reflectionofpower wrote:The Novag Citrine is a very nice high-end dedicated and it is strong enough to beat the majority of humanity.
It is the best deal you can get nowadays but it doesn't come close to one of the old wodden boards. After I got my Citrine I was very disapoointed because of the overall appearance. I would recommend to get a used Mephisto, or a Saitek board (Leonardo, Gallileo or Renaissance) which can also be connected to a PC. And the Citrine programm causes me serious pain compared to the style of the old Kittingers like the Super Expert.
Larry wrote:The Designer 2400 had the ARM processor, same as RISC2500,
according to wiki.
L
I found a rumour on a page from Dutch collector Hans van Mierlo (not the minister of state by the same name) that this machine was not supposed to have a Spracklen program, or one from Johan de Koning but from Ed Schröder who was probably working for Mephisto then:
http://chesseval.com/ChessEvalJournal/M ... m[quote]In this line, when Mephisto took control of Fidelity, they advertised the Fidelity 2400 Master as a next released computer. In fact, they never released it.
The same is true about the Master 2300.
It seems that in the 2 cases a program by Ed Schroder was included in the project[/quote]
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first
place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you
are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
-- Brian W. Kernighan
Very probably, at least the Spracklen no-go part. They probably were not anymore considered as in the edge of chess programming after his failure with saitek.
Sch., inversely, was very reputed with his rebel series....
A similar thing happened with a couple of the Saitek models.
The Megathon 2400 was never released in a plastic case
with pressure squares. It was released as modules as the RISC
modules:
Also the Saitek Turbostar2600, which the link below gives as
being released as the Montreux. This one's a bit strange because
the Montreux has a de Koning program: http://www.schach-computer.info/wiki/in ... ostar_2600
L
My father owns a 1988 Novag Alto. It is still running without any problems.
Although it is not very strong, there is something fascinating about these old computers. They run with tiny programs and with incredible slow hardware and still manage to play legal (and sometimes even good) moves.