Question about old software Chessmaster

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Jonathan003
Posts: 239
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2018 4:23 pm
Full name: Jonathan Cremers

Question about old software Chessmaster

Post by Jonathan003 »

I like the book making option of Chessmaster 9000. Chessmaster 9000 was the latest version that supports book making by importing a pgn file with games. I know Chessmaster 8000 also support obk book making from a pgn file. Are there previous versions of Chessmaster 8000 that supports this book making from pgn. And was the format of the book also obk? Ho is he programmer that invented it? There are many programmers that worked on Chessmaster. But I wonder ho programmed the book making functions.
Dann Corbit
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Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 8:57 pm
Location: Redmond, WA USA

Re: Question about old software Chessmaster

Post by Dann Corbit »

Thy Myrddin author, John Merlino used to work with the Chessmaster software.
I think the engine was written by Johan de Koning.

I don't know if either of them worked on the opening book format,
Taking ideas is not a vice, it is a virtue. We have another word for this. It is called learning.
But sharing ideas is an even greater virtue. We have another word for this. It is called teaching.
Dann Corbit
Posts: 12538
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 8:57 pm
Location: Redmond, WA USA

Re: Question about old software Chessmaster

Post by Dann Corbit »

John Merlino cannot post to his account right now, but he passed this information on to me:
"The obk format was created by Don Laabs, who was VP of Product Development at Mindscape and personally lead the Chessmaster team for (IIRC) versions 5500 through 8000. He originally wrote the PGN importer to create opening books for the GM personalities, but I'm pretty sure it was added as a feature early on - perhaps as early as CM4000.

IIRC, the opening book maker was severely limited in its RAM usage (it was the mid 1990s, after all), and I don't think it's possible to create a book with much more than 300K moves in it."
Taking ideas is not a vice, it is a virtue. We have another word for this. It is called learning.
But sharing ideas is an even greater virtue. We have another word for this. It is called teaching.
Jonathan003
Posts: 239
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2018 4:23 pm
Full name: Jonathan Cremers

Re: Question about old software Chessmaster

Post by Jonathan003 »

Thanks you very much for this information Dann!
I will google for this Don Laabs.
I made a obk book from a database with about 800000 games, 40 ply deep. I don't know exactly how many moves it is.
I converted the book to bin with obk2bin https://goneill.co.nz/chess.php
I like the book because its wider than most books you can make with polyglot.
I also like the option -p with obk2bin to create a pgn from the book with move annotations according the move weights. Than I search for ? and delete these games so I got a pgn with only the main lines.