#Osx chessmaster 10 how to#
#Osx chessmaster 10 software#
#Osx chessmaster 10 series#
#Osx chessmaster 10 mac#

At first, I considered this bit rather useless, but IвЂ™ve since changed my mind. This is at least sometimes helpful with deciphering the analyses.ДЄnother feature that I find useful is the tournament mode. Unlike most chess software, CM9kвЂ™s analysis includes auto-annotation that attempts to give plain language descriptions of its analysis. For me, these features alone were enough to make me purchase CM9k.Д¬hessmasterвЂ™s analysis is fairly decent. It also has a database of important historical games from which to study.

CM9k has a veritable cornucopia of tutorials, exercises, drills, and more. The first of such reasons is the inclusion of many learning aids.

There are actually many good reasons for using CM9k. Despite all the cons, I figured that the pros were sufficient for me to take the plunge. Considering all the nasty problems with Chessmaster on the Mac, you may be wondering why I didnвЂ™t just skip CM9k altogether. Me, being the diligent sort that I am, did my research and knew about all this crap before purchasing a copy of Chessmaster. Once CM9k has started, you can eject the CD, but youвЂ™ll have to drag it around with your laptop if you are going mobile. HereвЂ™s another little piece of bullshit: Chessmaster is one of those annoying games that requires the CD to run. In fact, from reading forum posts from irate CM9k users, for many people it took a couple of years before Feral Interactive produced enough patches to even get CM9k running on some machines. Hence the incredibly shitty interface, and all types of other nasty bugs. Feral Interactive decided that instead of doing a proper job of this port, they would do the minimal amount of work to get CM running on OS X.

#Osx chessmaster 10 mac#

Unfortunately for us poor Mac users, Ubisoft chose Feral Interactive to do the conversion. Not unreasonably, Ubisoft decided to farm out the Mac port of CM to a company that specializes in such platform-related conversions. The problems with CM began when Ubisoft decided it wanted to have a version of CM running on the Mac.

#Osx chessmaster 10 software#

In fact, many of itвЂ™s users consider CM to be the best bit of chess software available for that platform. CM started out life as a Windows program, and by all accounts the Windows version of CM suffers from none of the problems that I have just described. The Chessmaster franchise is owned by Ubisoft. I think that much of this can be explained best by a brief history lesson about Chessmaster. There are other UI related problems, but you get the idea. So, when you eventually bring it back to the foreground it takes forever to respond to user input. When itвЂ™s in the background it uses no cycles, but the messages sent to it by the OS pile up. However, with this option turned on, CM9k uses all possible cycles on one CPU core when itвЂ™s running in the foreground. Without this option selected, CM9k uses up processing whether or not it is running in the foreground.

As it turns out, this makes things worse, rather than better. There is an option to tell CM9k to use fewer cycles when it runs in the background. This is incredibly irritating and makes some of the dialog boxes completely unusable.Д¬M9k insists on chewing up CPU cycles even when itвЂ™s not doing anything. The most annoying manifestations of this problem are the occasional invisible buttons. Some of the interface is just plain broken. The menus donвЂ™t follow any of the conventions common to most OS X software so finding the menu items you want can be a bit of a chore.

#Osx chessmaster 10 how to#

In fact, itвЂ™s so screwy that IвЂ™m not sure how to describe it except to say that it is entirely out of place on OS X. First of all, its user interface is a bit of a horror show. Chessmaster has plenty of flaws, some of which are pretty nasty. So, although many of the programs that I will review have versions that run on other operating systems, I will only speak to those that run on OS X, and I wonвЂ™t say much about the Linux and Windows versions. I should state up-front that, at the moment, the only operating system I use is OS X.

#Osx chessmaster 10 series#

With any luck, this is the first in a series of chess software reviews.