I've got one of these… bought it brand new.
Just went down in the basement and got out it's old box where I figured the paperwork might still be contained. (I keep it's manual near the actual board.)
Bought it on September 4, 1990. Sales receipt shows I paid $675.00 for it.
The dealer was ICD Corp, YOUR MOVE. Drove out to Huntington Station, 21 Whitman Road, out on Long Island, New York, and was allowed to open many of their boxes and select the one I liked the most. That had just gotten a new batch of them from Fidelity Electronics.
Fantastic chess set. Over the years, I left it set up, and so the set up positions under the pieces are lighter in color, … but so what.
Learned a lot about how to play chess with it.
It was too good a player against me if I'd allow it to think on my time, so I'd usually play it at a think ahead so many moves format. Still, at level 5… and above, it usually would crush me.
Some openings against it, I'd dial them in by having played them so much, and I could beat it at level 6, occasionally. But, the game of chess became "unfamiliar" to me at that sort of level.
I found that I preferred playing it without the "sound", so I used its Options capability and turned off the sound.
It came with a pseudo parchment certificate that reads:
Be it known to all, that the
Fidelity Mach III
Chess Challenger
Computer
obtained a certified rating of
2265
by competing in 48 tournament games against rated
players thereby achieving the classification of
CHESS MASTER
in accordance with
the rating system of the
United States Chess Federation
Done on
the Fourth Day of July
Nineteen Hundred Eighty Eight.
The Certificate is signed by:
Al Lawrence, Executive Director
U.S. CHESS FEDERATION
Any specific questions you have, feel free to ask.
I recently found an Elite Avant Garde model 6114, with the stamp in the bottom corner reading 2265. Can anyone give me any information about this item?