Fritz 20 questions

I thought I might start a thread here as I have not been able to find a forum to discuss chessbase or Fritz, if that's ok? 

I got Fritz recent and to be honest, it looks like it's come with a ton of features but not the best documentation or UI. 

First question: the notation. It defaults to verbose algebraic notation, as in for pawn to king four, instead of just e4 it defaults to e2-e4 displayed.

I've gone into the options, changing it to the more commonly used convention but everytime I restart it, it defaults to the more verbose manner.

Do you know if there's a config file or something I need to edit to fix this permanently? 

Hi, good question, I came across the same issue. Lets start with saying that in using the Fritz GUI and the Chessbase one, you will somehow get used to their less-than-perfect programming skills, in the sense that there is a certain number of bugs that appear, then are corrected by a patch, then are re-applied, and so on...

There is a text format ini file that can be manually edited, even if I don't remember now where this is located. I'm on vacation now and won't be back before a week or so.

The ini file however contains only a few params that can be changed. Others are stored in encrypted files.

Potential things to try:

1. Set them to figurine, then restart sw, use it. Then set it to desired short notation and see if it works.
2. Check if, however it seems to reset to long notation, it actually prints short notation.

Question: does the option change back by itself to long notation, or it stays to short, but the printed notation is wrong (i.e. it is long instead?)

Basically everytime I run it, it defaults to long e2-e4 kind of notation. I go to the settings whatever, change it back to SAN, ie just e4. Works fine that session. Restarts however forget all that and we're back to e2-e4. Maybe it updates the running instance but doesn't update a config file parsed when Fritz is run. I'll look further, I'm always wary of corrupting config files. Thank you for your help!

Hi, maybe the program lacks access right to overwrite some config storage? Run it once as administrator, set the notation, exit and restart normally. Just a generic thought for an easy try...

Nice one as well, looking for the result of the test from the OP.

In Fritz 20 the Evaluation Profile bars disappear.

Specifically, if I step through a game with "Infinite Analysis" running, each move will create a bar in the Evaluation Profile window. In previous Fritz versions these just remained as calculated, so after stepping to the end I had a good picture of how the game went. But in v20, if I go back to a previous move, all Eval bars after that move disappear!

I do have "Evaluation Profile" enabled in the settings for that.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Guys, I took my time to perform a couple tests on the two recently reported issues, and I can confirm the following:
1) The short notation works correctly on my PC. From the "figurines" I have, I first select the "letters" in my language, so "DRCAP", press "Apply", then select the short notation, "Apply" again. The short notation appears. If I close and restart Fritz, it remains on short notation.
2) The evaluation graph's bars remain even if I move back and forth thru the game. I first make sure that the game does show immediately the evaluation as soon as I open it with Fritz20 from the DB. I mean: under the notation I see the evaluation, fully composed. Then, browsing with the arrow keys, does not remove any previous evaluations.
Hope this helps.
AG

Actually a great idea, sorry folks on holidays.

Thank you, I'll let you know when I get back

Sorry folks, I thought I replied to this one.
So here's what I have so far. Prior to all this, Fritz 20 was saving things fine --- I was using it in user level mode after installation and it would save paths like to syzygy etc. That it would update but not the config for the notation.

I tried to run it in admin mode to see if that made a difference. It did not. It still defaults to the verbose notation ie e2-e4.

Any ideas where the config file may be?

Before attempting to tweak any config file, I would recommend to update Fritz20 to the latest version, which has been pushed out the day before yesterday. I've seen in the log file that something has been fixed around the Options dialog, so maybe that can fix your issue as well.
In the meantime, I'll look into my installation for all the Config files I find and report back.
AG

Update: the only config files I was able to locate, which may or may not help resolve your issue, could be those located in:
C:\Users\**Your_User*Name**\AppData\Local\ChessBase\ChessProgram20
This refers to my Win11 Pro install.
I'm sure others are within the registry hives, but I'm not sure where.
HTH

agatti1970: Thanks for trying the Evaluation Profile retention issue I reported above. Today my Fritz20 is working ok in that regard.

However, it has another serious problem which I also had in Fritz19: if I open a game from my personal database, Fritz20 will often erase the player names! In both the game I just opened and in the database (without me even having saved it again)! This makes it unusable, as was Fritz19.

Fritz18 had the amazing issue that when stepping through the moves of a past game it would lose track of where the pieces were on the board.

So I'm still on Fritz17, hoping for a Fritz21 without any of these bugs.

You're welcome. What you report is an issue with graphics. In earlier version of CB, there was an optioin to use lower or higher graphics definition, but in the last versions I don't see that option anymore. I had experienced similar issues in the past, that I had been able to fix by a replacement of my graphics card drivers.