Chessbase chess playing software

I am looking for another chess playing software program for use on my laptop (Windows 10 operating system).  Mostly, I want to play against a machine.   I have Junior 8, a Chessbase Fritz program.  I also have the following free GUIs: Arena, Lucas, Nibbler, Crafty, Deep Fritz and Shredder. 

1. First question: If I buy a new Fritz program, the choices are Fritz 18, Power Fritz and Fat Fritz.  What are the differences and features?  I wrote to Chessbase asking this question and they recommended Power Fritz because it has the newest and best engine.  I don't need a very very strong engine since my rating is about 1150.

2. Second question: If I go to eBay and search on "Fritz" and "Chessbase", I get the folowing results:  

Fritz 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11,
Deep Fritz 7,
Zap! Chess Engine,
Shredder 7, 8, 11, and
Junior 9.

Please help me sort out these programs.  What are the differences?  What do they have in common?  When they were new?  Are they similar to my Junior 8 program?

3. Third question:  How about ChessMaster?  Is it worth using decades later?

Download extra personalities for your Chessmaster and you are good to go. The King engine which comes with it is very strong.

You already have plenty of chess playing programs; I'm not sure why you'd need more of them. Lucas Chess, which you already have, is great.

You might enjoy Chessmaster 10 or 11 (11 is also called Grandmaster Edition.) You can't buy Chessmaster from Ubisoft anymore. You'd have to get it from eBay, Amazon, or abandonware sites. (Some abandonware sites I'd trust, some I wouldn't.) The problem with Chessmaster is that it's an old program that's no longer supported, and it might be hard or impossible to find the add-on tidbits for it.

I was thinking the same the thing. Why so many GUIs?

Is it because he has to take the GUI to get the engine?  I'm asking because I have the same question.  I would think with UCI the object would be to split out those engines to add them to a single GUI, at least that would be my goal.  Sadly I'm on a Mac where there's already a dearth of options.

Each one has its own quirks, features and shortcomings.  This is especially true for the "free" / trial versions.  E.g., Deep Fritz doesn't save games.  Also, it doesn't use most UCI *.exe engines.   Nor does Junior 8. In Shredder, it's hard to select a single engine that I'd like to use.  I'm not sure how it works with a bunch of engines. 

By the way, I have the following additional free GUIs, but I don't find them satisfactory for use playing games against the engine:  BanksiaGUI, Chenard, ChessForge, CuteChess, Jerry, Scid, Slow Chess, Spike and Tarrasch.

Are the Chessbase / Fritz routines Fritz 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, Deep Fritz 7, Zap! Chess Engine, and Shredder 7, 8, 11 pretty much the same as Junior 8 which I already have? 

I'm not a Chessbase expert, but I did buy Fritz 8 at one point. I think that Fritz 8, Shredder 8, and Junior 8 all used the Fritz 8 GUI (graphical user interface), but they just came with different engines.

In general, if the package was "Deep", then it was a multiprocessor engine, whereas if it wasn't "Deep", then it was a single-processor engine. (The Deep version was a little stronger than the single-processor engine, but not by a dramatic amount.)

I never bought any other of their products, because I didn't care much for their proprietary engine format.

I recommend engines that use online neural network analysis. This was the next step beyond the products that did multi-processor/core chess analysis.