Is this your board ?

Unfortunately the (now rebranded) Viglen file library at

https://download.xma.co.uk/

has long since dropped any actual content under the Freshman board headings

@Horun, that’s the one.

Yeah, I can’t seem to find any documentation for it whatsoever. I guess I’m just down to hoping someone has a service manual lying around.

Edit: I just tried connecting the keyboard to the PS/2 slot using an adaptor (known to work). It didn't work at all (not unexpected seeing as it's labelled MOUSE), but perhaps that's a sign that the PS/2 port is non-standard or just broken.

I also tried connecting the PS/2 mouse to a serial port with an adaptor, but now the MS mouse driver can't find it.

Edit 2: I just discovered that the PS/2 mouse I'm using (Intellimouse 1.1) doesn't support serial anyway. I'll try a different mouse. MS IntelliMouse 1.1A Serial Support?

Searched the archives and found no jumper info for the Freshman 410 or Contender series. Did find jumpers for the Jacup boards and the Jacup3 and Jacup4 appears to have similar jumpers.
Without a better pictures of some of the jumpers on the board is hard to tell if either is close enough, cannot read all the jumpers numbers in the picture.
Here is the links for you to check against the board and see if any match:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010218205650/htt … UP3/jumpers.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20020627112939/htt … UP4/jumpers.asp

Yes! These jumpers seem to match perfectly. I noticed the Mouse Port jumper was not bridged, and bridging it solved my mouse problems! Thanks so much!

Not into custom motherboard layouts, but this looks badass.
Hope it performs the same way.

liamoc wrote on 2021-07-10, 20:56:

Yes! These jumpers seem to match perfectly. I noticed the Mouse Port jumper was not bridged, and bridging it solved my mouse problems! Thanks so much!

Great ! which of the jacup's is closest to your ? Is it the jacup4 ?
If you could take a few good pictures of your board specifically focused on the jumpers and post them here that would be great.
Also if sometime you could save the bios using "getrom" http://cd.textfiles.com/microhaus/mhblackbox3 … MORY/GETROM.ZIP
or with a tl866 and post here that would be super great !! There are no other archives for your board except what you can help us create 😀

I think it's closest to Jacup4. I also checked Jacup2 but that seems to be different too The jumper settings seem to be broadly similar between jacup 3 and 4 and both are broadly similar to mine. Like the Jacup 3 and 4, mine has s3 805, but the jumper descriptions don't seem to line up with what I'm seeing, but maybe I'm misinterpreting that. Apart from that, they seem similar, but the Jacup3 has an overdrive socket and mine does not (and comparing it to this incredibly small archived picture of the jacup3 it's clear the layout is different https://web.archive.org/web/20010706150142im_ … Images/icon.gif). I'll take thorough pictures and upload them soon.

Weirdly though, it says "128K Cache SRAM Passed" on boot. This is strange because the Jacup4 has apparently 256K cache as standard. So I'm not sure where the other 128K is. There are 4 empty slots for W24257AK sram chips, perhaps some of the SRAM chips have been removed?

The BIOS reports "Intelligent JAC-UP BIOS 2.05NS", so it definitely seems to be part of the Jacup family. I will dump the bios shortly.

I used savromxt from that getROM zip file and got an image XTROM of about 40KB in size. Is that correct? Should I then split up this ROM into 5 8KB ones?

Here's the pictures!

liamoc wrote on 2021-07-11, 00:04:

I used savromxt from that getROM zip file and got an image XTROM of about 40KB in size. Is that correct? Should I then split up this ROM into 5 8KB ones?

Try the romsavat.exe, 40k seems small considering it has video bios too. No need to split it, you can post up to 1Mb files here w/o issue
The pictures are great !

liamoc wrote on 2021-07-10, 23:23:

Weirdly though, it says "128K Cache SRAM Passed" on boot. This is strange because the Jacup4 has apparently 256K cache as standard. So I'm not sure where the other 128K is. There are 4 empty slots for W24257AK sram chips, perhaps some of the SRAM chips have been removed?

The BIOS reports "Intelligent JAC-UP BIOS 2.05NS", so it definitely seems to be part of the Jacup family. I will dump the bios shortly.

Hmm 4 - 32kx8 chips should be 128k so yes maybe someone took 4 or it only came with 128k for some reason. I have a ECS AL486 that had either 128k or 256k when shipped, mine only has 128k 🙁 but good enough to cache 16Mb ram according to its manual

OK, I will upload the results of romsavat soon. I have ordered more 60ns 20pin DRAM chips on the assumption that I'll be able to figure out how to up the VRAM on the video card jumpers. Perhaps I should also get some SRAM chips for the cache?

Also the IDE controller only supports 540MB disks, so I'm currently wasting half of my 1GB CF card. I wonder if it would be possible to upgrade..