Chessmaster 8000 in Fritz

Here is a cookbook method to how to use The King, the engine in Chessmaster 8000, in Fritz GUI. Other versions of Chessmaster could not be used because the engine there was not Winboard compatible.

What you need:

1. Download the Winboard adapter from Chessbase's The Winboard Engine Adapter page.
2. Download InBetween.
3. Both files are in zip-archive format so if you don't have any unzip utility you can download it from WinZip's home site.
4. You need of course also Fritz and Chessmaster. In this description Chessmaster is updated with the 1.03 patch.

Unpack this files to a temporary folder f.ex. your desktop and rename InBetween.exe to TheKing.exe and Winboard.eng to TheKing.eng.

Preparation in Fritz

• Open Windows Explorer go to the Engines sub folder under the Chessbase folder.
• Copy the Winboard.eng file (renamed to TheKing.eng) to this folder.
• Create a new folder with the name TheKing in this Engines folder

• Go to the newly created sub folder TheKing.
• Copy the InBetween.exe file (renamed to TheKing.exe) to this folder.
• Create a new text file and give it the name InBetween.ini
• Create a new text file and give it the name TheKing.init

• Open the InBetween.ini file with any text editor (f.ex. NotePad) and add the following lines to it.
• Edit the second line so that the path points to your Chessmaster 8000 folder.
• Notice the end of the line that begin with xboard, opk=8888. This number is the protection for The King so that you are forced to own Chessmaster 8000 to get this number. It will changes at least after each restart of the machine. It is explained later how you get this number from Chessmaster 8000

[InBetween]
CommandLine := C:\Programfiler\Chessmaster 8000\TheKing3.12d.exe

[Client2Server]
xboard := xboard\nhard\neasy\npost\nnew\ncm_parm default\ncm_parm opk=8888
fritz :=
reset :=

[Server2Client]
stat01: := why should I
001 :=
002 :=
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004 :=
005 :=
006 :=
007 :=
008 :=
009 :=
010 :=
011 :=
012 :=
013 :=
014 :=
015 :=
016 :=
017 :=
018 :=
019 :=
020 :=
021 :=
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025 :=
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027 :=
028 :=
029 :=

• Open the TheKing.init file and add the following lines to it.

[Parameter]
CommandLine = 
Author = Johan de Koning
Engine = The King 3.12d
Debug = False
LogFile = False

[Support]
AnalyzeMode = True
PonderMode = False
CastleAndEP = False
EvaluationWhite = False

Preparation in Chessmaster

• Open Windows Explorer go to the Chessmaster 8000 folder.
• Rename the file TheKing.exe to TheKing3.12d.exe
• Copy the InBetween.exe file (renamed to TheKing.exe) to this folder.
• Create a new text file and give it the name InBetween.ini

• Open the InBetween.ini file with any text editor (f.ex. NotePad) and add the following lines to it.
• Notice the line with Priority := low. If you have planned to run engine-engine matches with Pondering on in Chessmaster 8000 you should delete this line. But under normal circumstances it is better to have it there.

[InBetween]
Debug := 3
CommandLine := TheKing3.12d.exe
Priority := low

Ready for play?

Getting the opk number

• Start Chessmaster 8000
• Go in the Game room and start a new game against one of the Chessmaster personalities.
• It will now start up a console program that shows the communication between Chessmaster and TheKing. You will find the opk-number in the second blue line and in the first red line. Write this number down or copy it to your clipboard. If you don't see the console it is probably because it is behind some other windows, just select it in the task bar so will it pop up.
  NB! Don't close this window, it will be closed by Chessmaster when needed.
• If you would like play a game in Chessmaster, click somewhere in the Chessmaster window and play as normal.
• Open the InBetween.ini file that is located in your ChessBase->Engines->TheKing sub folder and fill in this new opk number.
• You are now ready to try to play with Fritz. Close Chessmaster and start up Fritz. When Fritz is started you can press <F3> and select TheKing as an engine.
• If the depth number never goes higher than 4 you will now that it is time to collect a new opk number

If you want to change the hash table size for The King you could add \ncm_parm tts=hash ttu=n in the xboard translation in InBetween.ini.

xboard := xboard\nhard\neasy\npost\nnew\ncm_parm default\ncm_parm tts=16777216 ttu=6 opk=8888

Would give 16Mb hash table. See the list under for other values.

  Hash settings (tts and ttu)
  - When hash=0      tts=4096,     ttu=0
  - When hash=512Kb  tts=524288,   ttu=1
  - When hash=1Mb    tts=1048576,  ttu=2
  - When hash=2Mb    tts=2097152,  ttu=3
  - When hash=4Mb    tts=4194304,  ttu=4
  - When hash=8Mb    tts=8388608,  ttu=5
  - When hash=16Mb   tts=16777216, ttu=6
  - When hash=32Mb   tts=33554432, ttu=7
  - When hash=64Mb   tts=67108864, ttu=8

Odd Gunnar Malin, malin@online.no