Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 09:42:50 12/15/00
I still have an old ChessMachine card left in an old 486 computer in my parents' house. I still play against it occasionally when I visit them. For those who are new to computer chess: The ChessMachine was a add-on chessplaying card for MS-DOS computers in the early nineties (I think it was introduced in 1992, but I don't remember excactly). Before the ChessMachine arrived, the best chess-playing software you could buy were the very expensive stand-alone Mephisto computers by Richard Lang. With the arrival of ChessMachine, it was for the first time possible to buy a really strong chess program for an affordable price. The ChessMachine consisted of an add-on card with a 16 MHz ARM 2 processor and 512 MB RAM (a version running at 30 MHz was released later), a beautiful MS-DOS GUI used for interfacing with the card, and an early version of Rebel (an early version of the King could be bought separately). The advantage of having a card with its own CPU was that the program was equally strong on all computers --- the speed of the CPU on the host computer did not matter. You could also let the chess playing program analyse in the background without slowing down the computer at all. The chess engine and the UI were both excellent, and the opening book editor was superior to anything I have seen in more recent chess programs. My reason for writing this message is that a successor to the ARM 2 processor --- the StrongARM --- is used in PocketPC computers and will be used in future generations of Palm computers. Is there any chance that the old Rebel for ARM 2 could be made to work with current handheld computers? Of course, the UI would need to be designed from scratch, but hopefully the engine should not be very difficult to port. Rebel was rather strong (around 2200, I think) even on the 16MHz ARM 2. On a 200MHz StrongARM, it should be vastly superior to all other handheld chess programs available ... Tord
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