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Your first chess program.
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Ed Schroder



Joined: 18 Aug 2011
Posts: 1643
PostPost subject: Re: Your first chess program.    Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 8:28 am Reply to topic Reply with quote
Don wrote:
mjlef wrote:
I took used an Ohio Scientific (C1P I think). It had a "massive" 4k bytes, and I wrote a chess program in interpreted BASIC for it. This was about 1980. When I had a co-op job during a break in college for GE, a boss there gave me some used memory chips allowing me to upgrade it to 8k! Wow! To fit the program I had to use direct peek and poke statements (to allow byte access since and INT would be too big!). And you had to put multiple lines together since breaking them up took too much memory. Even spaces took up memory so it was all squashed together. It only did 3-4 ply searches. I remember after a long drive on icy roads, a chess playing friend, very tired from the drive, agreed to play it. And for the first time, my program won a game!


I tried a couple of time to write a chess program in basic, but did not succeed due to the small memory size of the TRS-80 I had which was 4k. The program as well as all data had to fit in 4k. I don't even know if that was even possible to do in Basic, but it was definitely not possible for my skill level at the time. 4k was the entire RAM in the machine and some of this was needed for the operating system (which was essentially the basic interpreter.)

My start was also on the TRS-80 (1980) running at 1.77 Mhz and 16Kb RAM. The basic interpreter was incredible slow doing only 50 instructions per second and it took 10 minutes to finish a one ply search from the start position, that's about 0.03 NPS Wink When I moved the thing to ASM a got a speed-up with a factor of around 4000 and could do 100-150 NPS. Another royal pain was the cassette recorder to save the sources. Although the source code was split into several parts the bigger ones could take up to 15 minutes to save and then on many occasions the verification check (which took about the same time) reported the save-file was broken. Cleaning the heads of the cassette-recorder for the xx time mostly solved the problem else throw the cassette away and insert a new one. The thing was eating cassettes for breakfast. Crazy times.
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Subject Author Date/Time
Your first chess program. Dan Honeycutt Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:07 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Martin Sedlak Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:28 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Sam Hamilton Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:15 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Joshua Shriver Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:54 am
                  Re: Your first chess program. Ted Wong Sun Apr 22, 2012 6:28 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Thomas Petzke Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:02 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Fri Apr 20, 2012 4:07 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Gerd Isenberg Fri Apr 20, 2012 5:31 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. H.G.Muller Fri Apr 20, 2012 6:10 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Jan Brouwer Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:05 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Mark Lefler Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:59 pm
                  Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:11 am
                        Re: Your first chess program. Ed Schroder Sun Apr 22, 2012 8:28 am
                              Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 11:23 am
                              Re: Your first chess program. J. B. Buijs Sun Apr 22, 2012 2:03 pm
                                    Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 2:22 pm
                                          Re: Your first chess program. Dan Honeycutt Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:18 pm
                                                Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:23 pm
                                                      Re: Your first chess program. Dan Honeycutt Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:31 pm
                                                            Re: Your first chess program. Ed Schroder Sun Apr 22, 2012 5:11 pm
                                                                  Re: Your first chess program. Julien MARCEL Sun Apr 22, 2012 7:35 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Robert Hyatt Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:34 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Julien MARCEL Fri Apr 20, 2012 11:33 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. J. B. Buijs Sat Apr 21, 2012 6:27 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Evert Glebbeek Sat Apr 21, 2012 6:32 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Jon Dart Sat Apr 21, 2012 7:27 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Martin Brown Mon Apr 23, 2012 10:19 am
                  Re: Your first chess program. Jon Dart Tue Apr 24, 2012 12:01 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Harald Lüßen Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:20 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. F. Bluemers Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:44 pm
                  Re: Your first chess program. Harald Lüßen Sun Apr 22, 2012 8:43 am
                        Re: Your first chess program. Matthias Hartwich Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:11 pm
                              Re: Your first chess program. Thorsten Czub Tue Apr 24, 2012 6:50 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Joshua Shriver Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:43 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Ron Murawski Mon Apr 23, 2012 12:16 am
            Re: Your first chess program. Vincent Diepeveen Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:38 am
            Re: Your first chess program. Evert Glebbeek Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:45 am
                  Re: Your first chess program. Ron Murawski Wed Apr 25, 2012 4:45 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Martin Brown Mon Apr 23, 2012 9:36 am
      Re: Your first chess program. John Merlino Tue Apr 24, 2012 1:06 am
            Re: Your first chess program. Vincent Diepeveen Tue Apr 24, 2012 5:28 pm
                  Re: Your first chess program. John Merlino Tue Apr 24, 2012 6:41 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Oscar Toledo G. Fri May 04, 2012 5:28 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Giorgio Medeot Thu May 10, 2012 3:50 pm
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