Daniel4200 wrote on 2025-04-03, 20:25:

Thanks […]
Show full quote

Horun wrote on 2025-04-03, 01:13:

The Contender motherboard is listed on the old Viglen website, unfortunately the links go dead from there. See bottom of this: h […]
Show full quote

The Contender motherboard is listed on the old Viglen website, unfortunately the links go dead from there. See bottom of this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000306001253/htt … otherboards.htm
Also there were video drivers which are mirrored here: https://download.xma.co.uk/Motherboards/Archive/Contender_1/
Based on the 9155-01 cpu/bus clock generator and your current jumpers for 25Mhz (comparing to other boards with same), E7 should be like this:
CPU Mhz Jumpers
20 MHz 1-2 Closed
25 MHz 3-4 5-6 Closed * current setting
33 MHz 3-4 Closed
40 MHz 5-6 Closed

You can test this by changing to 20Mhz and see if it boots and what the BIOS says....
added: figuring out the cache jumpers and cpu jumpers will be a diff story !. If you upgrade to a sx33 you should not need change any jumpers but the cpu clock....which we can easily figure out...

Thanks

This will be really helpful it i do upgrade the cpu.

For now I'm just waiting for the extra cache and disks to be delivered. Then maybe play a little Frontier Elite.

It looks like E9 is the Cache size jumpers. One other similar board/chipset with same number jumpers and all off are 0 cache, like yours.
For that board it shows:
0K All Open
64K 3-5 4-6 Closed
256K 1-3 2-4 7-8 9-10 11-12 Closed
That would be the starting point IMHO....
E10 may be for single bank/dual bank or cache interleave, would have to experiment....

Going to stick these in the floppy drive tomorrow and start making this desktop my own.

Thanks for all of the help and advice.
I'm looking forward to this little project of mine.

+1 for networking.
It's one of those things that people put off for ages but one you have it you can never go back, file transfers become so trivial vs burning CD's or messing around with floppy disks.
But it can be a phase 2 upgrade for sure while getting to know the old girl.

Have fun installing dos and optimising your startup config. A surprisingly fun task and I know I'm not alone as plenty of people post about optimal drives, config.sys and autoexec.bat configs and the like.