Chessmaster 11 - Add Stockfish or other UCI engines

Does anyone else notice that the CPU is constantly used even when not in a game?

It's not doing that to me right now, and I don't remember if I've ever had the problem. However, this is from the CM 10 and CM11 FAQ on the Ubisoft forum:

Q: Game.exe always uses 100% CPU, even when I'm just at the Main Menu. Is this normal?
A: Don't worry about it, that's perfectly normal, though admittedly, it does seem a bit excessive.

Q: Why does TheKing.exe keep running after I close the program?
A: No one knows. There's no known solution to this problem. You'll have to close the process manually if it's eating up too much processor power.

https://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/299133-Chessmaster-Grandmaster-Edition-FAQ-READ-THIS-FIRST!

@EscherehcsE: it appears hourglass TC is not something top engines support natively. So it as to be being taught. It need to be implemented inside engine source to play better and use time more wisely.

Once they support hourglass TC. Games should turn out to be very interesting, moving slowly give opponent time advantage and can be spent on critical positions.  They can't afford to move too slowly nor fast. The sweetspot is something inbetween to avoid falling behind on time. 

Ah, yes I am using "Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition", I uninstalled it and will install the Art of Learning edition to see if it has the problem. I am not sure what the differences are between these two...

EDIT: Oh, it's called the Grandmaster edition on PC I guess, Art of Learning on the PSP etc.

I uploaded it to Sendspace. The download link is:

https://www.sendspace.com/file/rct50v

The link should be good for at least 30 days.

Oh, and FYI regarding the rar download... A 7-Zip vulnerability (Zip Slip) was discovered recently. If you use 7-Zip to decompress rar archives, you should upgrade 7-Zip to the latest version (18.05).

Also, any other decompression programs that use 7-Zip, such as PeaZip, should also be upgraded.

Lucas chess is free and has more features than chessmaster.

Has anyone been able to get this to work in Chessmaster's "setup position" mode? UCI engines can run with polyglot in training mode (because the engine starts from the starting position), but setting up a position doesn't work for me with Stockfish 9 (which supports a  setup board command, so the problem could be with polyglot). Also, I have tried some winboard engines in setup position mode, and only one worked: Fairy-Max. I am using Chessmaster 10th. 

Re: maathheus: Lucas Chess doesn't have 3D boards, among other things.

I wasn't able to get it to work in setup position mode, either. I tried Stockfish 7, Stockfish 8, and Shredder 12 in Chessmaster 10th - No joy. I haven't yet tried any added Winboard engines. My guess is that it's likely a polyglot issue, but I'm just speculating.

I have tried to install stockfish to my chessmaster 11 by using the guideline posted on first page. It didnt give any error but the engine does not play. Do you have any info on this?

I had to put all of the polyglot files into the same directory as the Stockfish executables. I did quite a bit of renaming to remove underscores/spaces in files per @EscherehcsE's preferences. Here were my steps.

(1) First, I unzipped the Stockfish 10 Windows .zip file into the same destination folder as my Chessmaster program directory-- to here (it is probably the C: for you, but that part doesn't matter):

G:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition

creating this new folder:

G:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition\Stockfish

(2) Inside of this new Stockfish folder is another folder. The default name of that folder is "Stockfish-10-win". I didn't like the hyphens or the length of that name, so I changed the name to:

Win10

Not necessary, but I'm detailing as much as possible. Inside of this folder are the contents of the Stockfish engine including many files and several folders. The "Windows" folder is the one that contains the Stockfish .exe files.

(3) I elected to use the x86 version not because my machine isn't 64-bit, but because the Chessmaster program itself is 32-bit, and I thought it might create compatibility issues to use the 64-bit version. I changed the name of this exe file to once again remove underscores:

stockfish10x86.exe

(4) Having done this I had to modify the polyglot.ini file I created per his directions in this thread's original post accordingly (I used Notepad). If it isn't clear all you have to do is open Notepad, copy/paste the contents of his Github link, and save the resulting file as polyglot.ini. I then changed the Engine Command line within that file to read like so:

EngineCommand = ./stockfish10x86

(5) Here is the key step, I believe, if you already got everything else right, but it still didn't work. You must unzip the polyglot1.4w29.zip you downloaded from a link in the original post in this thread to this same folder that contains the Stockfish executables. This creates the polyglot1.4w29.exe file and the "src" folder inside of it. I changed the name of the executable to this for simplicity (probably not necessary): 

polyglot.exe

I also put the polyglot.ini file I created in this same folder. Thus, the Stockfish10x86.exe, polyglot.exe, and polyglot.ini all reside inside this directory:

G:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition\Stockfish\Win10\Windows

(6) Finally, I went into the Chessmaster program, and followed his steps in #3 to Import Winboard Engine. I named mine "Stockfish 10". In summary, for "Winboard Engine Filename", I browsed to this directory:

G:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition\Stockfish\Win10\Windows\polyglot.exe

I then highlighted that field, copied it, and pasted it into the "Command Line Parameters" below. I changed the last three letters to "ini", and I hit the space button twice as instructed.

G:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition\Stockfish\Win10\Windows\polyglot.ini__

*Note: the underscores above represent the two spaces. You don't type in underscores in the program. You just hit the space button twice after "ini".  

Finally, I checked the "Pondering" box as advised.

I tested it out with a Fischer clock of 5+3 and 3+2. Give Stockfish ~15 seconds to make its first move. It is slow in the opening, so I assume it isn't utilizing its opening book, but I could be wrong. I played it against the Chessmaster three times. It wasn't a close matchup with a +1 pawn endgame. Stockfish 10 utterly crushed Chessmaster every time.

I found this thread and successfully utilized it to import Stockfish 15 (which kills Chessmaster like it's nothing) and then I noticed the comments about using Stockfish with the mentor features. I added the "personality=Stockfish15" line to my user ini file and the mentor lines stopped working. I assume this is what was meant in post #7 by "you can't use an engine for manual analysis" and I was curious if premio53 or anyone else had taken a look under the hood and tried to figure out why that stops working.

UPDATE: I found something that claims to do exactly what I wanted but I don't understand quite how to make it work.

Xyrus2000/ChessBridge: A bridge application that allows the chessmaster gui (9000, X, and XI) to work with different engines as the core, and allow the chessmaster based engines to work better with 3rd party GUIs (github.com)

If any of you could look at this or help revive it and help me understand it, I would appreciate it.