Author: Kai Lübke
Date: 05:17:16 04/17/98
Some things I found testing Nimzo98: Nimzo98 is the only chess program I know that does not allow to switch off permanent brain. The only way to emulate this is to switch to "Player-Player" as soon as Nimzo has moved, but this is annoying. It's also the worst CPU hog I've ever seen. Even when it's not doing anything, it slows other Windows applications down to 50% (tested with Fritz 5's FritzMark). DOS programs are almost unaffected, though. The copy protection is a joke. It took me 1 minute thinking and 2 minutes experimenting, now Nimzo will never (!) ask me for the CD again. (Consequence: people wanting to "crack" Nimzo have no problem but the honest buyer has the hassle of inserting the CD every 20 starts.) However, if I _rename_ the .exe, it suddenly wants the CD back! So I can't even have the CD version and the Paderborn update in the same directory! The sounds are also poor and don't attract my attention at all when I'm waiting for Nimzo to move. Fortunately, you can replace the .wav files with your own favourite sounds (I chose some from CM 4000 and 5500). Sometimes the move output is silly; e.g. once I saw the pawn move "f7-f5" noted as "f7xf5" - Nimzo sometimes captures when there's no piece on the target square! :) Installation is unnecessarily buggy, too: on "Standard", it insists on installing a 45 MB database to harddisk. Since the full installed Nimzo is rather small (< 50 MB), why does the CD only contain packed archives? A detailed review will follow as soon as I find the time. --- Shep
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