Getting Chessmaster 9000 to Work in Windows 10

That may be too big a price to pay...

I am backing everything up now for when I do attack this problem. A major concern of course trying to find all my passwords. MS Word is one I have great trepidation about.

Well, I *have* noticed one glitch. I set up an engine tournament with about 6 engines. A total of 600 games. At the time control I picked, the tournament would probably take a number of days to complete. After running a number of hours, I'll look at the computer screen, only to notice that the CM 9000 program has closed. I can restart CM 9000 and reload the tournament, and it will play for a number of hours more, then repeat the cycle.

I don't know what's causing the program to close. At first, I thought it might be the screensaver, but I disabled that, and it didn't make any difference. I'm not sure whether this was a problem in Windows 7, but I don't remember any such problem in Win 7.

Interesting. And NOT the 'Power' options you say. Still if it runs for a few hours that would still be enuff for me! Perhaps your processor is overheating?

I've turned off the screensaver & power options to "never". I haven't been monitoring cpu temps - I might have to install a utility to allow me to monitor cpu temps. However, only CM 9000 has been shutting down - Windows stays up; So the PC hasn't been shutting down completely.

I did look at processes in the task manager and noticed that there were a million occurrences of "the king.exe" running. I deleted them all and restarted CM 9000. I'll keep watching the task manager.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......... Interesting........

Well, probably every time CM 9000 shut down, it left a copy of "the king.exe" active, which might explain the multiple copies of the engine in Task Manager. It doesn't explain why CM 9000 is shutting down. I'll keep watching everything.

That is curious.

This is the fuss that I avoid regarding compatibility of old software on new operating systems. Better to just run them in the best real hardware that you can get. Dirt cheap on eBay. 

Yeah. Frustrating. Still. You got 99% of the features working! Bravo!  As for me? I am not spending  a couple hundred bux to get an old computer. There MUST be a legacy, old abandonware site that has CM9000 on it SOMEwhere! I found a site long time ago that had about 70% of the features working for download. Just not the features that I wanted.

Well, I don't remember having these kind of problems with CM 9000 in Windows 7. So if older hardware isn't an acceptable solution, then maybe a VM with XP or Win7 is the answer.

Btw, I'm still trying to figure out the cause of the glitch. I thought I had it figured out, but nope - It happened again - so I'm still hunting for it. I might not ever figure it out, lol.

What makes this worse is knowing that Microsoft is *constantly* fiddling with changes to Win 10.

"What makes this worse is knowing that Microsoft is *constantly* fiddling with changes to Win 10." I know right?!  Dunno if a VM would help. Curious if it would. I would do it if I could find the old program that I used before. It was one that I understood.

I know VM did not help with Power Chess a win 98 program, but did work with Kasparov's gambit.

An interesting read - https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-run-old-games-on-windows-10/ 

Well, I think I'm about ready to throw in the towel. I've tried a number of things, but I haven't found the solution yet (if there's even a solution at all). It will run for somewhere around 4 to almost 5 hours or so, then the GUI closes out, (According to the task manager, it's the Chessmaster.exe process that closes.) Oddly enough, the two active engines keep humming merrily along, haha. I didn't check temperatures, but I doubt that temps are the problem. The two engines are taking up just about all the cpu resources (near 100% for both engines total). The Chessmaster.exe file only uses a few percent of cpu resources.

At first I thought my Win2000 "No-CD" patch was the problem, since the patch modifies the Chessmaster.exe file. However, when I reinstalled CM 9000 without this patch, the problem remained.

I also tried setting Win XP compatibility in addition to the legacy DirectPlay.

I also tried making the CM 9000 program folder an exception for Windows Defender and the firewall.

The last thing I tried was to not install the program in the default folder (C:\Program Files (x86)). Instead, I created a new folder with a different name and installed the program into that folder.

I may have tried a few other things, I can't remember. (Oh, I always installed the three official patches. I guess I could have tried not installing the patches, but even if that worked, what good would the program be with a bunch of unpatched bugs?)

On my last attempt, I *was* lucky enough to catch the error message just before the GUI closed down! It said:

Error - Data read

Incorrect size

(It also had a little "OK" button that I could have tried clicking, but I chose not to click it.) The error message stayed on the screen until the engine on move flagged its clock, then the GUI shut down.

I guess that's about it. I just got tired of beating my head against the wall, lol.

Its possible that what you have is a timing problem in the application that is made visible by running the machine  and Chessmaster application flat out for hours on end.  It could be made worse  or even made visible, by differences in the operating system since it was written (and tested) and differences in the chunking and timing of the data transfer between processes.  I doubt its a disk read error, but you could check the event log for that.

Interesting. Thanks for your input.

Just for fun, I installed the old-games download version in Windows 10. (It does enable DirectPlay for you if you don't enable it ahead of time.) The nice thing about it is that it's already patched, and I guess it doesn't have any CD checks (since there isn't any CD). And, I didn't notice that it was missing any features, although I only did a spot check. However, it suffers from the same "4-5 hour GUI shutdown" glitch in Windows 10. I got the same error message as before.

This time I checked the Event Viewer, although it's mostly Greek to me. It did mention that the faulting process was Chessmaster.exe, and the faulting module was Display8.dll. Everything else was gibberish to me.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Yes I suspect missing DLLs to be a part of the problem in terms of getting CM9000 to work.

No, the dll is there - It's not missing. In fact, it worked for almost 5 hours...