Author: Stuart Cracraft
Date: 17:00:25 04/03/98
Go up one level in this thread
On April 03, 1998 at 06:45:44, Tim Jenkins wrote:
>I was at the National Open last weekend in Las Vegas and Mindscape had
>Chessmaster 5500 on display using the Smartboard. Is anyone out there
>using this electronic chessboard or something equivalent? If so
>where/how did you purchase it? Does it work with Fritz5?
>
>Note: the Smartboard has pieces recognition and plugs into a serial port
>of your PC.
Just visit http://www.tasc.nl and check it out. The supported
programs (from the Web-page) are listed as: MChess Pro, Hiarcs,
Chessmaster 5000, Rebel, Fritz, Genius and Kallisto.
Regarding the serial port, it is the parallel port that the SmartBoard
uses.
However, you might want to avoid the SmartBoard for the following
reasons:
1) there is some issue of a lawsuit in the U.S. preventing its
distribution
seemingly by U.S. companies. I don't know if it is legal to buy one
from an overseas supplier. Certainly some are willing to sell and
ship
one (GambitSoft of Germany, London Chess Center of England). Price
seems to be sky-high.
2) piece recognition technology requires more hardware support in the
board
making it less reliable, in my opinion. The feature is great but
not if
the board fails.
3) there have been rumors of poor support from the manufacturer.
4) the parallel port has disadvantages (mostly) compared to the serial
port used by other products.
5) the default (free) program that comes with the SmartBoard is not as
good as some programs that come with the other boards.
I own a Novag Universal Board and am interfacing it to my chess program.
The Universal is not full piece recognition but it is a) cheaper b)
seemingly supported better c) has no lawsuit judgement hanging against
it that I am aware of.
Anyone who wants the GNU C interface code may have it since it is
published and available freely through DJGPP's web site and is a
standard COM port interface
program that can easily be munged into a chess program to support I/O to
and from the Novag Universal board. I have used the program to manually
send and
receive hand-typed/hand-moved moves to/from the Universal. Works great.
Learn about the Novag Universal board at http://www.novag.com and
http://www.icdchess.com. Both ICD and Novag have been highly responsive
to me over the network to issues, with the one exception that Novag
wouldn't
give me the interface specification for the board but that has already
been published elsewhere on the web (e.g. make a move, reset a game,
swap
sides, etc.)
--Stuart
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