Author: Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Date: 11:58:33 08/22/98
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On August 18, 1998 at 12:14:17, David Eppstein wrote: >Over a year ago Rolf Exner put out a Mac version of Crafty 11.13 that was >compatible with ExaChess (very nice graphical interface and database program >with a standardized AppleTalk protocol for talking to several different chess >engines, available in both freeware and commercial feature-enhanced versions, >see http://www.exachess.com/). You can still find this old Crafty version e.g. >at http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive.html and at the ExaChess web >site. Why did these mods get dumped? As I understand the situation, the mods didn't get dumped, per se. The mods were never in Robert Hyatt's version of Crafty. Here's the history of Crafty for the Mac, as I understand it. Initially, Lloyd Lim tried to maintain a Crafty Mac version. His hope was that the Mac-specific code would be incorporated into the main Crafty source, but that didn't happen, so eventually he stopped maintaining it. His versions are at http://www.limunltd.com/crafty/ and are Crafty 9.31, with a GUI board added. Next, Rolf Exner was developing ExaChess chess database for the Mac (www.exachess.com) and wanted some chess engines that would work with it. (Currently: MacChess 4.0, ZZZZZZ, GNUChess, and Crafty 11.13 will). Rolf compiled the Crafty code for the Mac, added his Applescript extensions, and posted it to the Internet archives. This appears to have been done without any help from Hyatt - I remember a newsgroup posting by Robert Hyatt when it came out, where he was concerned that Rolf might be charging for it (he wasn't - he posted it to the various Internet archives, and his commercial ExaChess product says to download Crafty from the Net). Rolf has not kept up with the (frequent) Crafty updates since then, and I don't know if he plans to update this or not. Rolf currently seems to be putting his priorities towards developing ExaChess 2.0. (By the way, if you didn't realize that there was an ExaChess compatible version of MacChess 4.0, go to http://www.gambitsoft.com/mac.htm to download the patch to make an ExaChess compatible version of MacChess. This web site has a pretty complete list of pointers to freely downloadable Macintosh chess software - I feed the information to Bert Seifriz of GambitSoft, and he hosts the page). There matters lay for a long time, until some discussion on CCC about why there wasn't a current Crafty for Mac. Historically, it seems the issue had been that some of the Crafty code wouldn't work in the Mac compilers, so porting it to the Mac was a chore. After some cooperation between Robert Hyatt and some Mac programmers on CCC, Robert made the Crafty source more "Mac-friendly", and I believe Carsten Kossendy has been doing the Mac compililations recently. Carsten is the author of the Mac FICS interface PowerICS, and had been keeping a current Mac version of Crafty for his own use for a while, a job that is presumably simpler now that the Crafty source is more Mac-compatible. >Will we ever see a more recent >ExaChess-compatible Crafty? The most likely thing would be that Rolf Exner might get around to adding his hooks to a current version of Crafty. Ask Rolf. -Richard A. Fowell
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