Mac Hiarcs Users

How do you keep your database up to date? Like with TWIC downloads? The database functions of merging games into ONE up to date MegaBase doesn't seem to be very efficient. Is there an easier way to do this?

Thanks in advance for all help here!

Danny

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I thought this was easy.

Open the target database and then open the smaller database (like the weekly TWIC download, to be copied into the target). Select the smaller one.

Now...

followed by...

Not so much?

Hi IM what do you recommend I get? I own a Mac

Drag and drop in to bigger database.

I have a mac.  I use chessx with stockfish.  I paid for shredder but I like chessx better.  Its completely free and really easy to use.

Shredder is rubbish. Hiarcs is much better.

Chessgames.com is the way to go. Fantastic, you can get any game ever played.

Ok, with Hiarcs, open the download from TWIC or whatever, open the database you want to save in. Top of the screen - Edit - Copy -  you have a choice to save game or all games. Save to the database you want to save to.

HIARCS Chess Explorer is not very suitable for managing large databases. It uses somewhat uneficcient (but very portable) PNG database format. PNG databases are basically just text files and are therefore lacking manipulating abilities of other database formats (indexing etc.). 

What this means practically is that HIARCS must load a *complete* PNG database in memory every time it runs. This gets impractical with large (mega) PNG databases as your mac with probably run out of memory and start swapping to disk.

It's best to keep your PNG databases in logical chunks and load them when you need them.

HIARCS is great, but not for crunching huge amounts of data. You'll want to run ChessBase (using windows emulator like Parallels) for that.

I also suggest maxing out your mac with RAM. There's no such thing as too much RAM.

Hope this helps.

-Izmet (http://bestchessmenever.com)

All of these comments have been super helpful! I didn't realize copying games from one base to another was so easy in HIARCS. I agree the loading of big databases get's annoying. 

Kayden, yes please!!! Needs me an updated base!

Thanks everyone :-)

Danny

Go to the (finished) game in question... There should be a link above the move list.

pgn files are just well organized text files. I find it a bit cumbersome to open a sophistaced GUI such as Chess Explorer just to combine databases. In Macs and of course in Linux the terminal can be used easily and to great effect. A handful of unix commands make the creation of a masterdatabase very easy. For example you can download all TWIC pgn files, then navigate with the terminal to this directory, eg:

cd /Users/yourhomedirectory/Downloads

and then simply combine them with the cat command:

cat *.pgn > all_downloaded_pgns.pgn

PGN-EXTRACT by David Barnes (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/djb/pgn-extract/) is a fantastic command line tool to generate smaller databases for your openings. 

These steps circumvent Hiarcs lack of big database support. Using a combination of simple Unix commands and pgn-extract would be still useful even if big databases were supported.

PS: For those windows-users: it might be a good idea to look into cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com) to bring the power of the commandline to windows.