Author: Eelco de Groot
Date: 08:12:10 02/21/00
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Lance, Richard, this part of your message I think went with Richard's Essentia for Mac review? Eelco Posted by Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com) on February 13, 2000 at 01:47:17: In Reply to: Essentia for Mac- Tell me more posted by LANCE SCHUTTENHELM on February 12, 2000 at 12:54:18: On February 12, 2000 at 12:54:18, LANCE SCHUTTENHELM wrote: >what is it comparable to and is it useable and helpful I've appended a review I started, but never finished. I try to give links for things I mention, but you might also check my "Macintosh Chess Software Index" at: http://dmoz.org/Games/Board_Games/Chess/Software/Macintosh/ Regarding your question, Lance: Essentia (http://www.bookup.com/essentia.htm) is principally a million chess games of data, with a search engine, on a CD-ROM. The search engine is much simpler and less flexible than the competition, but cheaper as well. Other ways of getting similar capability would be: 1) the Chessbase 1.1 package (http://www.chessbaseusa.com/cbmac.htm) which includes 1.2 million games and the Chessbase chess database program, a much more powerful search engine than the Essentia one. 2) Any other "purely data" million game collection, such as this one: http://www.chess-space.com/columns/kk/nevens137.shtml, together with ExaChess Pro (http://www.exachess.com) as the search engine. (Note that ExaChess has many, many more capabilities than just "search engine", and is also a much more powerful (and faster, if you are willing to spend the hard drive space it needs to create an index) than Essentia. In any one of these cases, you'll get a million+ unannotated chess games, which are good for looking for sample games in lines you are interested, or looking up almost any famous grandmaster game of the last century, and a nice tool for searching/exporting them. I mainly use it when I come across a reference to a grandmaster game (for example, in an opening book) and want to see the full game, or when I'm looking over a game I played and want to find other games in the same line. Essentia is a cheaper solution than either alternative, but the search engine is more bare-bones. It is great if it meets all your needs - it is a turnkey, self-contained solution for having a huge reference file of grandmaster games. It also has the advantage of being self-contained on the CD - you don't need to devote any hard drive space to it. I find that most of the things I want to do with a megagame database can be done with Essentia. However, when I'm searching for endgames of a certain pattern, Myself, I bought Essentia, then moved the database to my hard drive and bought ExaChessPro to give me more flexible (and faster) searching, analysis engines, printing with diagrams, and lots more. The ExaChess indexing consumed a lot more hard drive space, though, to add the speed, and in time I took it off my hard drive to reclaim the space. I'm very delinquent on investigating the worth of the ChessBase approach - I bought Chessbase 1.1 a long time ago, but I always seem to have more pressing projects than playing with it. One link for Essentia is: http://www.bookup.com/essentia.htm
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