ExaChess Lite 3.1.3 review

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ExaChess Lite is a chess gamewhere you play against a built-in chess engine, or download others from the Web site and pit them against each other.

License: Freeware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 1795K
Developer: Exant Software
Price: $0.00
Updated: 13 Jul 2006
0 stars award from rbytes.net


ExaChess Lite is a chess gamewhere you play against a built-in chess engine, or download others from the Web site and pit them against each other.

Smart move entry allows 1-click moves. Reads and stores games in Chessbase (CBH), PGN and ExaChess format, up to 256 games/file. Prints short games (20 moves max) with diagrams. Annotates your games.

Here are some key features of "ExaChess Lite":
Direct support (without conversion) of ChessBase (CBF), NICBase, PGN and EPD databases, as well as ExaChess's own binary and text database formats.
Search across all databases or just a single database file by player name, event, year, result, ECO code, opening name, position, partial position, material, special game features, or any combination of these.
Shows ECO code and opening name for each game and statistics for all matching games.
Finds and allows easy removal of duplicate games from any database.
Resizable, customizable 2-D color board with smooth animation.
Move display shows game title and all notes and variations, using colorized text and formatting to distinguish the main line from annotations and variations. Click on a move to go to that point in the game; edit the move text to add annotations.
Flexible game parser that handles free-form text input, both algebraic and descriptive, including move and position evaluations, variations and text comments.
Records full tree of moves. Switch to variation or return to main line.
Shows opening tree (next moves for any opening position) with stats from the database. Quickly find matching games in database for any opening position.
Supports play against the database or against external 'chess engines' via Apple Events, including ZZZZZZ (supplied), Crafty, Sigma Chess, Vektor3, Screamer, GnuChess, and MacChess (available at Mac and chess Internet archive sites).
Supports automatic annotation of games using external chess engines.
Plays perfect 5-piece endgames using Ken Thompson's endgame database CDs (included with the ExaChess CD and also available from other sources).
Detailed User's Guide included.

Limitations:
ExaChess Lite is restricted to showing only the first 256 games of larger databases (128 games for ChessBase, NICBase), and limits searches across multiple databases to at most 8 databases.
What's New:
Fixed the problems of earlier releases when closing game windows under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Requirements:
Mac OS 8.6 or later with CarbonLib.
Mac OS X 10.1 or later.

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