Hi Robert,

Thanks for the reply. It was good that your experiment succeeded, because the Mephisto you modified is only powered by 4 x 1.5 cells.

Given that you did not change anything else in your modification, I soldered in the 16 Mhz crystal this afternoon. And the little Star Opal chirped up perfectly, albeit with a rather squeeky voice

So it seems to be working perfectly and I have verified it is now making moves exactly twice as fast as the original Star Opal on the corresponding fixed time and fixed depth levels.

This is great news, since this program really improves a lot given more time. My guess is that I can now use Level WG1 or even WG2 as the tournament levels, rather than level WF6 in the stock version.

It will be very interesting to now see if Star Opal Turbo can get a match win against the Cavalier!

I don't understand why Novag did not clock this thing at 16 Mhz to begin with. They have done it before and it is not as if the faster version gets too close to their 32K programs in playing strength (it is way behind them by about 400 points).

And the current Novag 16K programs can really use the extra power, since as I mentioned before, they improve greatly with the extra time, even though they will still make some bad blunders every now and then regardless.