Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 08:37:47 10/29/99
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>I was unfortunate in that I did not carefully read the rebel homepage >before I bought the product. I thought it was a windows program. Instead >I got a crummy interface (very grainy) in which my mouse takes about >2 seconds to register. I have been messing with things over the >last two days to see if maybe I could get used to the interface. >I can't. I still hate it. Also, the database is painfully slow. >So slow, in fact, that I have found it to be completely worthless. > It seems Rebel 9 and up do lots of disk i/o between moves which slows down responsivness, especially if you have no disk cache (like smartdrv) active. The lack of disk cache would also explain why your database is very slow. While the Rebel's database it isn't the speed demon, with disk cache it performs reasonably well (at least for simple use that I needed). Also, I have noticed that very old mouse drivers (from DOS 3.1 or such) perform better with Rebel and take much less memory. I even have a patched version of such old mouse driver (the patch fixes the mouse interrupt problem Rebel has under windows, where it locks up occasionally in the mouse interrupt; this is the same fix that the TSR fix.exe which is on Rebel site performs). I agree with "grainy" graphics (especially acute problem on laptops), that's something I wrote to Ed about as well as on CCC. It's really a pity to allow such a trivially fixable matter (by adding a few more higher VESA/VGA resolutions) to leave a bad initial impression of otherwise the nicest to play against chess engine. After playing Chessbase programs, it takes me usually half an hour to get used to the grainy graphics of Rebel and to be able to play without being distracted by it. Perhaps if they hear enough about it, they may offer an upgrade at some point with higher res graphics for DOS (if they care about it any more). For one, I would upgrade from Rebel 10, if all they added were better graphics under DOS (or to Rebel Century if there were promise to fix its graphics as its future upgrade).
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