Author: Richard A. Fowell
Date: 11:11:22 01/07/05
Go up one level in this thread
On January 07, 2005 at 08:57:47, ERIQ wrote: >On January 07, 2005 at 02:43:29, Richard A. Fowell wrote: > >>On January 07, 2005 at 01:42:15, ERIQ wrote: >> >>Well, first - others have. >> >>The King, Ruffian, GnuChess, Deep Sjeng, Crafty, and Fruit run on the Mac. > >To date hiarcs, cm9000, deep sjeng and ruffian are the only commercial engines >available and two of the four are loosely supported at best ie. deep sjeng and >ruffian. Yet you make this list seem good ?! > >Do you think mac and linux people would like to see other big names like: >shedder, fritz, junior, and chesstiger? Sure. >>The King, Ruffian and GNUChess are on the Mac as standalone programs >>(Chessmaster 9000, Kasparov Chessmate and Big Bang Chess). >> >>>I think some programmers are just getting lazy. >> >>It is more a matter of motivation - given the greater market for PCs than Macs, >>there's more reward in putting the code on the PC. > >ok, but if you already have a product for winblows then what else do you have to >do with your time? Most are not making any real impovements to their engines >(real=50+ rating points better than their last version) so what better and more >productive than porting to other platforms. Yes, that is a reasonable thing to do, especially since the PC market is crowded for engines. Even though the Mac is a smaller market, a bigger share of a smaller market is worth something. However, when pursuing that logic, the Mac has not been the obvious choice. Palm OS and the non-English language markets have been more popular diversifications. And it isn't that people have not realized that. HIARCS, Chess Tiger and Chess Genius were all ported to non-PC platforms in the past few years. Chess Tiger has had over 300,000 downloads at handango.com. Even if only one person in 100 paid to upgrade it, that is 3000 units. However, the platform most often chosen was not the Mac, it was the Palm. I have HIARCS, Chess Tiger, Chess Genius and Ruffian (Kasparov Chess) sitting in my belt pouch as I write this. Having done that, the author of Chess Genius continued to diversify in the non-PC world, but again, not to the Mac, but to the Pocket PC and smartphones. In another diversification move - he then created German versions as well as English - the market for non-English language chess software is another underserved market (like the Mac). >>Porting a full program (GUI and all) is a big project - when >>Chessmaster 9000 was ported to the Mac this year, it took six >>months longer than originally announced. >> >>It is a smaller project to port the engine, but not the GUI, as >>a UCI/Winboard engine, and let some other program, such as jose, serve as the >>GUI. >>That is what HIARCS is doing (per >>http://www.sigmachess.com/Hiarcs/sigmahiarcs.html). > >Yes, I see hiarcs these days making great strides to dominate other platforms >(ie. palm, mac) and others should take the hint, there is more that just one os >that chessplayers use. There's another annoying fact of life ( there are so many! ), and that is that having the strongest chess engine does not necessarily translate to having a lot of sales. Chessmaster sold overwhelmingly more copies on the Macintosh that HIARCS the first time that HIARCS Mac came out, and at the time, Chessmaster was at most the 6th strongest engine on the Macintosh. The ranking at the time (1997) seemed to be: HIARCS Sigma Chess (sold by Chessbase at the time) Sargon V Crafty 9.3 MacChess Chessmaster 3000
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