Yeah, I've pretty much decided to put money into a replacement motherboard. Just thought it would be killer awesome to play Frankenstein (that's Frahnkensteen) and drop in a new CMOS.
A full rebuild is out of the question for the time being. And I have so many parts that still work that it would be a shame to let them gather more dust. Won't be able to run any of the newer games but that's not much of a problem for me right now.
Reece, it could have been either a finger or the needlenose pliers (read further; I did use a proper tool to pull the chip. The pliers came along a bit later.). Not certain if it was static shallow fry, or if I damaged it while pulling the sucker out. They don't make it easy to yank those things out of their sockets; a couple of the prongs needed to be bent back into place after that. I don't remember a CMOS being so stubborn.
Anyhoo, I pulled the chip in the first place because during bootstrap it would print about half of the "Press <KEY> to enter Setup" message and then stall out, preventing the computer from booting up at all. Methinks it was buggered before I buggered it.
