English Chess Forum

Does anyone know what the best chess programme is to get for a MacBook? I really just want something to help me analyse my games (Fritz isn't made for a Mac).

Cheers
Paul

Generally speaking, there isn't much chess software for Macs because chess players don't own Macs because there isn't much chess software.

I found this site

http://www.chelper.net/chess/chess_software.htm

which lists what's out there.

Hiarcs, Shredder and Crafty show Mac versions and have reputations as reasonably strong chess engines.

Plan B would be to install Windows to run Fritz etc. but I expect you don't want to do that

Many thanks

Paul.

I would expect it to work with Wine (the Windows emulator...) but I have never tried it on my Mac Mini to be honest

You would perhaps need to be a little more technically minded but it should work in my opinion if you want to try it!

Paul, if it's an Intel based Mac then you can run windows effectively. I use a Mac Book Pro with Parallels Desktop which works well. that means I can use Fritz and Chessbase on the Windows part and still have the benefit of the Mac for everything else. It is a shame that Chessbase/Fritz doesn't develop Mac versions however. If it's not intel-based, then I do know a Mac user who has used Hiarcs for some time and is happy with it.

I think some versions of Rybka run on the Mac.

Well, Wine is not an emulator, it's a compatibility layer.

This registry shows how well the various Fritzes run on Wine. Personally, I've got Fritz 6 to work perfectly. However, I'm using Ubuntu, not Snow Leopard. I don't know if that matters. Also, that registry seems to mainly have reviews from various Ubuntu (or Linux) users, rather than Mac. If you're going to get a Fritz to run on Wine, make sure it's an old one.

Picky...

1.4. Is Wine an emulator? There seems to be disagreement.

There is a lot of confusion about this, particularly caused by people getting Wine's name wrong and calling it WINdows Emulator.

When users think of an emulator, they tend to think of things like game console emulators or virtualization software. This is the wrong way to think about Wine - Wine runs Windows applications in essentially the same way Windows does. Wine is just a native Unix substitute for the components of Windows; there is no inherent loss of speed due to "emulation" when using Wine, nor is there a need to open Wine before running your application.

That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator; both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way.

Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode.

There are a few things that makes wine more than just an emulator.

Sections of Wine can be used on Windows. Some virtual machines use Wine's OpenGL-based implementation of Direct3D on Windows rather than truly emulate 3D hardware.
Winelib can be used for porting windows application source code to other operating systems that Wine supports to run on any processor - even processes that neither Windows nor the Emulator bit of Wine supports.

"Wine is not just an emulator" would be a more correct name. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.

Look at scid

http://scid.sourceforge.net/download.html

It has been ported to the mac platform and provides combined functions of chess database and game play/analysis (engines of reasonable strength included in the package).

Paolo

The HIARCS guys do some MAC software
http://www.hiarcs.com/

A handy tip is to install VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems as Virtual Machine and install Windows (although you'll need to purchase a Windows Licence key) then just install whatever windows program you prefer. That's what I do... Also after you have VirtualBox make sure you install Guest Additions so that it more seamlessly integrates with your mac i.e. your mouse goes between the VM and Mac OSX without you having to switch with 'Cmd F'


Good luck...

I just grabbed Rybka 2.2n2 and the Tarrasch GUI, which are available as a free download. They run just fine in Windows on my Mac under Parallels.

On a related note, has anyone tried any of the chess apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch? The HIARCS one looks interesting.

Use boot camp to create a windows operating system, thats what i use. I wanted a mac but wasnt going to get one because all the programs like chessbase etc u cant use, then i found out about boot camp. Its easy to set up and then u just choose which operating system to use on start up, gets u the best of both worlds