Chessbase Free Alternative
Gualberto Estrada
The problem was that there was no real alternative! That has now changed with the arrival of Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro. Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro was released this January, and the price of the three versions ranges from 70 euro (single-core) to 150 euro (premium). For this review, I used the premium version, which supports up to 32 cores and comes with access to up to 6 men Nalimov endgame tablebases and several opening books. The Chessbase starter package costs 120 euro versus the standard multi-core Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro version of 100 euro. Compared to the Chessbase Starter Package, the Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro version offers the following additional features:
As you can see, the information is very comparable. Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro provides slightly more performance information. In addition, in Hiarcs Pro, you can have more information on one screen, while in Chessbase, you have to toggle tabs to access the same information.
In Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro, you can have multiple opening books open in different tabs, making it possible for instance to compare your repertoire, the Hiarcs opening book with the tree of your opponent's games.
Hiarcs has been selling its opening books for years. It is a subscription model: each year, you receive 4 updated openings books that you can use In Hiarcs, Chessbase, and the Hiarcs iPad and iPhone apps. The latter makes it very handy to check the best lines in between rounds in rapid tournaments.
These two features accelerate your analysis tremendously. The recommended move by the book is an excellent starting point and provide direction. There have been numerous occasions when a top GM plays a spectacular novelty that was just a standard move in the Hiarcs book.
In conclusion, finally, there is a complete alternative for Chessbase on the market. This is good news for all of us, but especially for Mac users who do not want to run Chessbase in Bootcamp or on a virtual machine. Hiarcs Chess Explorer is fast and offers more value for money than Chessbase. Hiarcs openings books are unique, accelerate your chess analysis, and provide you with many novelties.
Most of my chess preparation and studying used to revolve around ChessBase products. I stored my databases and notes in .cbh files, used computers with the ChessBase interface to study and do preparation, and used the tools that Fritz 12 gave as an aid.
It is completely free, has lots of functionality, and is fast (handles my 5.2M game database quickly and fluidly). I have only used Scid in its Linux and windows versions, not the Mac. But from what I understand there are no appreciable differences in the software across these operating systems, and I've certainly never noticed any real differences between the Linux and windows versions in my own use. A few notes:
1. Scid cannot open .cbh files directly, but you should be able to use the ChessBase products you've been using to export to PGN, which Scid can then import into databases in its own format.
2. This doesn't apply to you, but for those who have never owned ChessBase but do have some ChessBase files that they'd like to import into Scid, there is a way to do so without buying any ChessBase products, at least on a PC. The old Fritz 5.32 is now freeware, and can be used to convert ChessBase files to PGN. (Amazingly, I know of no other free program that can do this; maybe someone else does.)
4. One potential drawback, but only if you're on an older OS X: you can download the Mac version here, and it is pointed out there that the executable is available only for Mac OS X 10.5 or later; if you're using an older version, you'll have to build the program from its source code. They have instructions for doing so though, so it might not be too big of an issue anyway.
5. While I'm at it, I'll point out that some other developer made a free android app called Scid on the go, which I have used on my android tablet. It's scaled down from regular Scid quite a bit, and I've really only used it in a read-only way (data entry's not really fun on a tablet anyway IMO). But I have my big games database synced across devices using Dropbox, and it's nice to be able pull up games when I've only got my tablet with me.
I'll end by adding that Scid is the only database program I've ever really used, so do know that my recommendation comes without me having much experience with ChessBase or other commercial alternatives to compare it to. But that's also because I've never had any reason to; Scid really is great, and again, all the software I've mentioned here is completely free.
It has many of the same functions as ChessBase, and is from a developer who has an excellent history of supporting his Mac products. The program works with .pgn files, so being able to use ChessBase via Bootcamp is convenient for converting files from .cbh for .pgn format.
Having paid a lot of money for the original Mac version of ChessBase, which was total vaporware, I will never buy another Chessbase product. Frederic Friedel stole my money once. He will not get a chance to do so again.
For native OSX databases you're pretty much limited to SCID and Exachess unless you want to go the Parallels route and use windows software from there. You might be able to rig up WINE and run it on the later versions of OSX; not sure, never tried it.
In both of these you'll be missing the high-end features of chess base, such as the opening report. I'm not aware of anything on OSX that opens the .cbh format files. ChessBase got really closed after the older (CB6 and earlier) file format was decoded and distributed. I'm not aware of anyone who has decoded their cbh format.
ChessBase, back in the day, tried to create a Mac product, but it was slow, buggy and under-featured compared to their Windows version, and when it didn't sell well they blamed the Mac user base instead of their own lack of skill for it and vowed never to build another version for the Mac.
As for "use chess computers," I suspect you are referring to top chess-playing software. Fritz, being a CB product, will never appear for OSX. However, most of the rest of the top names already have an OSX version: HIARCS, Shredder, Stockfish; Rybka and Houdini have yet to appear on OSX.
Now if you have 30 euro spare then you might want to try Shredder which has a demo version for free and you can get this from their website. This is engine and GUI in one and simple and reasonably professional.
The Games menu in Chess Openings Wizard for Mac does quite a bit of the work of a game database like ChessBase, indexing millions of games in PGN format. No direct support for .CBH files though. When it comes to studying chess and using the strongest chess engines on a Mac, it's a decent alternative.
Since numerous posters have responded by suggesting that you try to run ChessBase in a virtual machine or emulator, I thought it would be relevant to raise an important consideration regarding this strategy.
Leaving a dialog open in one window/instance, (say, the annotation window for a game, or the statistics window for a games list, or the filter window for a games database), and then trying an action in other instance/window that requires a dialog.
Obviously, dialogs should be independent and completely decoupled objects, but the dialog handler appears to have a design flaw. This isn't the only case of an action that causes ChessBase to crash, of course.
To make matters worse, ChessBase 11 is so buggy that when it crashes in Windows 10, it fires up multiple instances of the Windows Crash Resolution Dialog (not its real name), and keeps cycling through them so insistently that you can't even toggle to another application. If I don't want to sit around for several minutes while this resolves itself, I have to override this behavior by pulling an interrupt with the Task Manager and use the End Task function to rip ChessBase out of the OS application stack. Even then, I still have to click "Ok" in the Close Program dialog box. It's vampire-like behavior dressed in a software cloak.
In the 1st case, pressing [Ctrl]-F opens a filter window for that games list. In the 2nd case, either nothing happens, or, if you messed up and happen to have another games list window open in the background, the filter window opens, but when you run the search, it will be applied to the background window's games list.
When no game is selected in the games list: sometimes pressing [Up] or [Down] will select one, and sometimes not. Sometimes pressing [Tab] once will select a game, sometimes pressing it twice will do so, and sometimes no number of presses of [Tab] will do anything. Sometimes switching windows and coming back will select a game, and other times it will do nothing.
Switching between several ChessBase windows can be done fast enough to overwhelm ChessBase's context management functions, in which cases it simply freezes up and never comes back. I'm not talking breakneck, try-to-break-the-program switching, I'm talking normal-expert-hotkey-switching use.
Now, keep in mind that all these behaviors are being exhibited in the native target environment for which ChessBase was written. If they make you shudder, just imagine how you'll feel when you see what happens when the emulator tries to handle them.
As a footnote, I should add that in no other Windows package that I own that was built to for the Windows XP architecture has there ever been any serious issue with backwards compatibility in Windows 10. Windows 10 is very capable of resolving these issues, when they present, including multiple configuration options to roll back how operating system calls are handled to prior versions. None of these recovery / compatibility functions make a bit of difference with ChessBase 11.
To be fair, ChessBase GmbH don't claim that CB 11 is Win 10 compatible, but they also say the only solution is to buy two upgrades at the upgrade price, or a full-price copy of the newest CB. Given that 5 prior versions in a row exhibited so many defects, some of them persisting through all the generations of the product, I'd say it's a poor bet that 13 will delight the user in this area. There are very few software products that actually have user-rant websites dedicated to criticizing them, but ChessBase is one of these.
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