Author: Komputer Korner
Date: 13:29:28 01/11/99
The 7th version of the world’s top selling chess software for Windows 95/98 is
now out and finally it has an editable database. In fact there already is a
patch on the ChessMaster web site. The way that you can tell that your store
bought version is the patched version or not is the date on the CM6000.exe file.
The date of the first patch version is Sept. 28, 1998. The readme 102 of the 2nd
patch does say to uninstall the program if you are having problems with the 2nd
patch but if you installed the 1st patch you
have to manually uninstall the 1st patch files as well as move any
saved games out of the directory before reinstalling the program and then
installing the 2nd patch. The date of the 2nd patch CM6000 executable is
December 9, 1998. Version 1.0.2 addresses the following issues:
 The program no longer crashes attempting to play a rated game
against a grandmaster personality.
 Cosmetic and content fixes to tutorials.
 Fixed an incompatibility with machines that had Internet Explorer
5.0 Installed on them.
 Loosened the requirement for CD residency, now it won't ask for the CD
for 7 to 21 days. (however, you still need the CD to access voice annotated
features such as Josh Waitzkin's games and the tutorials) . This is some dispute
because many users have found that it still asks for the CD 1 time or more out
of every 3 sessions.
 Fixed several Chessmaster Live bugs.
 The Auto-Annotator now fully demonstrates mating lines greater than
mate in 10.
 General improvements to some interface elements.
There is a new look to the interface with the dark brown being replaced by a
greyish blue background and this is much more pleasing to the eye. There are new
tutorials and annotated instructive games and the coach window has a statistics
function showing the opening score %’s. You now can play rated games against
the program and it keeps track of each user’s rating in a separate rating
information database. You can play rated games against each of the ready made
personality opponents. There is a new 440,000 game database which allows you to
import games that are in PGN files. You open up a tbg file which is
ChessMaster’s dB format ( the same one as TascBase) and then you click on the
import games feature and select the PGN file with the games you want to import.
You can also choose to convert these pgn games into cmg (chessmaster) format if
there is more than 1 game in the pgn file. The database screen is divided into 3
areas. The top area shows you a small board that you can move the pieces on with
the move list to the right of it. Click anywhere on the move list and the new
board position will show. Below that is the list of dB game headers. You simply
double click on a game and the top part of the screen will reflect the game. You
can choose to return to the main screen with the game you clicked on with the
board position. At the bottom of the database screen is the ECO-like screen
showing the opening book moves which you can navigate through via on screen
control buttons. You can click on the keys stats menu which will tell you a)
number of subkeys b) number of sub games c) average ELO for each colour in the
subkey d) results (wins, losses,draws) e) ECO code f) opening name. If you save
a game in either CM6000 cmg or pgn format the program will automatically delete
illegal characters in your named file. You can create a new tbg format dB or use
the 440,000 game dB that comes with the program. If you want to add or delete
games from the 440,000 game base you will have to copy it from the CDROM to your
hard drive. You then take off the read only property by right mouse clicking
the file in Explorer and clicking on properties. After deleting games, you can
then optimize your dB which will then physically delete the marked for deletion
games and at the same time all the header and opening key indices are adjusted.
You can now search these databases on a 5 by 3 field header matrix search with
“or” parameters. You can adjust the sizes of the game headers in the games list
and you can choose to add or delete which game headers you want. Fischer time
controls of up to 999 second increments are possible.
There is a new 3D board and the boards now present turn lights to tell the user
whose turn it is to move.
IM Josh Waitzkin has added some more of his deeply annotated games and I can’t
say enough about how good these are. They are simply the best tutoring available
outside of a real life personal tutor. Another great improvement is that the
chess tutor has been completely revamped. The tutor now has 14 sections each
explaining a different part of the game. Almost all of the tutorials now have
complete PV moving piece board analysis with complete audio, ghosted pieces and
arrows explaining the key piece trajectories. Ghosted pieces are key pieces that
are temporarily faded so as to point out key concepts in the tutorial
explanation. The tutorials are presented in a beginner to novice logical order
and the final section on John Nunn’s brain teasers will tax the minds of even
masters. There is a workaround to the missing Tasc Smartboard submenu. Change
the CM.ini file for the Smartboard value from 0 to 1. solution to to the
If you are having a problem printing out a square board diagram in Word invoke
the CM6000 fonts in Word 7.
After pasting the diagram from the clipboard, set the line spacing equal to
the font's point size (in Word, select the diagram go to FORMAT, PARAGRAPH,
INDENTS AND SPACING and set the LINE SPACING to "Exactly" and set AT to the same
point size as your font), this shoud produce the correct (square) board diagram.
Obviously, this doesn't solve the problem when printing directly the Board
diagram from CM6000, but at least it enables the user to produce font diagrams
quite easily.
Direct access to Chessmaster Live is incorporated and the web site is now up
and running. This is based on the Mplayer software that allows you to talk
directly to your opponent through your computer’s microphone.
A newly updated chess engine the King 2.61 is incorporated and it is indeed one
of the strongest engines versus human opponents especially on longer time
controls. The previous version CM5500 is presently winning the KK Kup 2. The
Walter Pilz settings as modified by Harald Fabar are now no longer the
strongest and the suggested best settings is still a matter of controversy but
one suggested setting by a user on rgcc is the following:
Opening Book: Mentor.OBK
Style:
Attacker/Defender -15
Strength of Play 100
Randomness of play 0
Book Depth 100
Selective Search 10
Contempt for Draw 0.0
Transposition Table and Deep thinking should never be off
Positional:
Material/Position 20
Control of Center 90
Mobility 115
King Safety 160
Passed Pawns 105
Pawns Weakness 125
Material:
(each value is for both)
Queen: 10.0
Rook:5.5
Bishop: 3.5
Knight: 3.3
Pawn: 1.1
As with all software here is a list of the faults.
The opening book editor is unchanged and is basically a joke . Among it’s many
faults is you don’t get a board position while editing. It is a separate program
that comes for free with CM6000 and is not even mentioned in the manual.
Chessmaster could have easily done an excellent editor by linking it with the
opening keys screen and making that editable but they did not. One can only hope
that CM7000 will do this. There is no way to get the thinking window (PV’s and
score evaluation) to work if you are in player player mode. The program is a
bit unstable in that the tutorials sometimes quit halfway through and exiting by
the x box in the top right hand corner will sometimes cause a crash, but this is
also because of my unstable WIN 95 setup. However it should be noted that I have
other Win 95 chess programs that never crash. There is no way to simply drag the
board window to make a larger size. You have to set it in the Environment menu.
When you change the board size to maximum size in the above menu, the piece
sizes do not adjust to reflect the new size.
The seconds per move limit is still a measly 999 seconds.
There is a semi intelligent mouse in that if only one piece can move to a square
then the piece will move if you click on the “to” square, but if 2 pieces can
move there, this feature will not work. Some other chess programs have a truly
intelligent mouse whereby the program makes the decision on which piece will
move if you click only on the ‘to’ square.
The setup position has no consecutive entry of same piece with left mouse. There
is no right mouse clicking for opposite piece colour in setup position.
The quick entry feature doesn’t seem to work fully. This is the feature that
allows the user to click on the “from” square or “to” square for moving the
piece. Clicking on the “to” square works but not the “from” square, contrary to
the manual. There are no take back or move forward buttons. The user has to
either press CTRL-T or go to one of the top menus. There is no info voice in the
database screen nor in the brain teasers tutorial. There is no word index in the
paper manual. There seems to be a useless column in the database headers that
contain a small 4x4 chessboard icon for each game.
You can’t save a game directly to a tbg database within CM6000. You have to
save your games to pgn files and then import those games into the database.
Since CM6000’s interpretation of PGN will save variations, but will not let you
play through them on the board, saving them is useless for using them within
CM6000. You can’t convert a cmg file to a pgn file even though you can convert
the other way. However since only cmg files can contain alternate lines and
evaluations, it is not possible to store annotated games in your CM databases.
PGN rules allow alternate lines but since cmg files cannot be imported into your
CM6000 databases, you cannot get your annotated games into them. When you import
the PGN games into a CM6000 (tbg) database, the alternate lines show up only on
the small database board but you can’t play through those variations. If you
import a pgn game into the dB, you cannot play through the variations except for
the main line. Importing a huge number of pgn games into a database is too
slow. Exported PGN games can’t be read by external programs until they have
been renamed so that all the punctuation is gone except for the .pgn extension.
The game move lists do not recognize transpositions nor do they recognize
that a duplicate move has been made as an alternative at any move. I must admit
that no chess program that allows alternatives in the move list has solved this
but Fritz 5/Junior 5 supplies a tree view that catches all transpositions.
However CM6000 doesn’t have an editable tree. There is no Replace game feature
and thus once a game is in a dB you have no way of changing the game header info
unless you save the game under a new heading and import this new pgn saved game
and then delete the old game.
The pgn dialog box showing the game headers for games that you are importing
isn’t large enough. It should expand to fit the full screen. There is no
option in the Auto Annotate feature to do only analysis for 1 side.
Interestingly, some of the opening commentary of certain openings has been
deleted from CM5500. Ex: some of the Moderrn Defence commentary has been cut
out. The replay of the Auto annotate alternate PVs is too fast.
The login registered user’s name should always be presented in a drop down pick
list for the name of either colour’s opponent. Sometimes it is necessary to
type one’s own login’s name inthe game details.
If you save a game to an existing pgn file, CM6000 will overwite the whole
file. You can’t save game details like round number and player ELO.
EPD files are not supported even though text files and FEN are.
The coach part of the manual hasn’t been updated to reflect the stats feature
mentioned above. There is no drag and drop capability of adding databases to one
another and no pick list of previously opened databases.
None of the tutorials allow you to skip some of the materiel. You have to go
through each tutorial in the sequence supplied. However you can go right to each
section in each tutorial by clicking on the + sign in the main tutorial list.
The practice openings should be much more in depth with the lines. Too many of
them are 1 movers. You are forced to keep pressing continue each time a page is
finished in the tutorials. This is a pain because most of the tutorials are laid
out such that only 1 line appears on a page and sometimes only one move on a
page!
If the sliding pieces on screen are on slow mode, they are often too slow for
the audio analysis in the replay of Auto Annotation. If you have taken back
moves and have changed the side to move and then woke up CM6000 and if there is
no time on the clock, CM6000 will blunder it’s moves sometimes. The tutorials
should not have buttons to mouse click the move alternatives. The user should
always be able to make the move choice by moving the piece on the board. This
isn’t always the case in CM 6000. The dragging and dropping of pieces is a bit
too cumbersome. Changing notation only changes it in the move list window. The
think lines always stays in coordinate notation. There is no search by material
nor theme nor negatives nor combination of header and position. Searches can
only be done on last names. There is no symbol pick list for annotating a game
yourself.
Some alternatives are not played out on the board in the tutorials.
You can’t delete variations in the move list. Does not run in WIN NT 4.
CM6000 won’t resign.
The non standard windows interface doesn’t allow the font size of the menus to
be changed. The maximum move number is 513 ply.
The tutorial written commentary should be in figurine notation and should be in
a larger font. The program will crash on page 27 and page 56 of the brain
teasers tutorial if the user tries to move the pieces on the board. In fact in
the page 56 brain teaser, the program will allow a wrong 1st move 1.f5.
Too many times the hint commentary is just a repeat of the actual move
commentary that shows on the next page. Force move often doesn’t work. The
Attacker/Defender setting is misnamed. The actual function of this setting is to
set the willingness to exchange pieces with positive numbers meaning that the
program will avoid exchanges. There is no endgame tablebase support. When you
print directly the Board diagram from CM6000, the diagram is not square. The
Graphical board is square but not the Board Diagram (Chess font).
The King engine doesn’t know the procedure to checkmate with bishop and knight.
When down to king vs king, the program gives no indication that the game is
drawn. Some personalities will not allow truly random moves even if user has
specfied that feature in creating them. Even though you can create your own
opponents, you can’t play rated games against them. The tutorial dialog boxes
showing the text should be larger or at least allow the user to resize them.
The list of exact mistakes is now down to 4 in the tutorials.
In the Strategy tutorial
Pg 67- There is a mistake in the suggested alternative commentary on page 68.
1.Rh1 only delays the win. After 1.Rh1Kg7 white would have to play 2.Rc1(d1)
anyway in order to get to b8.
195- The rest of the pieces should be on the squares because white has
alternatives otherwise.
In the Seirawan tutorial
Pages 208-240 The black pawn on f7 should be on f6.
In the Brain Teasers tutorial
Pg 26- The commentary should read “If white plays 1.Bc4 Black replies with
1....b3
In the Josh Waitzkin annotated games, the mistakes are:
Some castling sequences have the Rook moving first instead of the King.
In a variation of the game Bezold-Waitzkin , on Black’s 18th move at the end
of a long analysis at one point there are 3 black knights on
the board. The problem is somebody slipped in a black knight on the b2
square instead of the white bishop that should be on that square.
In many of the Waitzkin tutorials, Josh asks the user to think about the move,
but the next move in the move list is not hidden, so it is too easy to cheat by
simply looking at the move list. In some of Josh’s pre game speeches, it is
easy to tell that he is simply reading a text. There are 2 bugs in the
Zlotnikov-Waitzkin advanced annotated game. On White’s 48th move in a threat
variation the white rook should not be on E1. Also in another variation there is
a missing white queen.
However this program despite the above flaws is simply the best value for money
to non tournament chess players. Even for non masters who don’t need an opening
book editor and don’t go over their moves in their tournament games , CM6000
fulfills their needs. Chessmaster has now matured as a computer chess software
and CM6000 with it’s low discount price is tremendous value for money. For this
reason, CM6000 is awarded a Komputer Korner Gold Medal for its value in features
to non tournament players and for it’s engine strength .
For OTB masters or correspondence players the lack of thinking in player-player
mode and it’s poor opening book editor are serious handicaps. For those users
who simply want to play a tremendously strong program for a very cheap price,
CM6000 is the best deal on the market. CM6000 now is awarded 3 more Gold Medals
for the teaching categories.
--
Komputer Korner
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