Chessmaster 8000
Version 1.0.0

Table of Contents:

I.      General Information
II.     Late Breaking Changes to the Documentation
III.    Where to find the Chessmaster FAQ
IV.     Reasons to visit Chessmaster.com
V.      Technical and Customer Support

=====================================================================

*** General Information ***

If you experience any problems with this version of your Chessmaster 8000 program, before you contact Technical Support, please make sure that you can outline the procedure by which you experienced your problem. Try to be as specific as possible when describing EXACTLY what happened. What were you trying to do with Chessmaster before the problem occurred? What type of hardware does your computer have? What version of Windows is it running? What other programs, if any, were running at the time? These are all potential questions that Technical Support might ask you, and your ability to answer these questions will greatly increase the likelihood that your problem will be resolved. Thank you.

=====================================================================

*** Late Breaking Changes to the Documentation ***

The following clarifications to Chessmaster 8000 features and/or modifications of features took place after the manual and the online help file were completed:

1. There is a known problem involving piece movement sounds that can occur when a game is being played at fast time controls (usually less than 5 minutes per game). This "invalid page fault" is only likely to occur if you have selected either "Spoken Move Announcements" or "Thematic Sound Sets" in the "Piece Movement" tab of the "Sound" dialog, which can be found in the "Preferences" menu of any room. It is also more likely to occur if the game is being played by two computers OR at VERY fast time controls (such as 1 minute per game). If you find that your machine is susceptible to this problem, selecting either "Simple Sounds" or "No Sounds" will prevent it from occurring.

2. You MUST have a Chessmaster 8000 CD in your CD-ROM drive at all times to run the program, except when Chessmaster prompts you to switch CDs. We STRONGLY recommended that while running Chessmaster 8000, you do not remove the CD from the drive unless asked to do so by the program. If the CD is removed without a prompt from the program, the program might behave incorrectly.

3. XBoard Engine Notes
-- Note that the "Import XBoard Engine" feature assumes that the executable program that you import is a fully compliant XBoard chess engine program. Importing any other type of executable program will certainly cause Chessmaster to NOT play chess, and possibly cause your machine to lock up.
-- Depending on the XBoard engine that is imported, any number of Chessmaster 8000 features may not be supported or may produce unexpected results. This is because either these "special" features are above and beyond the minimum specifications that are required by the XBoard protocol, or because the XBoard engine does not support a feature in the XBoard minimum spec. Some of the most common features that an XBoard engine may not support are the Infinite Time control, Force Move and output for the Thinking Lines window. In addition, the output in the Thinking Lines window may be in a format specific to that engine, and not identical to that used by Chessmaster. However, output from XBoard engines will be faithfully reported in the Thinking Lines window to the best of the program's ability.
-- An extra pair of Windows were added to the program after the manual was sent to press. These are the "XBoard Engine Output" windows, and they are available only in the Game Room. There is one window each for White and Black, and, when opened, they allow you to see all of the communication that is going on between the Chessmaster GUI and the XBoard engine that you have imported. This is useful for getting raw data from an engine that has output that Chessmaster does not understand (as outlined above) and cannot properly display in one of its other windows. Note that these Output Monitor windows will ONLY receive data if they are opened, in order to maximize CPU efficiency. Any time these windows are closed, all data that would normally be sent to these windows will not be retrievable.
-- An excellent source for finding just about any freeware XBoard engine to import into Chessmaster is at a website that is hosted by the author of the XBoard protocol, Tim Mann. Just point your browser to:
www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/mann/engines.html
-- Another excellent site is "Frank Quisinsky's Chess Page". It has all of the most up-to-date versions of the best XBoard chess engines available from around the world. Although much of the site is in German, there is enough text in English for you to find the proper links. As of this writing, clicking on either "Engines I" or "Engines II" at the top of the home page should take you to the proper place. Just point your browser to:
amateurschach.in-trier.de

4. While the Chessmaster Development and Quality Assurance teams have done their utmost to ensure that Chessmaster 8000 is as free of bugs as possible, there is a statistical likelihood that some bugs have made it through all testing, only to be found by YOU. If this happens, please notify us by e-mailing chessmaster@broder.com, or by going to www.chessmaster.com and following the appropriate links.
  Unfortunately, every once in a while a bug can cause a program to "crash", shutting it down immediately. Because Chessmaster 8000 now uses the XBoard protocol for all of its chess engines, these engines are actually SEPARATE programs that constantly communicate with the Chessmaster main program. The upshot of this is that if Chessmaster crashes, these engine processes may still be running "in the background," and may still be churning away on the current game, taking up your computer's memory and CPU time. The only way to shut these engines down is to access the Windows Task Manager (usually by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL) and looking for the name of the chess engine program that is still running. Chessmaster 8000's engine is called "The King". You would then highlight any entry in the program list that is called "The King", and press the "End Task" button (these instructions are for Windows 95/98 -- other versions of Windows may have different task manager dialogs).
  However, if you have imported another XBoard engine into Chessmaster, and it was running when Chessmaster crashed, you will have to look for the name of that program in order to shut it down.

5. If you are concerned about optimizing the performance of the Chessmaster engine, be sure to follow these guidelines:
-- Run as few other programs as possible while you are running Chessmaster.
-- Use as few child windows as possible. Some of these windows (most notably Thinking Lines and Visual Thinking) can take up a decent amount of the CPU time during their visual updates.
-- Do not switch rooms, or access other game features or dialogs while running a game. Some of these dialogs will actually restart any chess engines that may be associated with the current game, causing any memory that these engines has allocated (used to "look ahead," among other things) to be destroyed. This, of course, will lower the quality of play.
-- In the "Piece Movement" tab of the Sound dialog, select "No Sounds." This will prevent the program from taking up a significant portion of time queuing up and playing piece movement sounds.

6. Chessmaster uses a third engine instance (called the "Mentor" engine) for all "mentor" features, such as Advice, Game Analysis, Hint and Solve for Mate (as well as providing data for the Thinking Lines and Visual Thinking windows). Unfortunately, starting up any of these features will restart the Mentor engine and any data that is in the Thinking Lines or Visual Thinking windows will be lost.

7. You may notice that computer players sometimes make their moves very quickly (usually during the opening moves of a game), and that other audio/visual aspects of the program (such as piece movement audio and the updating of windows) seem to lag behind or even get lost in the speed of the consecutive moves. This is because the actual moves themselves are given the highest priority in Chessmaster. The engine, in a nutshell, gets to do what it wants, WHEN it wants. For example, making the engine wait to move so that the audio for the previous move can finish playing could possibly cause the engine to lose a game by running out of time when it normally would not have done so. 
  So, let's assume that you are watching a game between two computer players. If this game starts with a flurry of opening book moves on both sides, you will probably not hear or see anything, other than the moves being made on the board, until all of the moves have been made and one of the engines starts thinking (out of opening book). After a short time, all of the windows will be updated with the current data, but much of the piece movement audio may be lost.

8. A maximum of 15 players can be connected on any single LAN or TCP/IP session in the CMLive Room.

9. If you have auto-annotated a game and want to save the game, you may use either the Chessmaster game format or PGN format. The Chessmaster game format will save all of the audio information and text formatting. The PGN format will save the annotation text, but no audio data will be saved and the text will not be formatted.

10. If you experience choppy audio in Tutorials, Josh Games or Natural Language Advice/Analysis, it could be caused by one of several problems:
-- You might need to update your drivers for your sound card and/or CD-ROM drive. Chessmaster "streams" its audio and sometimes requires several megabytes of compressed audio data, assuming that the CD-ROM will be ready to retrieve the data when asked. If your CD-ROM is lagging behind (either because it is too slow, needs updated drivers, or Windows is generally slow), then you may hear
the audio skip and jump.
-- Another possible cause is not having enough free hard drive space. Chessmaster sometimes uses your hard drive as temporary storage for large quantities of audio. If your hard drive is full, and it cannot accommodate the space requirement, then Chessmaster has to search for other means of storing the data. This can cause the audio to stop and start. Freeing up hard drive space is the way to solve this cause of the problem.
-- Your machine speed is just too slow to successfully pull all of the audio from the CD, for any of several reasons. The best way to solve this problem is to use the custom installation option and copy the large audio files to your hard drive. This will maximize the speed at which the audio can be handled, but does require about 700 megabytes of hard drive space for all three large data files.

11. The Switch Sides function, located in the Game Room, will rotate the board 180 degrees and also switch players (i.e. the player who was playing the White pieces will now be playing Black, and vice versa). Note, however, that the White and Black players will NOT switch clocks and time controls.

12. Database Notes
-- If you used the Minimal installation option (or chose a Custom installation and specifically chose not to install it), the Chessmaster database (approximately 77 megabytes) was not copied to your hard drive. Therefore, any attempts to modify this database will cause an error. You cannot modify the files because they are only on the Chessmaster CD-ROM. If you plan to make any modifications to the Chessmaster database, you should re-install Chessmaster with either the Typical installation option or the Custom installation option and select the "Database" option.
-- Note that cleaning and optimizing any large database -- such as the Chessmaster 8000 database, which contains over 500,000 games -- can take quite a long time. This could be as much as a couple of hours, depending on the speed of your hard drive, the amount of free memory your machine has, and the other programs that are running at the same time.
-- Also note that deleting/undeleting a large number of games can also take a significant amount of time (several minutes), even though this process only MARKS the games as deleted or not deleted, respectively.

13. If you find that, for some reason, the chessboard seems to have "disappeared" from the game (either due to a change in screen resolution or in window position/size), don't worry. You can always safely get the board back to the upper-left corner of the main Chessmaster window by going to "Preferences -> Chess Set" and selecting a new board and/or piece set. If you find that other windows are also not appearing when and/or where they should, then you can restore all windows back to their default position and visibility settings by loading one of the default layouts that came with Chessmaster 8000.

14. Depending on the speed of your system, you may not see the introductory video. Chessmaster makes a determination of your computer's speed to see if your machine can play the videos without audio or video distortion, and then plays the videos if your machine passes the test.

15. Certain video cards may cause Chessmaster to have visual problems if you have "Large Fonts" selected in your video properties. If text in menus and dialogs appears "wrong" to you, or some text or buttons appears to extend past the boundaries of a window, you might check to see if you have "Large Fonts" selected, and change it to the Windows default setting, which is "Small Fonts". You can check this setting by going to "Control Panel -> Display -> Settings Tab" and pressing the "Advanced" button. There will be a combobox entitled "Font Size", where you can see your system's current setting.

16. If you play MP3 audio files on your computer, you will likely find that Chessmaster 8000 and programs that play these types of files (such as WinAmp and Windows Media Player) will not work properly with each other. This is because BOTH programs try to "take control" of the MP3 audio drivers, and this causes a conflict. Some people, though, have reported that starting up Chessmaster FIRST, and THEN starting up the MP3 player, will allow both programs to work fairly well (as long as Chessmaster does not try to play any audio).
  So, if you enjoy MP3 music on your computer and you don't mind running Chessmaster with no sounds, then this procedure should allow you to do both. Just don't try to access advice, game analysis, tutorials or Josh Waitzkin Annotated Games, because the audio for these features is also in MP3 format.

17. To define your own sound effects set that will override the sounds played by the "Thematic Sounds" option, you can go to the "Sounds" option in the Windows "Control Panel". There you will find a "Chessmaster" group of sound effects to which you can assign any valid sound file that is in wave format (usually with a "WAV" extension).

18. Because of the file format of Chessmaster's opening books, if you use the "Import PGN" feature of the Opening Book Editor, you may not be able to import PGN files that contain a large number of games. Typically, 3000 games is a good maximum to use, although you might be able to import larger PGN files if all of the games use the same family of openings. Also note that this feature will only import the first 30 moves (i.e. White AND Black's first 15 moves) of every game. Any moves made after that will be discarded. Also, keep in mind that the criteria for the frequency of moves when importing a PGN file into an opening book is the frequency that the move was made within all of the games in the PGN file.

19. The notation that is used in the Opening Book Editor and Opening Book Reference features is figurine algebraic and cannot be changed. The Notation menuitems in the Library will be disabled when using either of these features, and will be enabled when viewing a Classic Game. You will be able to use any notation when viewing Classic Games.

20. The manual states that Chessmaster only requires a 256-color bit-depth monitor resolution. This is incorrect. Chessmaster requires a 16-bit resolution. The Chessmaster packaging is correct in this regard.

=====================================================================

*** Where to find the Chessmaster FAQ ***

The Chessmaster FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is regularly updated
with answers to many of the most popular questions that users ask
when they are troubleshooting. You can find the FAQ at our website:
www.chessmaster.com.

=====================================================================

*** Reasons to visit Chessmaster.com ***

1. At Chessmaster.com you will always find the latest updates.

2. You will also find the latest Chessmaster FAQ, which will answer the most common questions.

3. If you discover any bugs, you can report them via e-mail by following the appropriate links.

3. You may, from time to time, find free goodies to download such as new boards and piece sets, additional opening books, and other new content for Chessmaster 8000.

4. You will also find links to other great websites and software created by The Learning Company.

Why not go to www.chessmaster.com right now?

=====================================================================

*** Technical and Customer Support ***

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact Technical
Support at:

Mattel Interactive
1700 Progress Drive
PO Box 100
Hiawatha, IA 52233-0100  USA

Attn: Chessmaster 8000

Business Hours: Monday through Friday, 9:00am to 9:00pm (CST),
except on selected national holidays

24-Hour Automated Technical Support Service: (800) 409-1497
Technical Support Call Center: (319) 247-3333
24-Hour Fax: (319) 395-9600

To send an e-mail, go to www.mattelsupport.com/Email_support.asp and
fill out the form. An e-mail will be sent to Mattel Interactive's
Technical Support.

For general Customer Service questions or information, go to
www.mattelinteractive.com/store/Info.asp. 

For general information about Chessmaster 8000, including upgrades,
special offers, and registration information, visit our web site at
www.chessmaster.com.
