Author: Tony Schleizer
Date: 03:55:55 05/08/04
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I hate that battery door too. The entire computer is badly designed. Here are my main gripes: - double hinged face plate to protect the screen. The little tabs on the face place broke off within a week. I am using a piece of tape to hold the face place to the hinge. Instead of this stupid double hinge design, they should have made it a snap on cover like the Mephisto Touch Screen Chess or a Palm Zire 31. This would have avoided all the little plastics pieces that will defintely be snapping off in time. Or, if they made the entire unit out of Aluminum, then I don't think the tabs would snap off, but that might be too expensive. - No on/off button. With the on off button being on the screen, every time I clean the screen, the computer turns on and the pieces get moved around. Forget the ability to clean the screen while playing a game. - Couple of bugs in the interface. For example, the C character turns the board, but only at the beginning of the game. If you hit C during a game, the computer clears the move list, resets to the first move, but leaves the position on the board. This give you the ability to make multiple moves if you are playing Black, e.g. e4 e6, d4 now you hit C and it's White's move again. - Save/Load game. There are two problems here. First, when you save a game for replay, there is no way to take back all to get to the begging of the game and trace forward from there. So, if you play a long game, you have to track back one move at a time. In this case you cannot hit the TB character too quickly otherwise the unit looses pieces when capture occurred. Second, if you save a game where the board was turned, i.e. Black on the bottom, and replay with White on the bottom, the replay is garbage. The moves are output correctly, but the moves on the screen have nothing to do with the moves being displayed. So, if you save a game as Black on the bottom, you need to replay as Black on the bottom. - No flash memory, so when you change your batteries out you lose all your settings as well as saved games. This is especially bad if you have spent time to input your own opening book. - The way I save battery life is to turn the Easy mode on. This disables the computer thinking on your time. When you start a new game, this gets reset. It is my feeling that any change you make, turning the board, Easy on/off, etc., should be maintained when a new game is started. - Features. I think they could do away with the interface to the PC stuff. I'd also like to have a Tournament Book option for the opening book b/c the computer plays stuff like b4 a little too often. Regards, Tony
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