cp]

well, the answer isn't a simple yes or no.

if you still have the board up and running with its original bios, you can extract a lot of information from the running board without having access the the actual schematics. to the extend a lot of manufacturers used the chipset maker's advice on motherboard layout. so infact a lot of boards have a very very similar design. however they vary very much in details.

anyway: go and check coreboot. there you'll find plenty of sourcecode for initializing motherboard components (and ways to configure it to make it work despite those differences).