Author: Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Date: 23:29:56 01/30/98
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On January 30, 1998 at 18:11:39, William Dozier wrote: >Good day everyone: I have just downloaded chess mentor for the Mac and >about to check it out. It takes about 1/2 hr to an hour and a half to >D/L, the modem i have is slow. Hopefully i can give some feedback with >an humble opinion. Perhaps some of you have checked it out already, if >so, please let us all know. Thank You/Respectfully Yours/William Dozier Yes, I've used it. It is a 5.4Mb demo - so it does take a while! And, expanded, it takes 18Mb for the expanded version. Also, you need System 7.5.3 or later - don't bother otherwise. This version of Chess Mentor is written in Java, and distributed with a virtual machine. At the moment, the virtual machine used is rather slow. They expect to switch to a faster one, when such is available for System 7.5.3 machines, but I'd be (pleasantly) suprised if that happened before summer. They tell me the same code runs quite quickly on a low end (non Pentium) PC on the PC Java virtual machine they are using, so they feel it is the virtual machine that is causing the slowness, not the Java code itself. In the mean time, if you are thinking of buying the current Mac version (which includes a free upgrade to the next, hopefully much faster, version) you should definitely try the demo out for usability before buying. On my (rather fast Mac - a 180MHz 604e) it is usable, if pokey, as long as movement uses "click move" rather than "drag move" That is why the default setting for mouse movement is "click move" despite all the tutorial text telling you to click and drag. If you set the movement control to click and drag, it becomes, IMHO, excruciating. If you must use it that way, be sure to hold down the mouse on the source square until the piece highlights. It takes over a second on my machine, I kid you not. Then, when you move the mouse to the destination square, you must keep the mouse button down until the piece wakes up and moves to that square. If you just point and release, the piece will move twice as far as you intended. Beyond that, the lesson content is the same as that on the PC version (which I have used a fair bit). For experienced chess players, Chess Mentor is probably the best chess tutorial on the PC (per KK), and the only game in town on the Mac. -RAF
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