Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 07:27:23 12/15/02
Go up one level in this thread
On December 13, 2002 at 11:08:47, Christophe Theron wrote: >OK, so I need to explain again. > >Current Palm programs are going to be faster on the Tungsten only if: > >1) they make a lot of calls to the system. >2) they are recompiled in native ARM mode. > >Chess Tiger (current version) and ChessGenius (current version) are in none of >the above category. I was aware of this, of course. >That means that at this time your ARM processor is just executing 68000 code. >So it's extremely slow. The advertising I have seen want us to believe that the ARM Palms are usually faster than the 68000 Palms, even when executing 68000 code in emulation. I was probably a bit too optimistic when I believed in this. >In the future, when Chess Tiger is recompiled in native ARM mode, you are going >to see an incredible speed performance. My guess is 10x faster. > >For ChessGenius it's a different story. It is written in 68000 assembly, so it >cannot be recompiled in ARM native mode. So it will probably continue to run in >emulation mode on the PalmOS 5 handhelds. Unless Richard Lang rewrites it >completely. I think this will not be as difficult as you expect -- remember that Richard already has a version of Chess Genius running on Pocket PCs, which (IIRC) are also ARM-based. >>I also have a question regarding the (non-ARM-optimized) CT15. Will the new >>version support the 320x320 resolution? CT14.9 looks somewhat ugly compared >>to CG1.6 on my hi-res screen. > >CT15 for Palm supports only the 160x160 resolution. > >You can see screenshots at http://www.chesstiger.com. I don't find it ugly... Sorry, "ugly" was probably too harsh a word. But have you seen the new CG1.6 running in 320x320? It looks fantastic, and I would very much like to see CT in the same high resolution. I have now played with Chess Tiger for a couple of days, and I am very impressed by the number of features you have been able to pack into such a small program, and that the program is able to play a decent game of chess despite searching at such a low speed (around 300--400 nps on the Tungsten T, it typically reaches 3 or 4 plies in the middle game at 5 minutes/game). My estimate is that the playing strength is around 1700-1800 elo on my Palm (while Genius feels more like 1400-1500). The main weakness of the program is that it (like Genius) appears to have a rather limited understanding of king safety. The simple strategy of castling opposite sides and throwing pawns against Tiger's king is very effective. One concrete type of mistake which occurs very often in Tiger's games is this: It often plays moves like ...h6 in the opening, and a couple of moves later castles kingside while the opponent has already castled queenside (or has not yet castled), inviting a quick g2-g4-g5. I have also noticed one minor annoyance in the user inteface: Holding down the center button of the navigator pad at the lower end of my Palm for a couple of seconds is supposed to switch to the Application Launcher. This works in all other programs I am running on my Palm, but _not_ in Chess Tiger. Hence I have to uncover the Grafitti area of my Palm every time I want to switch to another app, which is rather annoying. Finally, I would like to point out that I have not had so much fun playing a computer program for many years -- Chess Tiger is a very enjoyable opponent. Thank you for giving us this program, Christophe! >>Of course, I would also like to do some development for my Palm myself. >>What development tools do you use? Do you have any books or other resources >>to recommend? > >I use the free GCC (you can download it from www.palm.com) and PilotMAG (that's >an IDE that comes on top of GCC, it's $25 IIRC). > >To compile in native ARM mode I'm switching to CodeWarrior (much more >expensive). Once again, thank you very much! Tord
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