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Subject: Re: When will Rebel Century 4 be available??

Author: Ed Schröder

Date: 00:56:14 11/18/01

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On November 17, 2001 at 23:55:37, Sally Weltrop wrote:

>On November 17, 2001 at 12:49:33, Ed Schröder wrote:
>
>>On November 17, 2001 at 12:08:55, Fernando Villegas wrote:
>>
>>>Ed:
>>>Sorry, but it is not clear from your post if you stopped to try with XP because
>>>you was succesful or you did it because you gave up. What is it?
>>>fernando
>>
>>
>>I did not get Century to work under XP. Perhaps there is a solution although
>>I doubt it as XP is a DOS killer, many DOS programs just don't work anymore.
>>
>>Its technical reason is an already installed memory manager by XP while
>>Rebel has its own memory manager, the so-called DOS extender. To remove
>>this memory manager from the program is such a too big job, I better put
>>my energy to move the whole thing to a Windows application.
>
>Ed,
>Is this a possibility? This is from your Rebel board:
>
>posted by a Dan Andersson:
>
>"It should be possible to port Century by converting it from MASM/TASM to NASM.
>Or to run it from a boot disk, even though that would be a bother. But better
>rewrite it in C99 or some other higher level language."
>Regards Dan Andersson


Wish it was that simple. First of all I don't use MASM or TASM to develop
Rebel. Since times I use the compiler from Symantec as it was the best
around at the time. Later the Microsoft compiler more or less became the
standard in the industry to develop software. 2-3 years ago, at the time
of Rebel 10 / Century 1.0 I moved Rebel to this Microsoft compiler running
under the Chesspartner / Chess Tiger interface. For that purpose I had to
translate all my assembler stuff back to C++. The result was a much slower,
thus weaker, version not worthy to release. All quite frustrating looking
at the enormous time wasted.

6-9 months later I gave it another shot but the Microsoft compiler did not
accept Symantec's assembler stuff, totally incompatible it was. Tries have
been made to make it compatible but the risk on errors (bugs) was simply too
high and I gave up again.

From that moment on I haven't considered a third try mainly because my lack
of time caused by some main changes inside the structure of my company, hence
DOS versions of Century 3.0 and Century 4.0. Still there is some hope as Lex
Loep the author Chesspartner is going to do my job soon. Since Lex is an
experienced chess engine programmer himself the chances are good he will
succeed in porting Rebel which is not going to be an easy job for him trying
to understand Rebel's interface code.

So I would say, keep your fingers crossed, I know I will. I also want to
leave this problem behind me and enter a new development world that allows
me to fully focus on Rebel's playing strength in my limited time.

Ed



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