UsurpatorII emu questions

[karger]

The link actually works to download it , it is a very aggressive little engine and plays well under Shredder , Thanks Mr Muller

[Guenther]

This would be shortly before the book was published. It must have a date in it. But I am not at home now.

Ok I found this old thread from 2011 in the WB Forum and here you said it is from 1979!
http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewt ... =2&t=51788

This post also contains info which I did not know about a possible commandline parameter - may be that info should be added to the according page at your site too?

Postby H.G.Muller » 22 Jul 2011, 17:37
...

I vaguely remember it needs a command-line argument, indicating the nominal depth in quarter plies. (It has no real time control; you have to set it to the approximate time per move you want it to play through this command-line parameter, and then hope for the best.) IIRC 12 is a good value for the TC used in the ChessWar promo. (Or was it 14? Perhaps Olivier still knows.)

[hgm]

The copyright notice in the book says (c)1983, so I guess that is the last year I worked on it. The leading comment block in the listing says (c)1980. The 1979 I mentioned in the posting is probably just a guess of the date I did started writing it, made from the top of my head.

To reconstruct the events: in the summer of 1977 I got my bachelor's degree chemisty, but because they had basically crammed all courses I had selected in the third trimester, I was one month later than others of by cohort, so that this technically counted as graduating in 77/78. I then received the 'Unilever prize' for best chemistry student at my university for that year, awarded in Q4 1978. As this was a cash prize, it enabled me to buy my own micro-computer (an AIM65). I must have obtained that early 1979. I almost immediately started working on writing a Chess program for that, as this was the major reason I wanted it.

Before that I had written a small Chess program 'Usurpator I' (in 2KB RAM) for a 6800-based home-build computer that I had borrowed for a few weeks. (Actually for fixing it, so that it would work.) The first version of Usurpator II was just a port of that program from 6800 to 6502 assembler. The comments were added only later, when I made the source into a stencilled booklet for handing out on a computer fair. The original AIM65 had only 4KB RAM, all needed to contain the machine code of the program and its data memory, and I had bought it with an 8K memory expansion to hold and edit the source code. (Saving things on non-volatile media in those days was a very slow and cumbersome task, involving audio-casette tapes.) I couldn't afford to waste any of that memory space on comments.

Anyway, I was constantly working on improving that program for the subsequent years, so the version that was in the 1983 book must have been from 1983.

I am not sure I have any info on Usurpator II on any of my web pages. I might have just uploaded the executable there for Olivier to download it.