Author: Keith Evans
Date: 17:25:40 01/29/05
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On January 29, 2005 at 04:09:46, Steve B wrote: >>What if someone took the guts out of a palm (or maybe bought something like a >>gumstix board with 400 MHz xscale processor) and jammed it into an excalibur >>grandmaster? (You might not want to risk one of your beautiful old wooden units >>on such a beast.) You could have quite a powerful dedicated unit, but would you >>be willing to pay $1000 for such a hack? > >well there are two points here.. >First ..i am not so interested in modified computers >the new dedicated computers that we are talking about will be avaialable to the >general public >there will be perhaps 50 or more sold >a prototype has competed in head on competiton with all of the other dedicated >units and won going away > >SECOND..the new dedicated computer will have two programs and it will be >upgradeable through a pc serial port built into the module >a wed site will be maintained by the seller which will allow upgrades to be >downloaded from the site directly into the computer to all registered owners > >so all together i think its a nice package and worth the money and so do many >other collectors > >what you describe is interesting ,but the concept of taking an existing computer >and modifying its processor or over clocking ,etc etc is not a new one >generally i do not acquire these sorts of computers > > > >now with all of that aside, if you can do what you described for say..$500..you >have your first sale >:)) > >i like the idea you picked the GM board..its a great board to play chess on > >Best >Steve I'm not actually doing such a project. I also have a wife that wouldn't be too happy seeing disemboweled chess computers in the house, but unlike you I don't have a basement workshop. And I spend all day at work on electronics, and need definitely need a break from that after work. It seems like a good undergraduate project though! I was more interested in what it takes to actually make something interesting for collectors. The excalibur grandmaster was available for about $100 new in a few places a while back but when I just looked on EBay there weren't so many of those units available. If I were going to do such a hack then I would want to pick something still in production so as not to receive bad karma from upsetting the serious collectors. For me a dedicated unit is not interesting unless it includes some kind of chessboard which can be used to directly enter the moves. If you are required to enter moves on a keypad or something, then my personal opinion is that you might as well be playing on a pc, palm, or gameboy. I can understand the interest of units lacking such an interface from a historical point of view, but that's it. I am not sure about the details of the project being done by Ruud Martin. Is it a module designed to slide into an existing unit?
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