Author: Chris Whittington
Date: 05:49:35 10/27/97
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On October 26, 1997 at 17:54:21, Keith Ian Price wrote: >On October 26, 1997 at 10:22:02, Kim Hvarre wrote: > >>Hello Keith, >> >>When You get it to work, could You please post some games of CSTal. I >>would like to see how it plays (style, etc.). Before buy oc... >> >>Being the happy owner of e.g. CM5000, Rebel 8 & 9, div. Genius, MCP and >>tried >>just about everything, I'm very interessted in esp. "humanlike" >>approaches, now when it's no longer a matter of being beaten. >> >>Thanks! >> >>kim > >Well, I had planned to, but I can't get it to work with Auto232. I know >what the problem is, but I am not pleased with what I have to do to get >it to work. The problem is that although it's a DOS program, it requires >a mouse. You cannot work it through the keyboard, and in fact if there >is no mouse, it just quits. No it doesn't, it gives you a message about the lack of mouse and quits. >Well, I have two computers for doing >autoplay, both are Pentium 150s. The one I tried to run it on has a >modem on com2, so I tried to run it in /c232 mode, hoping that it >wouldn't need a mouse, simply to respond as Black. It just locked up and >I had to power cycle. The presence of the auto232 software is enough to cause a crash rather than a nice messge if you run without a mouse. I think this is to do with the auto232 drivers using a port normally given to the mouse, and this confuses the DOS call to 'do we have a mouse' - the results can be unpredictable. I don't intend doing anything about this, since normal users get a nice message about their mouse, and power users of auto232, basically can cope :) Connect your mouse. > Well in the other, I have removed the modem, and I >thought I'd just buy a converter for the auto232 cable and run it off >com2, but in that one I have an ATI video card, and the mouse works as >an eraser as it moves around the screen, so I suppose I can get it >working, but I am tired of messing with it right now. My word, you are having problems ! Sorry, but CSTal was designed from the start to be mouse driven. Personally, I find the UI's of the disk and manual chess programs to be just dreadfull; I wanted to do something different. So your first problem is contention between your modem and auto232 interface, requiring both the available com ports, and leaving no hardware gap for the mouse. Your second problem is lack of an appropriate VESA driver (CSTal is in SVGA). This you can only solve by asking your machine manufacturor. Your third problem (the saitek board) I'm going to have to ask Thorsten to answer next week after Paris. I can't test it here because our Saitek board is kaput now. However the code is in there to run this board, and I've seen it work. I do recollect, either buried in the on-line manual or somewhere, a warning that the Saitek code used the parallel printer port and could fail under some circumstances - I don't remember what, but persumably some contention on this port. >I guess Chris is >too busy with Paris right now to get back about the other problems, but >I'd say that it doesn't much matter if everyone else is running on >60000Mhz Crays, if his program is so full of bugs, Hey, hey, hey. I will not be so foolish to say that it has no bugs, but we've spent a great deal of effort on QA, I can assure you. Further, apart from the Saitek issue, which is not clear at the moment. Your 'riddled with bugs' appears to be (a) you disconnecting your mouse, and (b) a hardware/ VESA driver issue. Both of these are outside my control. And are not bugs. > that one can't use it >for any of the things one bought it for. > For now, I suggest that you do >what I will have to do, and download the games from WMCCC to see how my >new purchase works... > >On the other hand, Ed, who realized that winning the WMCCC doesn't >really matter to his customers, has already given out the fix to the bug >in his install program that prevented Rebel9 from running on my machine, >and it is happily involved in a game with Chess Genius 5 right now, >looks sort of drawish right now. i had intended it to play CSTal, >however. We will be putting CSTal Paris up for free download to customers on our www site, the day that Paris ends. The Paris version contains a few changes to the general program usage, but, probably more importantly, contains some search improvements that were created after the release of the original version. These improvements appear to be fairly substantial. Chris Whittington > >kp
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