SCID vs PC

No, I didn't delete my post.  (At least not intentionally.)

Funny... Firefox and Windows 10, which I downloaded late last night, won't allow me to post without the post being in italics.  (And it won't allow me to turn the italics off.  This new Microsoft EDGE browser appears to be okay, however.)

Anyway, I'm curious... how much RAM do you have on your system?

I THOUGHT my command line utility from a text file trick was on my Scid vs. PC tribute page. 

http://www.edcollins.com/chess/scidvspc/index.html

However, I see it is not.  Maybe I will add it.

The text file you create will have one line in it:

"C:\Scid vs PC-4.14\bin\pgnscid.exe" UltraBook.pgn

Hit ENTER after the line, when you enter it.  Name the file convert.bat

1 GB of RAM?  That's it?  That can't be right.  Well, maybe it is, but I thought Windows itself required more RAM than that.

What will happen when i quit a group while playing a team match in it?

Ed, I noticed when using this batch file method, the progress bar in the Command Prompt window doesn't work. Do you know any way to fix this?

I'm wondering if it IS your 1 GB of RAM that's causing the error message. I just tried the pgnscid converter program WITHOUT the batch file, and it was able to successfully convert a 2.5 million game database. (I have 4 GB total RAM.)

No.  In fact, I wasn't even aware the progress bar didn't work.  However, later this evening when I get home I will do some experimenting and see what I might be able to figure out. 

Executing the utility via a batch file or executing it without the batch file SHOULD be the same thing, I'd like to think.  I like the batch file method because I can save that little text file and it's then easier for me to remember what I need to do and what the format is.  (I don't convert files very often and because of that, it's easy to forget the syntax of the command-line parameter.)

I think you may be right about this. In my 2.5 million game database, there weren't very many different round numbers (much less than 262 thousand). So I guess you'll have to keep the round number below the limit if you're going to use Scid vs. PC. Either delete the round number tags, or renumber them with fewer numbers, idk. (If the round numbers aren't important, many times people will just put a question mark in the round number tag field.)

By the way, I don't recommend Notepad.  It's very basic and very limiting and yes, it doesn't open large files.  Instead, I recommend something like TextPad for all of your text editing needs.   In addition to TextPad, there are lots of other good text editors out there, many of which are free.  They have lots more options and features than Notepad.

I have pgn file of 4.8 million games and TextPad opens it just fine.  Now, with so little RAM on your system you may have a problem opening large files with ANY text editor.  (I have 14 GB of RAM on my system here at home.)

If you have any computer programming skills you could write a short little program to edit your pgn file, and remove the ROUND tag or edit it or whatever.  An Excel macro could do it, for example.  This way you wouldn't have to worry about opening it at all.

I think this is a known limitation of SCID / SCID vs PC. The PGN format has a "round" tag, and the compressed format of SCID databases store the round number in 18-bits. That limits it to 2 to the power 14 = 256K.

So it is not so much the total number of games in the database that is limited, but the maximum round number. As soon a SCID encounters a round number larger than 256K it will choke on it, because it cannot encode it. If you do a million games that all have round numbers below 100, there is no problem at all.

OK, I think I have a solution, as long as the Round numbers don't mean anything to you. Norm Pollock has a set of pgn command-line utilities named 40H-PGN Utility Suite. One of them is named tagNull, and it will set all occurrences of a specified tag name in a pgn file to its null value (a question mark in this case).

Here's Norm's web page:  http://www.hoflink.com/~npollock/chess.html

Download the file named "40H-PGN-20151002.7z". Notice that it's in 7-zip format. You can extract the archive using 7-zip, available here:  http://www.7-zip.org/

After extracting all of the individual 40H-PGN files, copy your pgn database into that folder. Then open up a DOS command prompt and change the directory to the folder with the 40H-PGN files and your database.

Then type the command:

tagNull UltraBook.pgn Round

then press Enter. It may take 5 to 10 minutes or so to do its business. When it's done, all of the Round tags should look like this:

[Round "?"]

You can use GigaEdit to look at the modified pgn file. GigaEdit is the only free text editor I know of that can handle super large files without taking forever to open.

https://gigaedit.codeplex.com/

Oh, one last item to mention. I think Norm Pollock's Readme file cautions against deleting the Round tag, so it's better to just change them to the null value.

I'm not sure what could be causing that error message. It seems you've ruled out OS incompatibility (or at least you tried it on a 64-bit OS). It could be hardware incompatibility, except you tried it on two PCs.

You could check the hash of the tagNull.exe file to see if it's corrupted. Right-click on the tagNull.exe file, then click on "Properties", then "Checksums".

My MD5 hash is:

8b334b64308c68ab902b1b6f053b4c85

And my SHA-1 hash is:

a529d0856b67a8bac1fe8f67b77399f9615edb8a

If your tagNull.exe file isn't corrupted, then I guess I've run out of ideas.

I *think* that 32-bit programs should still run in 64-bit machines. Anyway, when I ran tagNull on my 64-bit machine, my Windows Task Manager said that tagNull was running as a 32-bit application.

Anyway, good luck with your project.

EscherehcsE certainly deserves most of the thanks. 

If you haven't seen it already, be sure to see my tribute page for more Scid vs PC tips.