Chessmaster 11: Grandmaster Edition (Is it worth the upgrade)

Hopefully with the Netflix show, more people will be interested and they will bring back this software franchise. I agree the interface is superb.

Man! This brings back memories to the days of floppy disk and IBM clones. I had Chessmaster 2000 and it was difficult for me. I loved it though.

Hayes Smartmodem. Wonder how much such a thing is nowadays LOL

I'd be amazed if Chessmaster ever makes a comeback. I just don't see it happening, at least while it's owned by Ubisoft.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out this thread - https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/gigantic-dos-chess-package

Among many others, there's CM 2000 and CM 2100.

I enjoyed the Chessmaster franchise especially at its height in the late 2000s. But it’s best features have been surpassed by all the available resources online. It has a place for collectors and retro gamers who are feeling nostaligic.

Thanks! I actually saw it but I won't download stuff like that. You just never know what's inside. There might be a surprise and not a good one.

@chessroboto Especially the original on the NES. That was my favorite chess game for consoles. Still is today my favorite.

Everyone has his own comfort level regarding downloading stuff on the internet, and, in general, I share your concerns. However, I will add that Franz Huber is a long-time poster on the Talkchess forum. As far as I'm concerned, he has a solid reputation in the computer chess community. I've used his emulator packages numerous times in the past with no problems. Also, I just checked his two DOS emulator packages with VirusTotal, and VirusTotal found no issues:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b6e31bc58096b8af78494cb69d02ef9c08f79c6fccece779cbf8aba3cc82cef3/detection

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/8fb6669631a67b9dd64bff5f1e415ff461a5de06404084a94317f81413799e1b/detection

I almost always draw the line at downloading anonymous, cracked software - too much risk for me.

I own legal copies of Chessmaster 9000 and 10th Edition, and I never saw the need to acquire a legal copy of CM11 on the used market (eBay, etc.). However, at one point, I wanted to do some testing with CM11, so that was the only time I violated my policy on avoiding anonymous, cracked software. (The dodgy site that I used later took down the link.) I *was* careful to not install the program on my regular Windows PC. Instead, I installed it on a test PC with a fresh Windows 7 installation. The CM11 install seemed a bit strange - it rebooted a couple of times during the installation. (Who knows what it was doing, ha ha.) CM11 seemed to work OK, and I never found any malware associated with the bootleg software. At any rate, after my testing, I wiped the hard drive.

Thanks! I will keep that in mind.

Using the free VirtualBox, you can create sandboxed virtual machines for testing (and using) all these mysterious apps. Just turn off any sharing privileges to the virtual machine, no Internet, no sharing of files with your host computer, no drag and drop sharing, no sharing of clipboard. You can install by plugging in a USB flash disk and sharing only that with the VM. You can install Windows XP or even DOS to these VMs. The DOS installer floppy disk images are freely downloadable from reputable sources online.

According to this thread:

https://forums.ubisoft.com/showthread.php/1703696-Increasing-the-Chessmaster-s-Performance

It seems it is possible to use the Chessmaster GUI with other engines (i.e., other than The King). I am not that interested in using The King with other GUIs.

@Centaurme I have VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I did run some game emulators from my friend on an existing Windows 7 VM but I still hate having that kind of stuff on any computer. I played the games once and then deleted it.

Can't say I really disagree with your position (no pun intended) on unknown software, but I guess for some of us we find it exciting to roll the dice once in a while haha (with suitable precautions as I mentioned).

The draw of nostalgia...

the main appeal of chessmaster is that it has most of what you need to be inmersed in chess. It has a decent opening book, chess lessons, chess history, customizing features etc. You can pretty much reach  expert level with chessmaster, and chesstempo tactics, (plus all the requisite playing and post-mortems of course)

no one gets chessmaster to be suggested the best move in a position. Thats not its primary function.

This is the one I need.

Such a cool interface :-)

I learned to play chess by running a PC chess game called chess88.exe. This was found on some Dos floppy disks way back when. I found the game online many years ago and ran it on my PC after scanning with different virus and malware scanners. Nothing happened but I think I just lucked out.