Hi @hap,

I noticed one more thing with Chesster Phantom: When you increase the speed or disable throttling, after a while the shift key is enabled by itself and can't be disabled after that. After that, playing is of course no longer possible.

Greets
Dieter

The game not showing the move in the display (even though the manual says it does), it doesn't look like it's an emulation bug. You can see the same thing happening here:


It works fine when setting it to auto mode(computer plays against itself), also shown in the video linked by Mark 1.
I don't know where to obtain last move info, maybe somewhere in the RAM.

Plextor: did you have sound on? It's probably asking a question and waiting for your yes/no answer.

I actually had the sound turned off. If no action is taken after the start, Chesster will begin explaining and wait for a response (yes/no/repeat). If you start the game before this point, everything is ok.

Thank you for the hint.

Hi hap,

your last changes for the Phantom (animating the motor movements) are interesting - much better than the previous version.
They work in MAME 0.230 and 0.238, but when I tried to port them back to 0.220, I got a few error messages about the new layout files (compiling the driver is ok):

1) one type of errors was about the duplicate definitions of bounds for different states:
bounds state="0" ...
bounds state="240" ...
I've tried to solve this by putting it into 2 separate definitions for "disk"
"disk state="0"
"disk state="240"
and with this change the error messages disappeared.
I made similar changes within the "repeat" loop at the end, but I'm not sure if my changes with separate parts
element name="motorx~i~" ref="mpos~i~ state="4"
element name="motorx~i~" ref="mpos~i~ state="136"
are correct there within a "repeat" or if something like this is possible at all!?

2) the other error message was about the token "collection" - it seems that MAME 0.220 doesn't know this feature.
So I've just removed those 2 lines with "collection".

With these changes the compilation worked without any errors, but unfortunately this new red disk doesn't appear on the board, so the motor movements are not visible.

Thus my question: can the layout file be changed, so that this will also work with the older MAME 0.220 which I use in CB-Emu?

Regards,
Franz

The .lay functions I use for animation did not exist yet in MAME 0.220.

It used to be possible to animate on a single axis, if you copy-paste the same line over and over with the X parameter increasing. But a dot moving in X and Y directions, no, not possible in older MAME.

That's a pity - this animation is really looking nice.

Hi,

der Chesster Phantom ist jetzt auch in CB-Emu enthalten - danke an 'hap' und Berger!

Ein Plugin (für MessChess) gibt es diesmal nicht, weil es mir trotz vieler Versuche mit unterschiedlichen Methoden nicht gelungen ist, die Züge des Phantom sicher zu erkennen - bisher hat jede Methode bei bestimmten Zügen versagt.

Grüße,
Franz

Hallo Franz,

deinem Dank an hap und Berger schließe ich mich gerne an!

Ich denke, das dürfte zu verschmerzen sein, wenn es sich um das gleiche Schachprogramm wie im "normalen" Chesster handelt.

Aber interessant ist der Chesster Phantom für mich trotzdem, denn, wenn ich ehrlich bin, ist der bislang komplett an mir vorbeigegangen.

Viele Grüße
Robert

Neuer romdump von Berger: Conic "Korchnoi"
*** nicht emuliert ***

It has an OKI MCU that's completely unemulated.
And this MCU has an internal ROM, it's undumped.

Hi,

Thanks to Hans van Mierlo for providing me with this chess computer so that, after its repair, I could analyse and perform reverse engineering, although unfortunately we are not in a position to emulate it at the moment.

As it is an uncommon computer and I don't think there are any videos of it working (maybe there are and I just haven't been able to find them), I have recorded some:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...8uyGPjCMQfztCb

Best,
Gerardo