Author: ERIQ
Date: 19:06:46 01/07/05
Go up one level in this thread
On January 07, 2005 at 16:36:10, Richard A. Fowell wrote: >On January 07, 2005 at 08:57:47, ERIQ wrote: > ><snip> >> >>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 ?! > >You are disappointed in a list that includes cm9000, deep sjeng and ruffian, >and (soon now) a current version of HIARCS, and say "Yet you make this list seem >good". > >How did you feel one year ago, when none of these engines were even prospective >possibilities, and cm6000 and HIARCS 7 were the strongest chess programs on the >Mac? > >Obviously, it isn't as nice as the list on the PC, and I would like to make it >better. >But it is heroicly better than it was a year ago. > >>Do you think mac and linux people would like to see other big names like: >>shedder, fritz, junior, and chesstiger? > >Sure. > >I have been actively working for over a decade to make that list better, and if >you want to do >something constructive to help me with that, I would welcome it. There are lots >of things >that users can do to help improve the chess software on their platform. > >Be very clear on one thing, though - it isn't that the programmers are lazy, it >is that the rewards for putting their engines into the Mac market have been >poor. The Chessbase database was on the Mac market for a while, then they >stopped. HIARCS was on the Mac market in the late 90s for two versions, and then >stopped. Chess software on the Mac just didn't return enough money to be worth >the effort. > >Even when HIARCS (late 1990s) has head and shoulders the strongest chess program >available for the Macintosh, it didn't make enough money to justify the effort. >And that was despite a lot of unpaid effort on my part to help HIARCS succeed, >including very extensive beta testing, writing chess software review articles in >Inside Mac games, the BMUG and LAMG newsletters, GambitSoft and elsewhere, >writing and distributing an unofficial patch to enhance HIARCS, and benchmarking >HIARCS Mac vs. HIARCS PC to show that (for that version of HIARCS) the Mac was a >faster platform for HIARCS than it seemed. > >So - what can we do to make it attractive to port good chess engines to the Mac? >The classic economic approach is to lower the cost of putting good software on >the Mac, and increase the return. > >One way of lowering the cost is to provide Mac OS/X host software that will take >care of the GUI issues, such as Jose. Jose (http://jose-chess.sourceforge.net/) >supports both X-board and UCI protocols, and I conjecture this is part of the >reason that Ruffian and Deep Sjeng are available as OS/X UCI engines currently. >I think the current work on Sigma Chess to support HIARCS through a UCI >interface will help encourage more chess engines there as well. > >Another way to lower the cost of putting good software on the Mac is for users >to volunteer to provide high-quality, unpaid testing as beta testers. By >high-quality, I mean thorough test coverage of program features, testing on >multiple configurations, narrowing down problems to specific, repeatable >scenarios, and providing constructive, implementable suggestions for >improvement. I have been doing that on the Mac and Palm OS for many authors, but >this is one direct way to help improve the quality of the product. Many of the >things that I as a user wanted in a chess program exist in MacChess because of >the time I spent with the author testing the program and making suggestions and >other contributions (such as creating a piece set). > >Now lets talk about the return side. There are relatively few Mac owners, of >whom relatively few buy chess software, of whom relatively few buy HIARCS-class >software, of which a relatively small fraction of the proceeds go to the >programmer. > >Although I have influenced a few purchases, I can't imagine I've made much of an >impact on the number of Mac owners, though I have done things such as join >Macintosh user groups, provide free Mac consulting, purchase Macs at my company, >and provide CD-Rs filled with hand-picked quality freeware and shareware as >Christmas presents to every Mac owner I knew. > >As far as the fraction of Mac users who actually buy chess software, and high >quality chess software, at that, I've tried to influence this through publicity. >This includes writing chess software reviews for such magazines as Inside Mac >Games, the BMUG newsletter, the LAMG newsletter, and an article in the past year >in some Mac magazine I don't remember. I also make sure the authors are aware of >the opportunities for free publicity offered by the Macintosh software indices >offered by Apple, Versiontracker and the like. > >The real high-leverage point though, is the fraction of the money going to the >computer programmers. As indicated in another post in this thread, the fraction >of the proceeds that the chess engine programmer gets through the classic >software distribution model is relatively small. > >One radical approach to changing this (as I mentioned in the other message) >would be to get a co-op effort to commission the port of a chess engine. That >way the fraction of what you as a user pay goes to incentivize the chess engine >programmer is much higher. > >So - what can you do to help change this situation? I can Let all programmers know that it would be more profitable to just make engine as xboard and uci for all three major platforms winblows, palm, unix-like systems (freebsd,linux and apple) and then distibute it themselfs via a webpage keeping most of the profits. I for one would find no problem buying an engine for $30 directly from an authors webpage and then downloading my favorite free gui to play it with. What is so hard about this? I am sure they are not making $30 an engine at the moment! >-Richard
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