Novag Citrine thoughts

[CRoberson]

the Chess Cafe is a very reliable dealer and affiliated with the USCF
they also have a great site dealing with chess in general
i have purchased many chess books from them over the years as i collect chess books as well
never bought any chess computers from them though
i cant say if their price is the best you can find.. but i do recommend them for reliability
click on books and equipment:
http://www.chesscafe.com/

The link for the DGT set and board is: http://uscfsales.com/item.asp?cID=0&PID=2704

The price is higher than I thought it was: US$749 + US$59 shipping = US$808 and that's a little steep. Maybe if it came with a robot arm...

I have one and i am not particularly excited about it. You probably remember the electronic board I built back in the late 70's when Dave Cahlander was building one for chess 4.x?? I prefer my 1970's version to the DGT even though the DGT uses RFID to identify the specific piece type. It lacks any sort of "output" mechanism (I used small incandescent lights under the squares on mine) which is a real draw-back for using it to play games. Too bad, really as it is thin (about 1/2") and looks nice... if it just had a decent LED under each square...

I saw Bob's board last year at the ACCA Pan-Am event. The lights were
noticable from across his office. Yet, they weren't too big.

Bob, can we hook it to a laptop? I know you used Parallel interfacing
instead of serial. Maybe use a converter?

[bob]

the Chess Cafe is a very reliable dealer and affiliated with the USCF
they also have a great site dealing with chess in general
i have purchased many chess books from them over the years as i collect chess books as well
never bought any chess computers from them though
i cant say if their price is the best you can find.. but i do recommend them for reliability
click on books and equipment:
http://www.chesscafe.com/

The link for the DGT set and board is: http://uscfsales.com/item.asp?cID=0&PID=2704

The price is higher than I thought it was: US$749 + US$59 shipping = US$808 and that's a little steep. Maybe if it came with a robot arm...

I have one and i am not particularly excited about it. You probably remember the electronic board I built back in the late 70's when Dave Cahlander was building one for chess 4.x?? I prefer my 1970's version to the DGT even though the DGT uses RFID to identify the specific piece type. It lacks any sort of "output" mechanism (I used small incandescent lights under the squares on mine) which is a real draw-back for using it to play games. Too bad, really as it is thin (about 1/2") and looks nice... if it just had a decent LED under each square...

I saw Bob's board last year at the ACCA Pan-Am event. The lights were
noticable from across his office. Yet, they weren't too big.

Bob, can we hook it to a laptop? I know you used Parallel interfacing
instead of serial. Maybe use a converter?

It needs a software driver, which makes it a bit more complicated. And it needs +8 volts, decent amperage, which is what is used (thru darlington-pair transistors) to turn on (flash) the incandescent bulbs.

For those interested, what I did was take a standard USCF roll-up vinyl board, and drill 1/4" holes in the upper-right hand corner of each square. The vinyl was then glued to a sheet of plastic that is pretty close in color to the cream-colored white squares on the board. This gives a pretty normal-looking board with normal sized squares. This sits on a piece of 1" thick plywood (thick enough so I could rout out a depression to hold the electronics, light bulbs, sockets, power transistors, ribbon cable to route signals everywhere, etc...

I chose the incandescent bulbs over LEDs because LEDs from the late 70's were not very bright (and all were red). I wanted something that stood out when the computer moved. I made it look sort of like a flashing airport landing light pathway...

BTW almost every computer I have owned had a parallel port. Might have to tweak the timing to make them match up, but it could work...

[Steve B]

For those interested, what I did was take a standard USCF roll-up vinyl board, and drill 1/4" holes in the upper-right hand corner of each square. The vinyl was then glued to a sheet of plastic that is pretty close in color to the cream-colored white squares on the board. This gives a pretty normal-looking board with normal sized squares. This sits on a piece of 1" thick plywood (thick enough so I could rout out a depression to hold the electronics, light bulbs, sockets, power transistors, ribbon cable to route signals everywhere, etc...

now if you could manage to make this a stand alone unit ..not connected to a PC in any way...and then lock and load it with your strongest version of Crafty then i know i would buy it for sure

its high time Crafty was memorialized in a stand alone dedicated computer
I need to check if Crafty UCI can be loaded into the Revelation with the Revelation UCI server(written by Alain Zanchetta for Phoenix chess systems)
this is not the same as having Crafty as an on board engine in the Revelation but it better then nothing

perhaps someone can point me to a nice and clean Crafty UCI executable file on the net?
will need to use Noomen books though because the UCI Server only allows one exe file to be loaded and if that file does not contain the opening book then i either use no book for that engine or the Noomen book which is hardwired into the Rev

Regards
Steve

[bob]

For those interested, what I did was take a standard USCF roll-up vinyl board, and drill 1/4" holes in the upper-right hand corner of each square. The vinyl was then glued to a sheet of plastic that is pretty close in color to the cream-colored white squares on the board. This gives a pretty normal-looking board with normal sized squares. This sits on a piece of 1" thick plywood (thick enough so I could rout out a depression to hold the electronics, light bulbs, sockets, power transistors, ribbon cable to route signals everywhere, etc...

now if you could manage to make this a stand alone unit ..not connected to a PC in any way...and then lock and load it with your strongest version of Crafty then i know i would buy it for sure

its high time Crafty was memorialized in a stand alone dedicated computer
I need to check if Crafty UCI can be loaded into the Revelation with the Revelation UCI server(written by Alain Zanchetta for Phoenix chess systems)
this is not the same as having Crafty as an on board engine in the Revelation but it better then nothing

perhaps someone can point me to a nice and clean Crafty UCI executable file on the net?
will need to use Noomen books though because the UCI Server only allows one exe file to be loaded and if that file does not contain the opening book then i either use no book for that engine or the Noomen book which is hardwired into the Rev

Regards
Steve

I am not aware of a UCI crafty version...

[CRoberson]

Ted,

Since the Citrine uses Arena as a sw interface and Arena connects
to ICC. Can you do the following with it:

o Connect Arena to Citrine and ICC and play an ICC game on
the Citrine?
o Follow an ICC match between two online opponents on the
Citrine?
o Follow two opponents matched via Arena on the local computer
via Citrine?

I am assuming that it can be set so that the Citrine itself can play against
an Arena based opponent.

[CRoberson]

You might be able to use WB2UCI to run Crafty as if its a UCI engine.
Then you tell the UCI server to load WB2UCI as if it is an engine.
Based on our previous discussions, this might fail. WB2UCI will need
to read an initialization file (on your PC) and then load Crafty (on
your PC).

[sje]

While not impossible, it's not so easy to write a chess program that can mix together xboard, UCI, and interactive commands and not be a mess.

The new CIL Toolkit manages this, but it does it in part by allowing only one of the three (or more) command sets to be used in any single invocation.

Many, perhaps most, developers pick either xboard or UCI and stick with it. Adding one capability to the other at a later date is not pretty; a third party filter program is the usual choice at that point.

[mephisto]

Hi Charles
No the 64 LED's are still there !!
Regards
Bryan

[sje]

No the 64 LED's are still there !!

The Citrine has 81 board LEDs; one at each vertex.

----

I might get mine by Friday! More likely Monday or Tuesday, though.

It will have to be kept in the spare bedroom in no-cat-land.

[Steve B]

I might get mine by Friday! More likely Monday or Tuesday, though.

It will have to be kept in the spare bedroom in no-cat-land.

good plan but one doomed to fail
when you sit down to play against it.. they will come and rub up against either you or the Citrine
if you play..they will come regards
Steve