Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 09:24:08 07/14/98
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On July 13, 1998 at 22:45:02, SEAN EVANS wrote:
>Hello Amir Ban,
>
>Will the next verision of Junior be called 5.32 making it a True 32 bit Chess
>engine which can utilize the larger BUS.
>
>Here is a good Newbie question for you! Is it faster for a Chess engine like
>Rebel or Mchess to run under a DOS system or a program like CM5500 to run under
>a 32 bit system??? It would seem to me the "Newbie" that 32 bits is faster than
>16 bits.
Chess Tiger is a 32 bits application and exists both in DOS and Win95 versions.
The DOS version is compiled with the (free) Gnu C Compiler, which includes a DOS
extender. The extender makes 32 bits DOS applications possible. This version can
be run under pure DOS, or in a Win95 DOS box.
The Win95 version can be compiled either with Microsoft C Compiler (version 4 or
5) or with the Borland Compilers. The fastest engine is obtained by using the
Microsoft Visual C version 5.
Running the DOS version under pure DOS is as fast as running the Win95 version
under Win95.
That is to say: the environment you are using (DOS or Windows) makes very little
difference. Pure DOS should theorically be slightly faster than Windows, because
of Windows real time multitasking overhead. In pratice, the MSVC5 compiler is
slightly better in producing optimized code, and I see no difference between DOS
and Windows.
So I keep using DOS for my competition engine, because with the same amount of
available RAM I can get more hash (Windows is not eating memory).
If I released Tiger, I would certainly do it as a Windows application, because I
don't want people to say: "Hey, this is a crappy DOS program!". Yeah, some
people really react like that...
And one more thing: I'm quite sure that Tiger would be a little bit faster if it
was a 16 bits (DOS or Windows) application. So why did I use 32 bits? Because it
is a little bit trickier to program a large application in 16 bits, and I was a
little bit too lazy for that.
As you see, things are not as simple as: "16 bits DOS programs suck".
Christophe
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