MPChess 1.2.2D - Copyright 2013-2025 Victor Matei Petrescu


This version requires FreeDOS or an emulator, such as DOSBox, DOSEMU etc.

https://freedos.org/

https://www.dosbox.com/

https://github.com/dreamlayers/em-dosbox/tags

http://www.dosemu.org/

http://dosemu2.github.io/dosemu2/


1. INSTALLATION
2. PLAYING


1. INSTALLATION

The source code is available here, so if you want to compile the game:

- Download open-watcom-c-dos-1.9.exe:

  http://openwatcom.org/ftp/install/

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/openwatcom/

  or watcomc.zip:

  https://freedos.org/download/

- Extract the archive, find directory which contains "BINW", "H" etc. and copy
  all of its contents into C:\WATCOM

- create a file in C:\, for instance "setenv.bat", with the following contents:

  @ECHO OFF
  SET WATCOM=C:\WATCOM
  SET PATH=%WATCOM%\BINW;%PATH%
  SET EDPATH=%WATCOM%\EDDAT
  SET INCLUDE=%WATCOM%\H

- enter C:\  and type:

  setenv.bat

- enter the game's directory and type:

  cd src
  wcc386 chess.c
  wlink option quiet name chess.exe file chess.obj

  wpp386 can be used instead of wcc386.


2. PLAYING

To start the game enter its directory with command "cd" and type "chess.exe".

To make a move during the game, type the coordinates of the start and
destination squares, like this:

e2e4
e2e3
e1g1 (this is castling)

To exit, type "exit".

The program searches (L+2)/2 moves ahead (assuming that a move means that both
sides move a piece), where L is the difficulty level. Positions are evaluated
only by adding the values of the pieces left on the board. Any factors related
to where the pieces are, such as mobility, doubled pawns, isolated pawns etc.
are not considered. The computer should figure those by itself and giving it
any clues would spoil the game. To add variety to the game, the possible moves
are randomly shuffled before every search. On level 2, the difficulty is
comparable to the lowest level of some old chess games for ZX Spectrum (not
all, some of those games play better). ZX Spectrum was a computer from 1982.
The interface is also inspired by those games.

To increase the difficulty, you can make modifications at lines 127...129 in
'src/chess.c' to allow values larger than 4 to be selected. In theory, the
difficulty can be increased to any level, with the only condition of having
infinite time available (4 is already a little slow - a move takes over a
minute on Pentium II, 400 MHz).

The original version of the game uses SDL (https://libsdl.org/) for graphics,
but version 1.2.2D here is for system FreeDOS, for which SDL is not available,
so the graphics are drawn with some functions offered with Open Watcom.
