Author: Ulrich Tuerke
Date: 06:37:54 01/23/01
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On January 23, 2001 at 08:44:05, Fernando Villegas wrote: >My personal devil is tempting me with the purchase of academy Office 6,0. The >pro version with 23 modules is not cheap: around 190 bucks or so. At the same >time I recall a comment by Frank K. that was very exciting. Seems that this >beast uses a very strong engine and that the engine uses a database for every >part of the game. Now, is there any people here with a more specific review of >this program? I mean: it is worthy the expense? >Regards >Fernando I have had a look to it, but not in detail yet. Most interesting for me, there is a support of winboard engines for analysis. You can also play against them or connect them to a COM port via win-auto232. My impression is that the whole winboard stuff has been implemented very carefully. There are a lot of winboard engines ( 50 or more ?) already on the CD and for each of these a special init file had been prepared, accounting for the various options being supported by the engines. The user selects them by a click, and that's it. Certainly, a whole lot of work and testing had been required to achieve this goal. The winboard engines support is very close to the original winboard protocol, i.e. no "new" command prior to each move. IMO, winboard engines run under Chess Academy without any loss of performance. The auto232 support works very well too. There is also a native engine, playing reasonably well. I also had a look to the database which comes on the CD. It' s real huge (1.7 Mio of games) and it contains a huge amount of computer game; I found more than 400 games by Comet. I am afraid that I cannot say much more, except I find the GUI quite nice. That's probably a matter of taste. I 'll have to spend more time to experience other features. Uli
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