Author: John Merlino
Date: 12:59:05 03/05/01
As far as the second patch of CM8000 goes, it went to the testers on Friday, and everything is looking good so far. I suspect that it will be released either this Friday or Monday. My previous posts talking about two different patches were incorrect, however. THERE IS GOING TO BE ONLY ONE PATCH, and it will patch ALL existing versions of Chessmaster 8000. Whether you have US 1.0.0, US 1.0.1, Euro 1.0.0 or a failed attempt to patch Euro 1.0.0, this patch updates EVERYBODY to 1.0.2. The patch will likely be about a 1.2MB download. Here's what it does (from the current ReadMe -- which might change somewhat): --------------- 1. Fixed a bug created by v1.0.1 with Custom Boards not displaying properly. 2. Fixed a memory leak in the audio playing code that was used by Tutorials, Josh Waitzkin's annotated games, Natural Language Advice, and Game Analysis. However, extensive use of these features over several hours could still result in the Windows swapfile growing by several hundred MB. Depending on what other programs may be running on your computer, and how little, if any, "down time" Windows is given, Windows may not decide to clean up its swapfile until after Chessmaster has been shut down. 3. The "Date" field in a PGN file is now properly supported in most cases. If you start a game in Chessmaster, and save it in the PGN format, the date will be in the international YYYY.MM.DD format. If you edit this field within Chessmaster, however, using the "Game Information" dialog, it may not be possible to convert what was entered into the proper format. Date text that is not convertible will be put in the "Date" field just as it was entered by the user (or loaded in from a file). 4. Fixed a crash that could be caused by doing a Data Query in the Database room and having empty columns between columns with data, such as having a "Player" search in column 1 and a "Result" search in column 5, with columns 2 through 4 not filled in. 5. Fixed a mouse cursor problem in the Set Up Position feature that could cause the incorrect cursor to be displayed, or cause the mouse cursor to disappear completely. 6. Added a "Send Engine Command" context menuitem to the XBoard Output Monitor windows for expert users. If you right-click on one of these windows when it is attached to an imported XBoard engine, this item will be included in the popup menu. Selecting this item will bring up a dialog in which you can enter any text to send to the corresponding engine. WARNING: This feature is only intended for expert users who are very familiar with the XBoard communications protocol! If you are not familiar with this protocol, then you should avoid using this feature. Sending invalid text to an engine can result in the engine no longer playing the game, the engine crashing, or even Chessmaster crashing. If you would like to investigate this protocol, just point your browser to: www.tim-mann.org/xboard/engine-intf.html 7. Added a special INI file setting for expert users, allowing them to override the amount of memory allocated for the mentor engine's transposition table. By default, the Chessmaster mentor personality only allocates 1 MB of memory (the same as the default Chessmaster personality that you can play against). However, several users asked for some way to increase this. Here's how you can do it: -- Go to your user folder. You will find this by going to the folder in which you installed Chessmaster 8000 (usually "C:\Program Files\Chessmaster 8000") and going to the "Users" folder under that. In this "Users" folder, there will be one or more folders, one for each user that has been created. Let's say your user name is "MyUser". This means that the full path to your user folder would be "C:\Program Files\Chessmaster 8000\Users\MyUser". -- In this folder, there will be a file called "MyUser.INI", where "MyUser" is the name of the user. Open this file for editing with your favorite text editor. -- Add the following text: [mentor] ttable_size=2 where '2' above is the number of MEGABYTES of memory that you want Chessmaster 8000 to allocate for the mentor engine. Chessmaster will only allocate up to 256 MB of memory, so any number greater than 256 will be assumed to be equal to 256. Numbers less than 2 will be ignored entirely. -- Save the file and run Chessmaster. Any time you use a "mentor" feature (Natural Language Advice, Game Analysis or the "Chessmaster" setting in the Visual Thinking and Thinking Lines windows), the mentor engine will now allocate the specified amount of memory. WARNING: This feature is intended for expert computer users only! Entering a number that is larger than or close to ONE FOURTH of the amount of PHYSICAL RAM that your computer has can cause your computer to slow down significantly, as Windows attempts to allocate the memory by "swapping out" other allocated memory to your computer's hard drive. This can even cause Chessmaster (or Windows) to stop responding entirely. Keep in mind that both Windows and the Chessmaster program require significant amounts of memory (as will any other program that may be running at the same time as Chessmaster). Another good rule of thumb to determine the maximum setting for your computer is to subtract 100 from the total amount of RAM that your machine has, and then divide that number by 2. This is a reasonable maximum for this setting. So, if your machine has 128MB of memory, then you should beware of using any number larger than 14. Use this setting with great care. If you do not know how much memory your computer has, then you should not use this setting! 8. Fixed a bug that prevented the checkmate designator to appear in Descriptive notation. The word "mate" is now appended to all mating moves in the Game Status window, as per the Descriptive notation standard. 9. Fixed a bug in the Opening Book Editor in which making a move on the board could create a duplicate move in the current opening book, if the move already existed. 10. Fixed a bug in the Import PGN feature of the Opening Book Editor in which setting the color to use to "White" created frequencies for both colors. 11. Improved the error message reporting for loading PGN games and the Import PGN feature of the Opening Book Editor. 12. Lowered the amount of rating points that is added to each personality based on CPU speed. Previously, 70 rating points were added for each doubling of CPU speed above a Pentium II-233. Now, only 50 points are added. 13. Further improved the WinBoard protocol parser to allow a few more engines to work properly. 14. Additional minor corrections to some tutorials. ---------------- So, that's that. As for other news, a little history is in order.... Originally, Chessmaster was created by The Software Toolworks. About 10 years ago, this company bought Mindscape and the new entity was called Mindscape. Mindscape was then purchased by Pearson PLC (a huge UK publishing conglomerate, involved in TV, magazines, books, etc. that wanted to get into the software business). Pearson then sold us to The Learning Company (a software company mostly devoted to educational and productivity titles). The whole entity became known as The Learning Company. The Learning Company was then purchased by Mattel (as they also wanted to become big players in the software industry), and the entity became known as Mattel Interactive. This entity was then sold to Gores Technology group (a financial holding company that is mostly known for taking "troubled" companies, turning them around, and selling them for profit) about 6 months ago. Well, today, the Chessmaster team has yet another new owner. The entertainment division of The Learning Company (which is called GAME Studios) was sold to a French company called Ubisoft (www.ubisoft.com), which is a strictly entertainment company that has a very strong international business (although not terribly strong in the United States) in both PC and console gaming. So, Ubisoft is now in control of Chessmaster. All other pieces of The Learning Company (education, productivity, etc.) are still owned by Gores Technologies. I wonder how many of you followed that (or cared! ;-) Either way, this probably means very little in the short term (the next few months). In the long term, however, ANYTHING can happen. I'll try to keep you all informed.... However, at least I can finally say, after about 8 years, that Chessmaster is owned by an entertainment-focuesed company again! Hooray! jm
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