Software Chess Simulators

I don't mean cheating software

I mean are there any installable and playable offline Chess games for a PC (Win10 Enterprise box with i7 6700 16GB but only GT1030 GFX), preferably freeware but willing to pay.

I don't game so do not have steam, besides I want it to work offline also.

I remember having some Chess game on my Amiga500 like 30 years ago, but never really ever played it.

Octamed & Sensible Soccer were the only software I really loaded :-) Millennials will have no idea what I am talking about!

Happy New Year to everyone at Chess.com

Do you mean current designs, or older, obsolete designs from the 80s, 90s, etc.?

Oh, OK (preferably freeware but willing to pay), so I'm assuming you want current. Probably the several most popular freeware GUIs are:

1) Lucas Chess - https://lucaschess.pythonanywhere.com/

2) Scid vs. PC - http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/

3) Scid - http://scid.sourceforge.net/

4) Arena - http://www.playwitharena.de/

I was referring to current software of sorts, not retro, after a lot of searching I found Chessmaster 9000, seems to fulfill my needs and managed to get a physical copy off Amazon for just £5 secondhand.

Thanks, I will certainly check those out!

Ah, okay, Chessmaster 9000 is good, if it installs on Windows 10 without problems. I installed CM 9000 on Windows 7 a while back. The install went smoothly, except that it wanted me to insert the CD into the drive every time the program started. I had a tough time modifying the install to get around that limitation. But maybe you'll have better luck.

In case you're interested in the CM 9000 patches, here's an archived link to the official Ubisoft CM 9000 patches. There are three patches, and if I remember correctly, they should be applied in order.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050219171849/http://www.ubi.com/US/Downloads/Info.aspx?dlId=12

If I remember correctly, even if you apply the three patches, the program will still periodically require insertion of the CD (after 14 days, or on the 20th use, whichever comes first). (One of the Chessmaster 10 official patches removes the CD-check requirement, but not so for Chessmaster 9000.) As far as I know, to get around this CM 9000 requirement, you'd have to apply an unofficial "no CD" patch. Even this unofficial patch wouldn't work on my Windows 7 machine. Ultimately, my Rube Goldberg solution to this problem was to install CM 9000 on my Windows 2000 machine, apply the official patches and the unofficial "no CD" patch to my Windows 2000 machine, THEN manually copy the patched Chessmaster executable file from my Windows 2000 machine to my Windows 7 machine. :-)

P.S. - If you don't want to use the original CDs for the periodic CD checks, you could burn copies of the CDs, then use the copies for the CD checks.

Chessmaster 9000 'apparently' works fine on Win10, you simply need to enable legacy direct play (found under programs and features/turn windows settings on or off/legacy)

Failing that I will simply ISO a copy of the CD and mount it in a virtual CD/DVD drive

And if that does not work, well it's only £5 I spent

Thanks for all your help though my friend, really appreciated. 

Great! I was actually thinking of trying to install CM 9000 on a Win 10 box that I have lying around not doing anything. Sounds like it might need the legacy setting, since my CDs are for Win 98, Me, and XP. Thanks for the tip - I'm not sure I would have thought to check for that.

If the legacy setting does not work, then I would suggest creating an iso of the physical cd, mount this iso on win10 and install it from the virtual drive, as long as the iso is mounted it 'should' work and never ask for a cd as the iso is always mounted.

Just for fun, I tried doing an admin install of CM 9000 in my Windows 10 Pro box without enabling DirectPlay, just to see if it would let me get away with that. It seemed to install OK, but the first time I tried to run the program, Windoze told me that I needed to install DirectPlay.  So I said, "Sure, go ahead", and after a reboot, CM fired up without a hitch. It's working great. (Well, I did have to go into the advanced settings and tell it to "run as administrator", but I think that was to be expected. Before I did that, it would give me a fatal exception message regarding the Mentor database.)

I also applied the three patches and replaced the chessmaster.exe file with my Windows 2000 executable, so I shouldn't get any nags about inserting the CD.

The ease of installing CM 9000 into Windows 10 was a pleasant surprise for me; I actually expected it to be very difficult, if not impossible, based on the fact that *many* people in the past weren't able to install Chessmaster 10th Edition into Windows 10. Is it possible that the DirectPlay feature is a recent addition to Windows 10? If DirectPlay was there all along, I wouldn't think very many people would have had problems with the CM 10th installs. (Maybe CM 10 has a different copy-protection scheme that causes problems with Windows 10, idk.) I guess I might need to try installing CM 10 next, haha.

That's cool, Seems I should have no worries when my copy from Amazon turns up!

I do believe the direct play feature was a feature of (WinXp) and disabled by default in Windows  7, 8 &10, Probably due to some serious exploit in Windows Xp so they had to re-write the code from scratch for Windows 7, Hence it became a legacy feature.

I just tried installing CM 10 on my Windows 10 box. No joy, I'm not sure why it didn't work. When I click on the icon, nothing happens. I can hear the drive grind for a bit, but nothing comes up on the screen. I uninstalled everything, and I may try the install again. But if it doesn't work, no big deal, as I have it installed on my Windows 7 hard drive (no longer connected to the internet, of course).

Well, I give up - I just can't get CM 10 installed on Win 10. I feel like I'm close, but no cigar. I get the initial splash screen and video, but when the main window comes up (the one showing the various choices like Training, Tournaments, etc.), it's just a black window. The strange thing is, the links inside the black window are active, if you can find them. But even then no boards will be visible. So it looks like something is wonky with the video. I've tried everything I can think of: DirectPlay, no DirectPlay, trying to install DirectX 9.0 during the CM install (doesn't work, it just says a newer version of DirectX is already installed, which is ver 12 in my case). I've also tried every compatibility setting I can think of - nothing works.

If this was important to me, I'd keep beating my head against the wall, but I've already got it running just fine in Windows 7. (And I hardly use Windows 10 - I've mostly abandoned it for Linux.) @66mhz, I think you made the right choice between CM 9000 and CM 10. :-)

Good news on installing CM 10 in Windows 10. I decided to give it one last look - I decided to go to the Ubisoft Chessmaster 10 forum to see if I was forgetting any steps in the installation, and I had indeed forgotten one - A rookie mistake.

You don't need to do it for CM 9000, but for CM 10 in Windows 10, you're advised to disable your antivirus programs (in my case, Windows Defender). So I disconnected from the internet, disabled Defender, then tried the CM 10 install once more, and it installed just fine. :-)

Oh, and one more item to mention. My default compatibility setting was on Win 98/Me, but the video was a little herky-jerky and tearing a little. I changed the compatibility to Windows XP SP 3, and that problem went away.

As a followup, in the thread linked below, I think we figured out why so many people weren't able to install CM9000 into Windows 10. In most releases of Disc 1, the Setup.exe file is copy-protected, and Win10 has removed support for this copy protection - So the program won't install. As the thread mentions, my disc has  an earlier release of Setup.exe that isn't copy-protected, so that's why I never had a problem installing CM9000 into Win10. PM me if you want a copy of my Setup.exe file.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/getting-chessmaster-9000-to-work-in-windows-10