33 MSDOS chess programs

[Vinvin]

33 MSDOS chess programs running smootly in a Windows environment only one mouse click away reliving the 80's and the 90's.

http://rebel13.nl/misc/more%20dos%20oldies.html

There still a couple of other old chess programs here : http://www.myabandonware.com/search/q/chess

[bnemias]

You do not want to run windows dosbox in wine. Instead you run linux dosbox. But that's probably exactly what's happening.. you ran wine and it chose to use dosbox rather than the windows compatibility layer. You'd want to verify this though.

Ed's right. Running dos programs in an accelerated VM gives much better performance than running through dosbox. For most games Dosbox is better, but if you care about NPS for your chess engines, you'd prefer the VM. For some numbers, I've been running M-Chess on my ancient core2 quad both ways. In dosbox, I get about 30knps, but in a full VM (running XP, not 98-- don't have a 98 VM), I get 400knps. Big difference. However, I actually prefer the dosbox solution because it acts more like a native window than using a full blown VM.

For M-chess, it's possible to run. You can in 9x versions actually use the move.com file and transfer the protection under (real) DOS. I did that on another machine for kicks. But there is a program that breaks everlock (called neverlock) which I ran after actually transferring the protection to a harddisk. Then I transferred it back to the original 5.25" floppy and had one with faked protection. It works on dosbox, real DOS, 9x, and NT kernels reasonably well. It does like to take over your entire screen so a VM or dosbox is easiest to work with IMO.

[stegemma]

And don't forget my Drago!!! It works fine in a VirtualBox DOS machine.

[Gurcan Uckardes]

To all dosbox users: use max with care. Why? Because each program reacts in a different way. I confirm clocks slow down with max setting. With several attempts, i finally found out the emulation goes out of sync beyond cylce 86000. Each program has its own limit. Weird but true.
However that doesn't mean you can't use chess progs at max setting. The impact is that you may have to wait 1 minute for a move but the clock on the screen will show 45seconds for instance.

[chessico]

I use "D-fend Reloaded" to configure DosBox. I simply set the CPU cycles to "Max".

Thank you and everybody who addressed my problem. Works much better this way. But I agree with others that in order to get really good performance one should probably use a virtual machine. (Just a pity that I have thrown away my old windows disks, not so long ago, iirc. I suppose that MS still don't offer win98, dos or sim for free? Probably not, they prefer to give away win10. One might call it a strategy ...)

[tmokonen]

There are DOS-compatible operating systems out there, such as FreeDOS:

http://www.freedos.org/

and Caldera Open DOS, based on DR-DOS/Novell DOS:

http://esca.atomki.hu/paradise/dos/opendos-en.html

Maybe one of these might do the trick for you, if you want to run a pure DOS environment.

[Matthias Gemuh]

MS offers

http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/

[jdart]

I remember Psion. It was pretty good, good enough to beat amateurs.

--Jon

[PK]

As a kid of 12 I learned a lot about chess by playing Psion. Beating level 3 took me a couple of months, when I learned not to hang my pieces and not to crack under pressure. Then I progressed all the way up. It made me very unpleasant unrated opponent during my first couple of tournaments.

[Eelco de Groot]

Psion was the first program from "Chess Genius" Richard Lang I believe? It was the first program I know that you could actually use to analyse adjourned chess games and such, when the chess club still allowed adjournments.

Maybe there already was a Rebel then but I did not know it, or Rebel was still Tandy TRS 80, for the Z80 processor. A PC was Intel 8086. I got Psion together with a surplus computer from my brother in law. A very nice present. The computer was a real Tulip PC, made in Holland, indestructable, it is still somewhere in storage. Well, I don't know if it would still start up, it has been in a non heated shed now since 1991, that is close to 24 winters. If you plug it in there is probably danger of electrocution. Monitor was a real monitor old style green letters on black background, or was the background also a darker shade of green? But I think it did have a harddisk already, if I'm not mistaken 20 Mb large, very luxurious for the time, before that you would have to load MS DOS on a 5¼ inch floppy disk into memory at least that is what I remember from my Turbo Pascal colleges in Haren. Fond memories.