ChessMachine from 1993

[James Constance]

I'm just looking at a British Chess Magazine from 1993. As well as adverts for Chessbase 4, and Fritz 1 (£44.95) and 2 (£76.95), there's one for: "ChessMachine 512kb: The world's most powerful PC program £422".

Does anyone know anything about Chess Machine? It doesn't seem to have survived for very long.

[rlsuth]

I seem to remember it being an ISA plug-in card.

[Tord Romstad]

I'm just looking at a British Chess Magazine from 1993. As well as adverts for Chessbase 4, and Fritz 1 (£44.95) and 2 (£76.95), there's one for: "ChessMachine 512kb: The world's most powerful PC program £422".

Does anyone know anything about Chess Machine? It doesn't seem to have survived for very long.

I actually owned one, many years ago -- it's what originally made me interested in computer chess.

It wasn't actually a PC program, but a plug-in card with its own CPU, an early ARM running at 16 MHz (a 30 MHz version was released later), with a GUI running on the host computer. There were two available engines, Rebel (which was included with the card) and The King (which was a separate purchase). At the time, the CPUs found in mainstream computers (this was somewhere around the 286/386 era, if I recall correctly) weren't that fast, and the ARM CPU gave the Chess Machine a considerable advantage. This didn't last long, of course.

The Chess Machine was made by TASC, who are also known for the TASC R30 dedicated chess computer, also powered by a 30 MHz ARM running The King. I have no idea whether the company is still around; I haven't heard of them since many years.

[IQ]

I had one way back. It had nice graphics, a good interface and was pretty strong for a while. It had two programs for it rebel and the king - i hope i remember that right. But unfortunately is was very, very quickly overtaken by pc hardware. It was just one more failure in the long line of "hardware" based chess programs. I think i threw mine away 3 years ago.

ahhh, the good old times....

[kaissa]

[quote="Tord Romstad"]The Chess Machine was made by TASC, who are also known for the TASC R30 dedicated chess computer, also powered by a 30 MHz ARM running The King. I have no idea whether the company is still around; I haven't heard of them since many years.[/quote]

AFAIK it went bankrupt after a patent case regarding the piece recognition system. The value was around 1 million USD. I had enjoyed a lot of their programs; sad ending.

[Spacious_Mind]

There were several versions of the Chessmachine.

The first version was called The Final Chesscard and came out for PC and also for the Commodore 64 as a cartridge. It ran at 5 MHz and looks like this:





You can read about it at my site:

http://spacious-mind.com/html/the_final ... commo.html

Yes they were all ISA Cards. There were several versions that came out between 1989 and 1991.

There were 14 & 16 Mhz versions that had 128K 512K and 1024K RAM. Then there was the 32MHz versions with 512K RAM. Strange that they never as far as I know made a 1024K RAM card for the faster 32MHz version.

Also there was several software available for it. From either Ed Schroeder's Gideon software or Johann de Koening's King Software.

The versions available are:

King 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 2.2 and 2.5
Gideon 2.1, 3.0 and 3.1

The Gideon 3.1 was also called Gideon 3.1 Madrid and it became World Champion in 1992.

Unfortunately I have both my 16 MHz and 32 Mhz cards inside a computer otherwise I would show you photos of these. But if they interest you, you can get more information here:

http://www.schach-computer.info/wiki/in ... essMachine

King 2.2 and 2.54 is also available as a stand alone called the R30 or the rarer R40 (ask Steve about this one ) and were connected to the TASC Chess Boards SB 30 and SB 20.

The R30 (30 MHz) is about equal in strength to the Chesscard but the R40 (40 MHz) is probably a little stronger. But unfortunately for the R30 and R40 you are limited with the software range as they only have King 2.2 and King 2.54 for software choice.

Mephisto also made another dedicated chess computer range called Risc 1 and Risc 2 these although a little slower then the 32 MHz card do have the Gideon software inside them.

Best regards

Nick

[James Constance]

Many thanks for your interesting replies.

[BBauer]

Perhaps the following link may be of interest.
http://www.top-5000.nl/authors/rebel/chess_2.htm
kind regards
Bernhard