Chessbase 17 problems (Tablebases)

Is there anyone who can get the endgame tablebases to work in Chessbase 17?  When inserting a position within a database range there is nothing in chessbase 17. In Chessbase 16 this works fine.  The above pic is Chessbase 17 and Chess 16 is below so that you can see the difference. Chessbase support doesn't respond. 
 

Hi, they do not work. As usual like most of their products they’re full of bugs and you just wait for their subsequent updates in the hope it will work properly. Also the fonts are very limited (no Fritz5, no user defined or clear colour options), searching for annotated games in megabase shows an empty search. Their products are very faulty, last year it was impossible to create new cloud bases for months, I contacted them and they could not address it, suddenly after months I tried it again and it works now - but again only through chessbase 16, you can not create new cloud databases on chessbase 17.

My suggestion is continue to use 16 until (hopefully) they sort it out, whenever that will be. I’ve realised that a lot of chess software is experimental even at point of sale or in the case of free stuff as well like stockfish. Stockfish will keep crashing when using the 6 piece tablebases and you can only use 5 piece. This is unfortunately also true of fat Fritz, which is paid for.

@donniebrascosr yes I forgot to add their support are hopeless and evasive even if they ever do respond

Hi, Thank you for your answer.

Yes indeed I saw the problem with the fonts also and there is no possibility to choose the right colour as a background. Last year I had the problem with the cloud databases but I thought I did something wrong. Now I understand why this wasn’t working. Frustrating. 

Maybe I will try HCE for a while. 

Chessbase is at its best when "borrowing" and selling open source stuff, while denying that they did that.

I would dare to say that their programs are Bughouse Deluxe, with one problem solved and two new created, but you can find worse than that, e.g. Chess Assistant selling "new versions" which are just the same thing for the last 5-6 years, with most of the reported bugs withstanding.

Expect ver.17 to sort-of-mature after at least six months, or so. At version 16 they needed some 20 updates to fix a very simple problem with unicode characters. And from what i have read, v.17 still is not 100% unicode compliant, which speaks volumes about the quality of their coding.

Anyone else having issues switching databases to do position searched (using the reference tab and the pulldown menu to change databases) if the database has been converted to 2CBH format?  I figured out too late that appears to only be working with the old format and not 2CBH format at the moment.  Wondering if it is just me or if others found the same?  It seems to work if the database has been designated as the reference database in the database properties - but not if it has not.

To clarify if I use the pull-down menu circled in red and switch to a CBH formatted database, the position search updates as expected.  If I select a 2CBH formatted database other than the one actually designated as my reference (Mega in this case) it does not work.

As I've discovered, CB17 is not about working with 2CBH. At least not so far. Maybe they'll make an update that will fix how long it takes to convert into the format and move games into and out of it. But right now those two things go about 100x slower, i.e. if you're converting a PGN to a CBH (on a system comparable to my own) it will go at about 4000/s and if you convert a PGN to a 2CBH it will go at about 40/s. So if it takes ten minutes the first way, it really will take a thousand the second way.

I have tablebases working, but I don't know if that has anything to do with 2CBH, as you might imagine after what I just said. But the thing is that even Power Fritz 18 doesn't work with that format. Just try making an opening book in Power Fritz and importing a db. It won't even recognize the 2CBH file format.

Use Arena or SCID PC. Free and less buggy

Yes, Scid has a tablebase window and can use Nalimov tablebases. Though I have not used that so far. I use Lichess or Shredderchess.

Scid vs. PC is great alongside ChessBase. Stripping out tags is something that CB doesn't do, for instance. I've heard that it won't get any more updates, however. I hope that's not the case.

If you use Scid, or Scid vs PC, I recommend to install both. Both have their use cases. Scid vs PC is better at importing PGNs and some other database stuff, Scid has the better game window and a more polished GUI. (when using Vista or XP Native theme, the default theme is ugly). Though I admit, the Chessbase GUI looks most pretty.

CB really is far more extensive than any other application out there. Or suite of applications, really. But they've kind of turned into the chess version of late-90s Microsoft, so I can see why you would prefer Scid. This Power Fritz is almost exactly the same as Fritz 18. It was only thirty bucks to upgrade, but still. It was like MS releasing Windows ME only a short while before coming out with XP. I do like regular Scid, but it seems as if I would have to create a database just to import a PGN and work with it, although maybe I've missed a step. I've been considering figuring out how to run Linux software in Windows, so that I can grab the latest version.

Yes, Scid can not replace games in PGNs, it just can export to new PGNs.

That is because PGNs can not easily be live filtered, they are text files without indexes, while Scid databases are fully indexed. Chessbase resolves that by creating index files when opening PGNs, but Scid and Scid vs PC focus on the Scid database format.

I dunno what you mean with grab the latest version. The Scid versions are latest on Windows, on Linux the package managers contain outdated versions of Scid.

Oh! That makes it easier. I was assuming that it was Linux software that they were porting over, and that they were a few versions behind on Windows.

Yes, both Scid and Scid vs PC install the latest versions on Windows with no problem, at least on my Windows 7 box :-)

With version 5 there was a solution for the tablebases when there is a winning position

In the case of a position where there is a draw the tablebases disappear. 

Overall, are any Chessbase products worth buying, for someone who plays a mix of daily and rapid and is not very high rated but keen to study and improve?

I had several problems with the pull down menu. Also in the video of Sagar Shah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TMmjwrbSJE you can see that there are too little hits in the 2CBH reference database vs the online database when searching a position. (see from aprox 25.00 minutes to 27.00 minutes in the video).

I hope that Chessbase brings out some updates to correct these problems.