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Posted By

Csabo
on 2014-07-11
19:16:50
 Shack!

ShackShack? No, not the English word meaning "a roughly built hut or cabin", but rather a Swedish word which translates to Chess. After releasing another five-letter, one-syllable converted game (Whack) earlier this year, Gaia is back with a new conversion called Shack. It's a Swedish chess program converted from Commodore 64 that runs on 64K machines. It has adjustable difficulty setting (from 1-9), load/save state option and even undo. If you feel like playing a round, fire it up and see if you can beat the computer! Check it out and enjoy!

Posted By

Chronos
on 2014-07-11
19:19:22
 Re: Shack!

Gr43t stuff, but why haven't you translated it to English? Is it a special kind of perversion?? grin (I always think about following the advice, "Don't comment anything on when you're drunk!" :D)

Posted By

Csabo
on 2014-07-12
19:13:45
 Re: Shack!

Yeah, neat conversion. I have an interesting idea for a project (maybe other have though of this too): have all the C16 & Plus/4 chess games play against each other. Probably using the highest setting in each. Eventually we would see a final ranking, e.g. find out which one is the best chess engine happy

Posted By

Gaia
on 2014-07-13
04:06:05
 Re: Shack!

Well there are more chess games than chess engines... wink Anyhow, there has been a C64 chess tournament on the site linked:

http://www.spacious-mind.com/html/commodore_junior_closed_chess_.html

Since most of our chess games are conversions from the bigger brothers (save for the few originals), the ranking does make sense for us, too. And, yeah, Shack is also ranked happy

Posted By

Litwr
on 2014-07-13
07:22:19
 Re: Shack!

This tournament looks unfair because white side has advantage. So there must be two games for every two programs. The total is 240 games for 16 programs.

Posted By

Gaia
on 2014-07-13
12:43:09
 Re: Shack!

Note that there were two rounds, the second one (with tables turned) is linked on the bottom.

http://www.spacious-mind.com/html/commodore_junior_closed_chess_1.html

Posted By

gc841
on 2014-08-23
08:49:14
 Re: Shack!

Good conversion Gaia, thanks. Nice display and the engine plays a solid game.

The spacious mind website notes that Shack has "the tendency to quite often sacrifice a Knight for a pawn in the early stages of the game". It seems that the original programmer set up the piece value table like this: P,N,B,R,Q = 1,1,3,5,9. Usually N=3. This is unfortunate because it puts Shack at a disadvantage. With a small change at runtime on plus/4 (>$3081 03), you get a stronger opponent. With the same change on C64, Shack would presumably have done better in the tournament.

Posted By

Gaia
on 2014-08-23
15:10:06
 Re: Shack!

Hi Gary, yeah I could also experience this type of sacrifice while playing. Your fix is excellent, we might think of re-releasing this as the "ultimate" +4 version perhaps? happy

There is yet another bug though, the autoplay has a tendency to get stuck in a state when there is not even check let alone checkmate.

EDIT: added your fix as a cheat for now

Posted By

Csabo
on 2014-08-23
15:31:58
 Re: Shack!

Yeah, that's excellent debugging Gary! Big thanks and respect for looking at this in such detail. I was going to add it as well, but I was busy with something else just now and Gaia beat me to it happy



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