[ In nostalgic mode ]

Frans Morsch in those days did an even better job, 4 Mhz 6502, 16 Kb rom, 512
bytes ram (the Mephisto Mondial) and it was very close in strength to my stuff
wheras my stuff ran on 5 Mhz, and 4 Kb ram (Mephisto Rebel). Don't ask me how
Frans did it, but he did.

In those days there wasn't any C compiler so you were forced to write in
assembler. Writing assembler it was not the chess engine that gave me a headache
(I was used to that delicate needle work) but writing the interface was a major
pain for me each time. You have to realize you had write directly into the
hardware, make those LED's burn, program the buzzer, write to the screen (you
had to program the characters yourself), program the keys all driven my some
tricky interrupt routine. Bah, I never liked it.

Later the hardware was upgraded to 32 Kb rom and 8 Kb ram, it gave some extra
elo but not all that exciting. At a certain moment you realize the hardware
limitation is a dead-end street, time to say goodbye to the 6502 and move on to
the RISC processor (the ChessMachine) and a few years later to the PC.

[ back to real life, wiping a tear ]

Ed

Frans ported his engine (Nona) to my interface code for the Mephisto hardware because my hardware was running at a higher speed and at the time his program was considered stronger. The idea was also to commercialize it but as far as I can remember that never happened.