Playing against old DOS chess programs with Picochess

[Dirk]

I am playing again Kasparovs Gambit, an old (1993) MS-DOS chess program from Electronic Arts with the Socrates engine on my ChessNut Air with the help of the Remote Mode (not to be mixed up with the remote engines) of Picochess! 

How cool is that?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5l18gtigu0hlvy7/Kasparovs%20Gamibt%20Picochess.mov?dl=0

Dirk

[RandyR]

That's really cool, Dirk!

Randy

[Scally]

Very nice Dirk …

Coincidentally it was in 1993 on the 17th Of February when I played Garry Kasparov in a 25 board simultaneous match.

The game lasted 36 moves, you can listen to the story and play through the game in our PGN Replay selection of games via Al_Kasparov

For those of you who can ssh into the RPi, analysis is provided within the pgn by our very own Shiv.

End of Plug …😉

Al

[Dirk]

For people interested in the software I used:

1. Picochess WebServer (of course) and Picochess in remote Mode. The remote mode allows people with access to the web server to play against the eBoard Player by entering the moves via web interface (you can even access the web server via internet if you know how to route it through your router... (I wouldn't do this;-). But instead of this I use the remote mode here in order to enter automatic moves from another chess program so that I can  play against via (different) Types of eBoards; -)))))

2. DOS CHESS collection provides by Franz Huber (people using mame chess engines will know him for his CBEmu project). I run these DOS programs under WINE on my MacBook without problems.

 

3. The little secret weapon: Tanios WEBCAMCHESS, see http://webcamchess.fr and a lot of video with different types of use cases on his you tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@spiderchess32 eg here he plays with his board against a different Kasparov program 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sLyRg-GLI 

Originally this sofware recoginizes your normal non electronic chessboard via a webcam so that the moves are automatically are detected and can be passed to a UCI engine or a different 3rd party chess GUI with a grapphical chessboard weher you can enter the moves via mouse clicks (that is then simulated) - really cool. Check this out if you are interested in such stuff. Recognition of the chessboard is done with the help of a neural networks and works very good!

Yes I bought the software from him and I was involved during the first testing phase for the non-webcam based feature (which I use in this demo for the DOS programs). This is so cool and Tanio was kind enough to include some feature we can use for mame und especially for picochess (he trained his neural net with our web interface or did some adoption for this).

Having much fun with this although every time you need to do the setup (recognizing the chessboards of webcam and/or the Chess GUI)) again and again...

 Dirk

[Scally]

Very nice Dirk!

Al