Author: John R. Menke, Sr.
Date: 14:27:41 10/07/99
Greetings, I just received & installed CM7000, and my early impressions are negative. I don't like the new design, and I'm finding a host of apparent bugs. I may keep it for a few days then return it for a refund, and go back to the more reliable CM6000. In the meantime, I'll try to solve a few of its problems. For example in the gameroom I can't get it to wake up and think when a defined personality has the black pieces. CTRL-W (the wake up command) doesn't work. And if I try to move the black pieces manually, it keeps telling me that I can't move opponent's pieces!? Switching sides or flipping the board apparently does no good. Has anybody solved this problem yet, or am I overlooking something?! There is also an apparent mixup when switching sides and/or flipping the board. It forgets whose turn it is to move and lets the same side move twice, or am I just confused?! I did the minimum installation, which was supposed to take only about 19MB of hard drive space. However by just following the directions on screen, accepting only what it said was required, it put 55MB of stuff on my hard drive. It put on something called Quicktime and DirectX, and even changed my video drivers. Wow! I'll certainly have to get rid of most of that...if I keep it. Space is fairly valuable on my 512MB hard drive. Although not thoroughly tested, the CM7000 chess engine appears to run quite a bit slower on my system (AMD5x86 133MHz 64MB RAM), only about half as fast as CM6000. Unless that problem is solved pronto, that alone is enough reason to return it. With CM6000 I can usually reset my computer system to optimize the running speed, a technique that also works with Fritz 5.32 and Hiarcs 7.32, but that doesn't seem to affect CM7000. I use 800x600 video resolution so I loaded that size CM7000 layout, but some of the screens are the wrong size for that resolution. It has no resave/replace provision. So if I try to save the same game to disk again, it keeps adding a .cmg appendage each time. After a few resaves, the name gets pretty darned long with all those ".cmg" extensions on the end!? I admit that I don't adapt to new things quickly or easily, so maybe I'm being overcritical and blockheaded here. I would welcome if anybody can straighten me out on some of the above points. --JRM
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