Aart's Blog

After burning cycles on my Nexus One for many days, Group E has just finished a complete thirty seconds-per-move tournament,  played from both sides of all positions in the Nunn opening suite under the conditions described earlier. Congratulations to Ben-Hur Carlos Vieira Langoni Jr for RedQueen's promotion to Group D. All games can be downloaded from the tournament page .                     1         2         3         4         5                     1 RedQueen 0.9.8 JA     *     10.0-10.0 14.5-5.5  17.0-3.0  19.5-0.5  61.0/80 2 greko8.2          10.0-10.0     *     14.5-5.5  16.0-4.0  18.5-1.5  59.0/80 3 Sungorus 1.4 JA    5.5-14.5  5.5-14.5     *     13.0-7.0  16.0-4.0  40.0/80 4 Jazz v5.01 JA      3.0-17.0  4.0-16.0  7.0-13.0      *    14.5-5.5  28.5/80 5 DoubleCheck 1.3    0.5-19.5  1.5-18.5  4.0-16.0  5.5-14.5     *     11.5/80

As a present, my wife ordered the Micro-KIM from Briel Computers for me, which is a modern replica of the KIM-1 microcomputer. Even though I learned machine code on the 6510 of the Commodore 64, I remember seeing the KIM-1 in an electronics store much earlier, and I was intrigued right away. I can't wait for it to arrive to do some vintage programming. In anticipation of the Micro-KIM's arrival, I extended my 65xx cross-assembler (available for Windows, Linux and MacOS) with the paper tape format , either in the original binary format (option -p) or in a text representation (option -P) so that its output can feed directly into the Kim's terminal interface. I simply generated the format based on old documentation and it is still untested. If someone is interested in trying it out, I would appreciate early feedback. Otherwise, I will report back when I get my Micro-KIM. For example, using the assembler on this little test assembly program: .org  $0100 .byte $FF $E

Group F has just finished a complete thirty seconds-per-move tournament, played from both sides of all positions in the Nunn opening suite under the conditions described earlier. Congratulations to Evert Glebbeek for Jazz 's promotion to Group E! All games can be downloaded from the tournament page .                 1        2         3         4         5  1 Jazz v5.01 JA    *     15.5-4.5  18.0-2.0  18.5-1.5  19.5-0.5 71.5/80 2 ZCT-0.3.2500  4.5-15.5     *     13.5-6.5  17.0-3.0  16.0-4.0 51.0/80 3 BikJump v2.1  2.0-18.0  6.5-13.5     *     12.5-7.5  12.0-8.0 33.0/80 4 tscp181       1.5-18.5  3.0-17.0  7.5-12.5     *     12.5-7.5 24.5/80 5 umax48w       0.5-19.5  4.0-16.0  8.0-12.0  7.5-12.5     *    20.0/80

Charles Bond wrote a nifty 6502 simulator, called Soft6502 , which I find useful for testing small programs written for the 65xx microprocessor family. The simulator supports the full 6502 instruction set and two 8-bit ports for input and output.   Programs can be entered one byte at the time through the keyboard or, more conveniently, loaded from file. The simulator uses the H6X file format , which is a simple, but surprisingly versatile way of representing 6502 code (essentially an ASCII representation of addresses followed by bytes). I have extended my 65xx cross-assembler (available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS) to support this H6X file format, so that its output can be directly fed into Soft6502.

I just released version 3.0.2 of Chess for Android, available at the Android market and as direct download . This release enhances XBoard/WinBoard support (infinite analysis, resign feature, older idioms used by various engines).