Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: some questions about computer chess programs

Author: Amir Ban

Date: 13:16:53 04/02/98

Go up one level in this thread


On April 02, 1998 at 12:31:17, Christophe Theron wrote:

>On April 02, 1998 at 10:14:38, Ulrich Tuerke wrote:
>
>>>
>>>Because it runs in a different environment (Win16 instead of Win32),
>>>uses 16:16 code instead of 32-flat, and uses a different compiler (BC3.1
>>>instead of VC5.0).
>>>
>>
>>I guess that BC3.1 means Borland C 3.1 ?  The Borland C compilers which
>>I used in the past (if I remember right, version <= 3.0) were extremely
>>weak in code optimizations. Did they improve with 3.1 ?
>>
>>Regards, Uli
>
>Version 3.1 introduced some improvements in the avalaible optimizations.
>
>But one bad thing was that turning all optimizations on generated
>incorrect code! I had, for example, to turn some optimizations off to
>successfully compile Chess Tiger 9. This was true for both DOS and
>Windows compilers (BC3.1 provided 2 environments). I used BC3.1 for 5
>years.
>
>All in all, BC3.1 was able to produce average speed code.
>

It's a superb compiler. It dates from 1992 and was to my mind the best
compiler Borland ever produced. In later versions they started
neglecting 16-bit code, so I never found a reason to upgrade. I've been
using it for the Junior DOS version for a long time. It's also still the
standard 16-bit compiler at my place of work, and I see it being used in
other companies including Intel.


>But I'm very surprised that Amir used this quite old compiler to release
>the commercial Junior code. I suppose he was forced to do so because he
>had to run inside the Fritz 16 bits environment?
>

This was the first time I've done anything on Win16, and there was the
consensus that Microsoft compilers are faster, so I initially developed
on MSVC 1.51. When it was done, I found the performance disappointing.
After many attempts to improve, without great results, I decided to give
my old BC3.1 a try in its Win16 mode which I've never used before. It
was equal to the Microsoft compiler on P5 but 10% faster on P2/P6.

Amir



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.