ChessBase Light: fantastic!

[Dan Scoones]

Today I managed to download and install the new ChessBase Light
program, and I have to say that I'm impressed!

One problem that I had to solve was how to work with data files in the
old .cbf format. For this I went to the chess.onenet.net site and
picked up the cb2pgn.exe DOS utility. (Searching with Yahoo on
cb2pgn.exe will bring up this site.) The cb2pgn utility converts .cbf
files to .pgn format, and even though you have to convert them one at
at time, believe me, it's faster than downloading the .pgn versions
(from, e.g., the pitt site.) Under Win95, you run the utility from
the DOS window with the syntax cb2pgn sourcefile targetfile. Once you
have a data file in .pgn format, you can read it with CBLight.
Unfortunately, many of the useful CBLight utilities require the data
to be in the new .cbh format, but fortunately ChessBase has generously
supplied a .pgn to .cbh conversion utility. To convert a file, right
click on its icon and select "convert data." When the conversion is
complete, you'll get a dialog box suggesting that you delete the old
pgn version of the file. I recommend doing this since the .cbh
version takes up way less space.

As a test I played around with the fischer.cbf file that I got a long
time ago from the pitt site. As most users realize, this file is
sorted in a strange way: all of the games where Fischer played White
come first in rough date order, followed by all the games where he
played Black. To confuse things, several games by other "Fischers"
(e.g., Jens Fischer) are mixed in. Once I had the file in .cbh
format, I used the CBLight utilities to strip out the duplicates, get
rid of the games involving other "Fischers" and then *sort* the data
into date/tournament order. The result is a beautiful, clean file to
which opening keys, etc. can be applied!

The ChessBase people deserve a great big *thank you* for making
CBLight available, and it is certainly my intention to buy the
commercial version in the very near future!

Cheers,
NM Dan Scoones
To reply via email, remove 1 from my address

[Ron Moskovitz]

I Agree that this seems to be a great peice of freeware.

I have two question, however: it appears that the "Speical Annotations"
menu is inactive in CBLight. If I select any options on it, I get a
"Not In CB Lights" error box. Is this by desgin, or am I doing something
wrong?

Second, when I select "set up a position" from the Game menu, nothing
happens. Do others experience the same problem, or, again, am I
doing something wrong?

Thanks!

-Ron

[stei...@hotmail.com]

I now have two Fritz program to work with Chessbase,

Fritz300.dll and Fritz401.dll

Wich one is best? Is there other 'engines' i could find for free?

thanks

Chris

[Steven Rix]

In article <34482306...@News.IslandNet.com>, ro...@islandnet.com (Dan Scoones) writes:
->Today I managed to download and install the new ChessBase Light
->program, and I have to say that I'm impressed!
->
->One problem that I had to solve was how to work with data files in the
->old .cbf format. For this I went to the chess.onenet.net site and
->picked up the cb2pgn.exe DOS utility. (Searching with Yahoo on
->cb2pgn.exe will bring up this site.) The cb2pgn utility converts .cbf
->files to .pgn format, and even though you have to convert them one at
->at time, believe me, it's faster than downloading the .pgn versions
->(from, e.g., the pitt site.) Under Win95, you run the utility from
->the DOS window with the syntax cb2pgn sourcefile targetfile.

Fair enough, but CBASCII is about ten times faster (in my experience).
You get get it from ftp.pitt.edu or through links in the CBWin demo
FAQ:

http://www.chemeng.ed.ac.uk/people/steve/cbdemo.html

The usage is as before. If you have a large database, CBASCII can also
do an export of only a certain range of games:

cbascii -e -r 1-7500 file1.pgn database
cbascii -e -r 7501-1500 file2.pgn database
etc

where file1.pgn (etc.) are PGN files you create (and then import with
CB Light) and database.cbf and database.cbi are old-format ChessBase
databases (e.g. from ftp.pitt.edu).

--
Steve Rix
S....@ed.ac.uk http://www.chemeng.ed.ac.uk/people/steve/