Author: Ray Rogers
Date: 13:32:43 02/18/06
Palm Chess Game Databases The Palm series of machines seem so perfectly suited to chess that it’s a pity .pgn databases aren’t recognised by them. A while back I asked about storing lots of chess games on a Palm (I have a Tungsten T - OS 5) and got no response. I was not surprised. Problems are that to enter a game in the memo pad means doing so one game at a time and, if you were to enter thousands, pulling up a game from within Hiarcs, Genius etc slows the loading process down. No matter where you store the game memos they are all brought together to be loaded by the chess playing program as if they were all in one big file. You can’t keep them in databases. So having hundreds or thousands of games on the thing is a problem. I did this tonight and it seems to work fine. 1) Load up the .pgn database into “Word” and save it as a .txt file. I called it “Game Only” (there are no notes to any of these 681 games so nothing to confuse Genius etc.) and added “Game Only” as the very first line of the new .txt document. 2) Go into the Palm on your PC desktop, click on “Memo” then create a new category called “Chess Database.” Go to “File” to find your newly created .txt and “Import” it. It will tell you that as the new memo is so big it will be added as 140 new memos called “Game Only 1” etc. (in this case). 3) Perform a hot-sync. In this example there are now 681 games stored in 140 memos none of which can be seen by your chess playing programs. Some games will of course span two memos but never mind. 4) Using your Palm find one of these games by making use of the basic palm search routine (i.e. Rogers,R) to get a list of candidate games, highlight, copy and paste the game into a new memo. You can even search for something like 45.Be4 for example if you remember that killer move. Your chess playing program will now find this one new memo in the usual way. You could of course delete this memo afterwards if you wanted to. I don’t see why you can’t now store many thousands of chess games on your Palm. There are plenty of you who know much more about this than I do so your comments will be welcomed. Having a beer now as brain getting hot. Cheers. Ray.
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