Author: Chris Kantack
Date: 11:11:20 07/17/02
This month Excalibur is introducing Chess Station to the marketplace. Chess Station features a sleek new handheld unit along with a docking chess board. As for program strength and features, Chess Station is essentially the same as Touch Chess (minus the touch screen of course.) I hope to have a review posted for this system within the next 8 weeks or so. Next month (August) Excalibur will begin shipping Talking LCD Chess. Though Talking LCD Chess is housed in a similarly shaped and sized unit as LCD Chess, I find it to be particularly interesting. Talking LCD Chess features a faster chip and newer program. Excalibur estimates it to be 400 Elo points stronger than the original LCD Chess unit. (Most people estimate LCD Chess at 1300 to 1600 Elo.) Also, Talking LCD Chess has an opening book of 3,000 moves. (Touch Chess has 250 moves in its opening book.) Talking LCD Chess boasts a number of improvements in features as well. You can set playing strength levels a number of different ways. Rather than the fixed 72 timed levels of LCD Chess you can set the strength by: - ply levels (1 thru 8 ply!) - tournament time levels (such as 40 moves in 2 hours) - "sudden death" levels (presets range from G/5min to G/90min) - and there are several fixed time level presets Additionally, each level has an additional attribute that can be set: E - easy, A - Average, H - Hard I plan on posting a revieww of Talking LCD Chess sometime in the late summer/early fall time period. The point of this posting is: Don't judge these units by their external appearance. The "pocket LCD portion" of Chess Station has the more radical (newest) external design. But the most advanced changes (at the chip and program level) are with the Talking LCD Chess unit. If you have not seen the photos of Excalibur's 2002 Chess Products, you can view them at: http://home.earthlink.net/~kantack/lcdchess/newproducts.htm Chris http://home.earthlink.net/~kantack/lcdchess/home.htm
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