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Subject: Re: CM8000 time control bugs fixed (general patch update also)

Author: David Dahlem

Date: 14:39:57 12/07/00

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On December 06, 2000 at 17:04:15, John Merlino wrote:

>The development tells me that they are now confident that all time control
>issues have been fixed and will be available in the patch (due out in about six
>weeks). For those of you who are curious, here are the timing results of 13
>games played against Crafty 17.13 at 40/120 (time left is in H:MM and Moves are
>for each side):
>
>CMColor  Result   CMTimeLeft   CrTimeLeft   Moves
>   W       1-0       1:45         1:30        55
>   B       0-1       1:38         0:49        62
>   W       1-0       2:37         2:04        83
>   B       1-0       2:43         2:21        82   <---
>   W       1/2       4:12         3:02        142  <---
>   B       1/2       1:41         1:26        60
>   W       1-0       0:56         0:26        35
>   B       0-1       1:19         1:22        56
>   W       1/2       1:43         1:41        133
>   B       1-0       1:24         2:02        65
>   W       1-0       0:52         0:35        69
>   B       0-1       0:08         0:03        78
>   W       0-1       1:45         1:29        218
>
>It is apparent, from the way that the CM has been behaving for those of you who
>have been using the moves/minutes time control, that the above represents a far
>better time usage (although the 4th and 5th games, as highlighted above, show
>that, perhaps, The King is probably still a bit conservative, at least compared
>to Crafty).
>
>The "seconds per move" time control now uses the "st" command, rather than
>attempting to fudge it like it did in previous versions of Chessmaster. This is
>now bug-free as well.
>
>Other items that have been fixed:
>
>-- Some machines would hang (or appear to hang) if sound failed to initialize
>for some reason. This has been fixed and appeared to be more likely to occur on
>Win2K machines.
>-- Fixed a bug that would cause the mentor engine to restart thinking about a
>position if the Visual Thinking or Thinking Lines window was opened, even if the
>mentor engine had already been thinking about the position and sending its
>output to another window.
>-- Added a "Copy Contents" context menuitem to the "Thinking Lines" window.
>Whenever any checkbox in this dialog is selected, you can now  right-click on
>any "best line" window (the one that has a "Score" column), and one of the menu
>items will be "Copy Contents". Choosing this item will copy all of the contents
>of that window to the Windows clipboard, formatted just like it is in the
>program. Since you can have more than one of these sub-windows active at a time
>(if you have more than one checkbox selected), whichever "best line" window you
>right-click on will be the one that copies its data to the clipboard.
>-- Fixed a bug that would cause the "Positions" columns in the Thinking Lines
>window to display incorrectly after approximately 2.1 billion positions had been
>seen. These columns will now "wrap" their values (i.e. display incorrect data)
>after approximately 4.2 billion positions, but this is unavoidable.
>-- Fixed a crash that was caused by attempting to load a 16-color bitmap as a
>wallpaper in a room. 16-color bitmaps are not supported, but the program now
>tells you when you are attempting to load one as a wallpaper.
>-- Fixed a bug that occurred on some machines in which Thematic and Simple piece
>movement sounds would only play if Chessmaster was NOT the active application.
>Now, these sounds play properly but NO piece movement sounds play if Chessmaster
>is not the active application. Spoken Move Announcements were not affected by
>this bug.
>-- Added an "Import PGN Settings" dialog that allows you to set the criteria by
>which games in a PGN file are imported into an opening book.
>-- Fixed a bug in the "Set Up Personality" feature that would give an erroneous
>error message stating that personality files that began with the letter 'Z' were
>damaged, meaning that, once created, these files could not be modified.
>-- Increased the minimum number of seconds in the hourglass time control from 5
>seconds to 30 seconds.
>-- A few minor corrections to tutorials.
>
>Here are the items (some bugs, some enhancements) that are still on the
>development team's plate (in no particular order):
>-- Properly handling draw offers from imported XBoard engines when their
>opponent is also a computer.
>-- A Win2K specific crash that occurs if you make an error in a move question in
>a tutorial.
>-- Fast personalities (such as Max and Lacey) stop responding (and eventually
>lose on time) if they leave book and then come back into it due to a
>transposition.
>-- Proper formatting of the Date tag in a PGN header.
>-- A Win2K specific crash involving moving through menus quickly (but not
>actually selecting a menuitem). This has been reported by only one user and is
>not reproduceable by the dev team, yet.
>-- 3-fold repetition draws sometimes not being recognized by the GUI, causing
>the opponent of the side that made the drawing move to lose on time.
>-- Problems with the sizing of the Customize Board dialog.
>-- Putting "Mate in N" instead of "99.xx" in the Thinking Lines window.
>-- Supporting "whisper" and "kibitz" output from XBoard engines.
>-- Human adjudication of comp vs. comp tournament games, rather than having to
>wait for the legal finish to the game.
>-- A special INI setting to COMPLETELY turn off audio in the game, intended for
>debugging purposes only.
>
>That's about it. Thanks to all of you who helped to make these bugs (and their
>fixes) possible! ;-)
>
>jm

Are there any plans to supply any documentation or info on configuration of
imported winboard engines? I refer to the problem others have reported and i
also have problems with some engines that work fine in winboard but will not
work in CM8000. I currently have nine strong high quality engines that do not
work and would really like to have them working in CM8000.

Dave



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