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| Chess on the Mac You can play chess against your Mac, play against people across the globe, view the games of world champions, print chess games and diagrams, and much more. Besides your Internet browser, you'll want the free programs "Sigma Chess" and "Fixation." These provide a rich set of chess software features. However, there are literally dozens of Macintosh chess software packages indexed at the "dmoz" site on the Web. Learning chess from your Mac If you're a beginner, Sigma Chess and Fixation are not the best place to start. A better choice would be a commercial chess teaching package. "Chess Mates," for ages four and up, is the best introduction I've seen. It teaches the rules of chess and elementary tactics and then tests you against ten levels of opposition. "Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess," for ages ten and up, covers more material than Chess Mates. Both programs run under Classic in Mac OS X. The "Tutorial Software" link at the dmoz site points to web pages where you can order these packages. Sigma Chess Lite - Playing chess against your Macintosh Sigma Chess 6 Lite will play chess against you, estimate your chess strength, analyze and annotate games, print annotated games in a two-column format with diagrams, and store and display games downloaded from the Internet. Sigma Chess 6 Lite is free, and runs on any Power Mac with at least an 800 x 600 pixel display and 20 MB of RAM. It runs in native mode under Mac OS X, and runs on OS 8.6+ with Carbon Lib 1.4+. Older Macs can use Sigma Chess 4.02 Lite, which requires only System 7 and a 68020 or better processor. Sigma Chess Screen Shot Sigma Chess Lite has an extensive web site at www.sigmachess.com. The "Download Sigma 6 Lite" link is under "Contents" at the left of the home page. There are also links to grandmaster game collections on the website that can be viewed in Sigma Chess, a summary of the rules of chess, and a download link for Sigma Chess 4.02 Lite for older Macs. Sigma Chess Lite comes with a good hyper-linked manual. But watch out, it defaults to full strength, so you will want to adjust the playing level so that it is challenging, but not murderous. Try using the "Level" menu to set "Playing Mode & Level" to "Playing Mode: Novice", "Level: 1 (Easiest)," and increase the level each time you win a game. Once you've mastered the "Novice" levels, set "Playing Mode & Level" to "Normal", use "Level:Sigma Chess Rating" to set the computer's rating at 1200, then work up from there.Fixation - playing humans over the Internet Fixation 2.1.1 lets you play other humans over the Internet, regardless of the type of computer they have. You can watch games in progress, or play yourself. Fixation works with "chess server" sites on the Internet, such as the Internet Chess Club (ICC), the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), US Chess Live (USCL) and chess.net. Fixation is free, and requires a Power Mac with OS 7.5 or higher ( OS 8.5 or higher preferred), an Internet connection and Open Transport. The Carbon version requires at least OS 8.1, and will run as a normal application under OS X. |
Fixation Screenshot The Fixation web site is linked in the "Online Chess" section of the dmoz site above. The Fixation web site has a download page and extensive online help. To get a quick feel for Fixation, connect to the Internet as usual (even a dialup connection to AOL will suffice), then launch Fixation and click on the "connect" button. The first window to come up will be a text window with a command line at the bottom. To start a game, just type "seek 2 12" in the single boxed line at the bottom of this window, then hit the Enter key. In a few seconds, a chessboard window will pop up, and you can start playing. Fixation chess games are time-limited. "Seek 2 12" tells the chess server that you want to play a game where each side starts with 2 minutes on their timer, and gains an additional 12 seconds every time they move. When it is your turn to move, your timer counts down until you make a move. If your timer runs out before you move, you lose the game. After your game is over, a window may pop up offering you a free trial registration on the server. This provides a number of benefits, but if you are not interested, simply close that window and start a new game. Other useful chess server commands:"help intro" - Internet Chess Club info "help register" - for registered access "help help" - list of available commands "seek 5 0" - start a "five-minute" chess game "observe*" - watch the current game with the strongest players. Fixation is highly customizable. The game board window is resizeable, there are ten selectable piece sets, and the "Edit: Preferences ..." menu item allows many other choices. www.sigmachess.com
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