Name of earlier Windows chess program?

I've been playing Chess Titans lately because it came with my operating system (Windows Vista), but in a previous Windows operating system I had around 2006 there was a much stronger program that I believe I never beat. I would like to get a copy of that program for times when I don't have Internet access. Does anybody remember which program that was?

By the way, I downloaded SCID vs PC, but it's harder to use for playing a game from a setup position, which is one of the features I need, and to figure out how to run it, and it eats up most of my RAM and forces me to abort out of other programs I have running, so I've hardly used it. If somebody has a better suggestion for a free, easy-to-use, strong program, one with graphics already built in or easy to add please let me know.

I am not sure the one you mean, but do you know you can download world class programs for free?  Like, you can get Stockfish, which is last year's strongest and this year is #2, for free.  I think you can get the new #1 as well, but I just don't recall it's name.  Not pirate--freeware.

I don't know what your earlier chess program was. What was your previous operating system? Did the chess program come with the OS, or could it have been installed separately?

Also, I'm a bit confused about one thing: You want to play against a chess program that's so strong that you can never beat it?

Regarding the RAM issue, how much free RAM do you have available? (You also might want to mention the total RAM installed on your machine.) It might be the case that the engine is using a large hash table size, which would reduce the available RAM. You could lower the hash table size at the expense of engine performance. But in general, if you have an old piece of hardware, you might not be able to run a bunch of applications in addition to a chess program.

Scid vs. PC isn't that hard to use for playing against an engine. You might want to check the engine settings to make sure the hash table size isn't too large and that you're not specifying too many cores (threads).

One very easy-to-use chess GUI is Tarrasch Chess GUI. It also has a fairly small memory footprint. (http://www.triplehappy.com/)  The only problem with this GUI is that it's very plain looking.

Another GUI with a small memory footprint is Winboard, but if you had trouble using Scid vs. PC, you may also have trouble using Winboard. (With Winboard, you have to have a bit of a "tweaker" mentality.)

Winboard download: http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=51528

Another possibility is the Crafty Chess Interface. I haven't kept up with the versions - I have ver 5, and it's up to ver 10 now.

http://nchess.eu/crafty/

Thanks for the suggestions.

Stockfish is a free engine but doesn't come with graphics. That might be an option if the external graphics package is easy enough to install, which is why I mentioned that. Also, I am not sure if an "engine" is intended mostly for analysis of single positions, or for playing games. I'm more interested in playing games.

I don't remember which Windows version I had before, or else I would have mentioned it. I looked online for some such list of earlier Windows chess programs but so far I have been unable to find such a list. Yes, the program I mentioned came free with the operating system, similar to Chess Titans, except it was much stronger. I remember it also had an openings book in text file format that I could view and modify, which I did, which was a very nice feature.

The reason I want another program is that Chess Titans is a little too weak for me and it won't let me set up the board to practice my usual defenses (Titans always chooses 1. d4 so I can't get practice defending against 1. e4). It's very similar to Bluebush Chess in long move time, poor positional understanding, fairly limited tactical lookahead, and 10 levels of play, but at least Bluebush allowed me to set up the board, which I can't do in Chess Titans. The program I'm seeking was very much like the strength of the chess.com program on ~1600 level play, although its openings weren't random as chess.com's program is. Ideally I'd like to have a program I could never beat (I'm in need of proper discipline!) but any program stronger than Chess Titans would be fine. (By the way, I suspect chess.com's "~1600" level is really "~1900" level since I've *never* beaten it, only pulled off some draws.)

I don't remember how much RAM I have. I read that SCID vs PC has a huge opening book, so if it's pulling that into RAM, that alone would explain the problem.

None of the program names people mentioned above sound familiar, but I'll check into them anyway.

Some amateur engines can't analyze and can only play games, but most of the better engines, both free and commercial, can do both. The Stockfish engine might be a good choice (in addition to a GUI of your choosing). Stockfish is extremely strong, yet its reduced-strength settings (0 to 20) correlate to roughly about 1200 elo up to full strength. There are some other engines that can play even weaker than Stockfish. Any of the previously mentioned GUIs, except for Chess Titans, can install Stockfish.

Also, any of the GUIs that I mentioned can also paste in FEN positions or let you manually set up a starting board position.

The polyglot opening books that are supplied with Scid vs. PC aren't that big. I doubt that the opening book is causing any RAM problems.

I can recommend Stockfish. It'S a really great engine. And it's for FREE :)

And external graphic files aren't hard to install, I can recommend Arena 3.0 (a free and pretty nice interface). Stockfish can even analyse games, but be careful, it doesn't understand the materially different, but drawn positions. And once it led me into a mate in 1 with continuation for next like 20 moves or so (pretty rare for such an engine to not realise that the very first move of these 20 mates)

I would recommend WinBoard. It comes with two engines ready to run out of the box (Fruit 2.1 and Fairy-Max 4.8V, one suitable for analysis, the other beatable by mortal humans). And you can literally choose from hundreds of others if these don't satisfy your needs, with Elo ranging from hardly above 0 to 3300, which are easy to install through a Load Engine dialog. It also comes with a small opening book. Although the opening book is not  in text format, it has a function Edit Book that you can use to view the available moves for the current position, add or delete move or change their playing probability.

From your intended use (exercising openings) it seems that the most convenient way to set up a position would just be to play the moves in Edit Game mode (which restricts you to legal moves). WinBoard also has an Edit Position mode that can be used to set up arbitrary positions from scratch by moving around pieces of either side in any way you want (like it was woodware), duplicating pieces (by keeping Ctrl pressed during the move), or creating them (right-clicking on a square, to either summon up a menu from which you can choose the piece to put there, or by sweeping the mouse down until you see the piece you want, and release the button then). You can start this from the opening position, a position that has each piece type only once, or an empty board.

The opening book is Polyglot format, and many very elaborate books in that format are available for free.

Well Sqod, I had similar problems under Scid itself. It was running on my netbook with only 2Gb of RAM and a single core atom-processor. Everytime I started to analyze with Stockfish it grabbed all system ressources almost freezing the netbook.

I see two possible solutions for that problem:

1) Try to configure the engine parameters in Scid limiting the system ressources that Stockfish may use.

2) Use a different engine that is more lightweight. Modern engines are strong enough and if it has only 2600 ELO instead of 3000 something, who really cares?

One very annoying thing when doing auto-analysis of a game under SCID was that you get variations with ~20 ply depth which are complete nonsens ahead of ply 8-10. That might be due to weak hardware. I was never able to solve this though...

Thanks for the new suggestions. I'll chess out WinBoard when I get a chance, for sure.

Note that when an engine freezes your computer it is almost never because there is something fundamentally wrong with that engine, and almost always because it was configured to use more memory and CPU than your system has to offer. This can be easily cured by setting the size of the engine's hash table to not more than ~25% of you system's RAM, and thenumber of search threads to one less than half your number of virtual cores. (The latter because almost all modern CPUs use hyper-threading, rnning two hyper-threads on one physical core, which is only slowing down engines anyway, as they are so CPU-hungry that they compete themselves away when two of their threads have to share a core. So you should have one search thread less than the number of physical cores you have, to leave one for other system tasks, to keep the system responsive.)

Normally you can configure these engine parameters through the GUI dialogs (in WinBoard, at least).

I remember using a commercial program back when Win95 was new called ChessMaster.  It actually had a pretty good rateing as I recall and a 3d board if you wanted to waste what little graphic power you may have had at the time.  But these days you can download a really good interface from Chessbase by joining for free and then hook up almost any modern engine to it you want!  It's even the interface that comes with Rybka4 and Fritz! 

FFOman,

It wasn't ChessMaster because I would have remembered that name because some player on Yahoo in those years had a username ChestMaster as a pun, which I thought was funny. Good try,though. I can always play the computer on chess.com, as I mentioned, but I can't always get online since I don't have Internet access at home, so I have to use public places.

That can be a drag!  But methinks you're wrong because I remember an update that came out for ChessMaster called ChessMaster 2000...probably about the time WinXP was hot.  It had a picture of a wizard type hanging over a chessboard.