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7.02 / February 2001
Download ATPM 7.02

Review: Macintosh Chess Downloads (Part I)

by Richard A. Fowell, Rafowell@aol.com

ATPM reviewed five chess software programs in the September 1999 issue. Since that review, Sigma Chess was upgraded, and Vanessa Chess was released. Since Macintosh chess software is my hobby (I own dozens of Macintosh chess programs, and maintain the Macintosh Chess Software Index), I volunteered to write about them.

Sigma Chess 5.12 is the strongest Macintosh freeware/shareware chess program reviewed in ATPM. I’ve played 100-game matches between each of five programs using the excellent freeware chess umpire/database program, ExaChess Lite 2.1. Sigma Chess beat all the others—their score against Sigma Chess was: Crafty 14.11B (47%), MacChess 4.0e (39%), Screamer 1.0 (25%), and Vanessa Chess 2.01 (10%).

These days, chess strength should seldom be your primary decision factor in selecting a chess program. With the power of modern Macs, even Vanessa Chess is a much stronger player than most humans when set to full strength. For an opponent that is challenging, rather than unbeatable, one must usually set the computer to an “easy” level, or limit the number of moves the program looks ahead to one or two moves (“fixed depth 1” or “fixed depth 2” in computer chess argot).

Price and convenience of acquisition are important factors, and commercial programs can’t touch the price of freeware/shareware programs (Vanessa Chess is $10 shareware, the other four are freeware) or the convenience of downloading.

For those of you who find chess program strength of supreme importance, HIARCS 7.0, available online at Your Move Chess and Games and GambitSoft, is by far the strongest Mac chess program.

Two other important factors are ease of use and features, which is why I’m not reviewing Crafty: Most of Crafty’s features can only be accessed through a command line interface.

Sigma Chess

excellent

Developer: Ole K. Christensen (product page)

Price: free

Requirements: PowerPC-based Mac with System 7.5.

Recommended: 800x600 display with thousands of colors, 10 MB of application RAM.

Sigma Chess is the strongest, prettiest, and most full-featured freeware/shareware GUI Mac chess program.

It has many nice things no other Mac freeware/shareware chess program includes, such as a double-clickable chess tutorial (“Rules of Chess”), an illustrated online manual, and a collection of instructive games, endgames, combinations, and chess problems. The last ATPM review rated Sigma Chess 4.02 higher than all the rest, and Sigma Chess 5.1.2 is much better than 4.0.2, with many major improvements and a host of minor improvements.

Starting with Sigma Chess 5, Sigma Chess was optimized for Power Macintosh, making it much stronger.

If the “Novice Levels” in Sigma Chess are too easy for you, Sigma Chess 5.0 now has a “Playing Strength” feature, where you can set Sigma Chess’s approximate strength numerically (higher numbers are stronger), as an alternative to setting the time Sigma uses or the number of moves it looks ahead.

Sigma is the only free Macintosh program with the option of displaying the board in a 3D view using “true perspective” pieces like those in the commercial chess programs Chessmaster 6000 and Virtual Chess.

The 3D display has been polished since the earlier version. The menu bar is now visible in 3D mode, the optional digital clocks are less obtrusive, and the side to move is now indicated by glowing yellow LEDs embedded in the right edge of the wood board. These changes are representative of the many improvements made throughout the program.

chess-sigma

The Sigma Chess 2D Display

I personally prefer the 2D display, which I think is the nicest looking Macintosh chess interface available at any price. The pieces are gorgeous, and the on-screen control buttons save a lot of time otherwise spent in travelling to the menu bar. The menu selections each have color menu icons. I like these icons, but those who don’t can turn them off in “Preferences.” I also love the digitized sound of the felted pieces landing on the wooden board, and the “clack” of wood on wood when pieces are captured, though I usually have this turned off in “Preferences” so as not to annoy others.

For those who like chess puzzles of the “White to move and mate in 2” variety, Sigma Chess is the only Mac program whose “Mate Finder” mode is not only guaranteed to find such a mate if it exists, but which will find all such mates, if you tell it to.

Sigma Chess has scores of other features, including rating your play, annotating your games, and printing them in double-column format with diagrams and comments. If there is something you want Sigma Chess to do, you can probably find out how in the online manual.

Vanessa Chess

good

Developer: Schubert-it (product page)

Price: $10 (shareware)

Requirements: 200 MHz PowerPC-based Mac, Mac OS 8.6, 12 MB application RAM.

Recommended: G4-based Mac with Mac OS 9.

Trial: Fully-featured (30 days)

Vanessa Chess has a nice-looking interface and a reasonably complete set of features (albeit far fewer than Sigma Chess).

Three things about Vanessa chess might make it a better choice than Sigma Chess for some tasks: it can read games out loud, it is much weaker than Sigma Chess, and it can print formatted game scores with color chess diagrams.

The ability to have games read out loud is one I wished for when studying games from chess books. When playing such games on a physical board, I found my attention distracted by the need to look back and forth between the book and the board to follow the game. Almost all modern computer programs are an improvement in the sense that games stored in the computer can be viewed on-screen without needing to look away. However, some feel that the best way to study for over-the-board play is to play games out on a real board. With a program that reads chess game moves out loud, this can be done while keeping one’s attention on the board. The only other downloadable program that does this is the $10 shareware program PGNTalk, which doesn’t play chess or print games.

The tournament results indicate that Vanessa Chess is about a tenth as strong as Sigma Chess. Paradoxically, this can be a good thing. If you find other chess programs too overwhelming, it may be easier to configure Vanessa Chess to a comfortable level. Besides the usual ability to limit the computer’s thinking by setting a time limit or the number of moves it looks ahead, Vanessa Chess offers a unique “Adaptive strength” feature that is supposed to match its strength to yours, but I have not used it enough to know how well it works.

chess-vanessa

The Vanessa Chess Interface

One use of computer chess programs is printing games with diagrams and notes. Vanessa Chess and Sigma Chess Lite are the only Mac freeware/shareware chess playing programs that let you do this. Vanessa Chess is the more capable program in this regard. While Vanessa Chess does not permit printing in figurine notation (mini-icons rather than letters for pieces) like Sigma Chess, it is the only program that allows your printed game to include color chess diagrams, multiple diagram formats, and multiple annotation fonts and styles. If you want to print nice-looking chess output, Vanessa Chess might be worth considering for this alone.



Reader Comments (26)


anonymous May 08, 2001 - 19:36 EST #
I thought you were going to let me download chess!!! Well, thanks a lot.

Richard A. Fowell May 09, 2001 - 00:48 EST #
I did let you download chess. Click on the underlined "product page" link on the line starting with "Developer" under the title of either Sigma Chess or Vanessa Chess (or on the "Crafty", "MacChess" or "Screamer" links).

Richard A. Fowell June 03, 2001 - 23:58 EST #
If you want chess games to download, rather than chess software, here are a couple of links to chess games in PGN format. You can use Sigma Chess to view these. http://www.notzai.com/notzai/regence/regence.shtml http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twic.html (see "Games in PGN")

Kenny July 30, 2001 - 03:41 EST #
I was wondering at what time control the games were played, and if those games could be made available for download. I would also be interested in the details on variables involved for the tournament, CPU, memory, and settings used for the programs. For example, I note that the difference between Sigma Chess and Crafty is not statistically significant in your sample. In my experiments, I note that the difference between the strength of the two largely depends on the setting I configure them with, opening book being the greatest determining factor.

Richard A. Fowell July 31, 2001 - 00:48 EST #
The time control was 5 seconds/move, I think. Since this was run on a single computer (Power Macintosh 7300/180), I turned permanent brain off. I tried to match the hash allocations between the programs, but I don't remember the exact amount—something like up to 20 Mb. I also provided the 3-man ending tablebases to programs that would use them—Screamer and Crafty use the same format, and ExaChess has its own. Each program used the standard book available for the ExaChess version of the program. I agree that the difference between Crafty and Sigma Chess is not statistically significant. Furthermore, Crafty can take advantage of larger ending tablebases than any of the others. I think Sigma Chess and Crafty are capable of accepting much more complete opening books (Sigma Chess in Fritz format, and Crafty in PGN format) than I used, but I thought few would take advantage of this. If you like, I can email you the games—just drop me a line and let me know which pairings you want. I'd prefer to send them in ExaChess format (more compact than PGN) if that is okay.

Terry Chay November 05, 2001 - 10:57 EST #
Good article. Too bad you didn't have the latest version of Crafty available even for the time, since later versions don't support ChessEvents.c. Same goes with MacChess 5. I believe it was upgraded to support PPC which would make a huge difference in performance. I noticed the author has updated Screamer (it's now Carbonized), though I seem to have trouble running tournaments in Exachess Lite on my computer. For some reason, the games can hang on one machine or another.

Richard A. Fowell November 06, 2001 - 00:45 EST #
You make a good point that the latest version of Crafty that was compatible with ExaChess (14.11B) is far from the most recent version of Crafty, and the most recent version of Crafty is probably a good bit stronger. As far as MacChess goes - MacChess 4.0e is compiled for PPC, so while 5.0 is hopefully somewhat improved, it isn't as dramatic as the difference between MacChess 3.0 and 4.0. As far as the trouble with ExaChess tournament - I encourage you to communicate with the authors about them - by sending them the games that hung tournaments, they were able to spot problems and improve the stability of ExaChess tournaments considerably.

Stef December 29, 2001 - 15:06 EST #
I have just started playing chess, and I liked Sigma Chess a lot. I am interested in getting tutored in the basics, ideally by computer (keeps my attention, compared to books). I found some helfpul demos from a company called "Think Like a King" and learned some good tips there. I need to do a lot more, however, and that particular product was fairly pricey. Do you have any recommendations? I know there are tutorials in Chessmaster 6000 but I don't really know how good they are or how much material they contain. Buying the Mac product online is something I would consider if people felt the tutorial function was good enough for the money. If you have any other tips, thoughts, let me know.

Richard A. Fowell December 30, 2001 - 18:55 EST #
Stef: the tutorials in Chessmaster 6000 are interesting (with animation and two levels of explanation), and have several types. However, Chessmaster is expensive. If you want something more gripping than library chess books, but cheaper than Chessmaster, there are chess videotapes available at libraries and online. As far as Macintosh interactive chess tutorials, see this DMOZ site. For Web-based chess tutorials, see this Yahoo! site.

Gregory Tetrault (ATPM Staff) January 01, 2002 - 21:21 EST #
Stef: I didn't write the article, but I played tournament chess about 15 years ago. I tried two brands of electronic chess games and later tried Chessmaster. I do not recommend either route for a beginner with a serious interest in learning chess. I recommend two approaches: buying and studying chess books (there are hundreds written for all playing abilities) and joining a chess club. Computers can help you practice, but their tutorials are not very good.

Ajisegbede Aderemi March 25, 2002 - 09:11 EST #
I thought you were going to allow me to download the ChessMaster stuff. I was actually fascinated by the heading "free downloads" but, to my dismay, I realized that I could't download it just like that.

I live in Nigeria where access to a standard chess board is expensive. I thought your site will provide me with the opportunity of down loading. I just started playing chess not quite long ago. I could have appreciated you better if i was able to get the download. Anyway, thanks for having a site on the web.

Remi.

Richard A. Fowell March 26, 2002 - 00:27 EST #
I did allow you to download the chess programs. Lots of them. All you have to do is to click on the links I gave, and follow the directions. See my comment of May 9, 2001 above for more details.

Ernest Burden August 13, 2002 - 16:45 EST #
Thanks for the info. I followed the links and have downloaded a couple of versions to test drive.

Jim G. August 05, 2003 - 21:38 EST #
I will be purchasing a Mac soon and am looking into Mac chess software. I currently use Fritz 8 and ChessMaster 9000 with Windows. I am not a particularly strong player, so I appreciate user-friendliness, tutorials, auto-annotation abilities, and flexible playing strength.

Is there any chance of doing an updated Mac chess round-up?

I will gladly pay for the full version of either Sigma or Vector. I suppose I will have to try the demos once I get my Mac. I am also wondering about the feasibility of running Fritz or CM9000 through VirtualPC or the like. Any insight?

BTW, I would kill to have the ChessMaster series resumed for the Mac. CM9000 is very, very good.

Lee Bennett (ATPM Staff) August 06, 2003 - 10:55 EST #
Jim - two other ATPM staffers had some thoughts:

I've used SigmaChess a bit, and I like it. —Chris Lawson

We published a mini-roundup of two chess programs and the article also makes reference to an older bunch of chess program reviews. (The article claims to be part 1, but part 2 never happened.) —Paul Fatula

Richard A. Fowell August 06, 2003 - 22:45 EST #
I can't commit to an updated roundup.

However, Sigma Chess is up to version 6.03 and updated for OS X, and the OS X version of Vanessa Chess is Vector 3. The Macintosh Chess Software Index has links to 64 Macintosh chess software pages, including Sigma Chess and Vector 3. Chessmaster 6000 is still available for the Mac, even though 9000 is not.

Regarding Virtual PC, I have used it in the (long) past to run a number of Windows chess programs, so I would expect it to work, though the program speed won't be as fast as on a Windows hardware machine.

Before you get your Mac, you can read the full manual of Sigma Chess on the web.

Richard A. Fowell November 24, 2004 - 00:22 EST #
Of the sources for HIARCS, one has gone out of business, and that other has changed its URL.

Update: For those of you who find chess program strength of supreme importance, HIARCS 7.0, available online at Your Move Chess and Games, is by far the strongest Mac chess program.

R.A.G. de Graaff December 04, 2004 - 10:06 EST #
Is Hiarcs7.0 adapted to OS X or does it run as an OS 9 application?

Richard A. Fowell December 05, 2004 - 00:14 EST #
Hiarcs 7.0 is an OS 9 application. For more info about HIARCS, see http://www.hiarcs.com/

Richard A. Fowell December 05, 2004 - 20:44 EST #
HIARCS 9.51 for Mac OS X may be out before Christmas.
This announcement came out today:

Macintosh HIARCS
----------------
The new Mac HIARCS product is nearing completion and we hope to have it
available before Christmas. We believe it will be the strongest chess
software ever on Macintosh computers and will also have a high quality
graphical user interface. We will be updating the website accordingly over
the next week to explain the product offering in more detail.

John Scott Pfeiffer February 23, 2005 - 22:16 EST #
Mr. Fowell,

Thank you for the wealth of information you have provided and for your many insights into chess programs for the MAC.On behalf of the world's chess community, we appreciate your efforts !

Yours in chess,
Scott Pfeiffer

Rusty Taylor April 07, 2005 - 12:48 EST #
Great website. You offer very good information and links. I appreciate your time and effort.

choppi May 15, 2005 - 19:24 EST #
How can I play chess with my Mac using OSX against a person using a PC ?
Thanks for help

Richard A. Fowell May 16, 2005 - 00:30 EST #
There are many ways for Mac OS X users to play against PC users.

A direct method is for both players to play each other over the Internet or intranet using the free program, ChessWorks. Both players would download ChessWorks for their operating system from:
http://www.ekimsw.com/chessworks/index.html

A very popular method is for both players to log into one of the Internet "chess server" sites such as the Internet Chess Club ( http://www.chessclub.com/ ) the Free Internet Chess Club ( http://www.freechess.org/ ). Many such sites let you to play using your Web browser, or you can download a freeware interface program, such as Fixation (http://cknelsen.sasktelwebsite.net/fixation/Fixation_title.html). Your Windows opponent will have similar choices. Most sites offer "free trial" memberships, or you can login as a "guest". If you are both logging in as "guest", you will typically be assigned a random user ID at each session, and will need to contact each other somehow (email, instant message, or phone) to figure out the ID of your intended opponent.

For more Macintosh links about person-person chess over the Internet, see the links at http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Recreation/Board_Games/Chess/Macintosh/Multiplayer/

Malcolm peskoff May 17, 2005 - 17:11 EST #
I upgraded to Tiger 10.4.1.
Is anyone having problems with the HIARCS feature in SigmaChess
(registered) product. It appears that HIARCS is not recognizing my
KEY number.
With 10.3.8 I had no problems.

Robert Stoehr July 17, 2005 - 09:54 EST #
Excellent site and reviews! I have used many software and freeware chess programs and concluded that Sigma is by far the best! I am a 1460 USCF player that is much stronger than my rating. I am now regularly beating 1800 players I feel, due to playing Sigma! Thanks Sigma!!

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