CDB Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list - 7-11-98 CDB is Peter Klausler's free chess database software for

Windows 95 and NT. CDB is both a chess position database and a game database program. CDB can drive Bob Hyatt's free Crafty chessplaying program to derive analysis of positions and games. 1. Where can I get CDB? Use Netscape or similar browser and go to the URL http://reality.sgi.com/pmk_craypark. 2. Is CDB available for the Mac? or Windows 3.x? No, I don't have a Mac, and I don't think CDB would be easy to port even if I did. No, CDB is 32-bit program that relies on many system services not available in 16-bit Windows. 3. Why are there letters on the chessboard instead of pieces? CDB thought that you had a chess font installed, but was mistaken. Copy the Chess Traveller Standard font shipped with CDB into the Fonts folder of your Control Panel. 4. Where do I get Crafty? Use Netscape or an FTP client and go to ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt. Follow the directions there and download a "wcrafty-14_x.exe" file; you may also want to download additional files and construct an opening book. CDB works with (at least) versions 14.2 and 14.3 of Crafty; version 14.4 is reported to not work, and I don't know about any others. 5. How do I flip the chessboard? Use the chessboard's popup menu, which you activate by the chessboard. The popup menus of the chessboard and controls do lots of cool things that you might want to In particular, the colored lines on the chessboard can to Go Away if you don't care for them. 6. Does CDB read the ... file format? CDB can read *.PGN *.EPD *.CDB *.CBF *.G30 *.BFI these file formats: Portable Game Notation Extended Position Description CDB's own database files (for merging) proprietary ChessBase(TM) format proprietary NICBase(TM) format proprietary ChessAssistant(TM) format right-clicking scoresheet explore. be made

The last three are read with the use of conversion utility programs that CDB can automatically invoke to translate proprietary formats into PGN. These utilities are small, so I ship them with CDB. If there's a proprietary format with a public-domain conversion utility that should be added to this list, please let me know about it.

CDB can write only standard PGN and EPD files. 7. How can CDB interact with other programs? You can transfer games and positions to/from other programs using the Clipboard. CDB uses PGN format for games and EPD for positions. And with CDB 1.3, CDB can run as a database server. 8. I don't understand how game searches work. CDB provides powerful game searching capabilities with objects called gamesets. A gameset has rules that determine whether a chess game can or cannot be a member of the gameset. You can specify constraints on players, events, dates, ECO codes, and positions. You can also combine gamesets together using the basic operations of set theory. A gameset can be a subset of another (essentially a refined search), and can also be the result of a combination with another gameset under the rules of set union, intersection, or subtraction. The membership of games in gamesets is dynamic. When games are imported into the database, they are tested against the criteria of the gamesets and added to the ones they should belong to. So, to do a search, you create a gameset; CDB finds the games that belong to it, and you can then select a game for browsing. 9. I hate the appearance of the chessboard. Can I make the pieces bigger? Yes. The easy way to do this is to use a chess font with a larger point size. Make sure that you have a chess font installed (the free Traveller Standard font is shipped with CDB), then right-click the chessboard and navigate the menus to Appearance->Pieces->Use chess font. The default size used in CDB is 28 point, and sizes up to 48 or so work well. You can also load a custom piece bitmap, several of which have been designed by Mats Winther and are shipped with CDB. Just find a bitmap (*.BMP) file of pieces that you prefer (larger or smaller) and use the chessboard popup menu to load them. Read the on-line documentation for extensive help if you run into difficulty. 10. How does (this particular command) work? Please take a look at the context-sensitive on-line help shipped with CDB. I've tried to cover all the commands and several important topics of interest. 11. After I import 20,000 (or 30,000) games or so into a database on my 32MB machine, CDB gets really slow. What gives? CDB uses the virtual memory and memory-mapped file services of Windows 95 (or NT) to access its databases. When the size of a database exceeds the amount of available RAM in the system, Windows starts thrashing data between memory

and your hard drive. By default, CDB requires about 1000 bytes of memory for each distinct game in the database. You can reduce this requirement by more than half using the File->Compression command and setting the transposition detection guarantee ply down to 25 or 20 plies. If you're curious about how CDB is using your memory, execute File->Database Statistics. You might also want to consider expanding the memory of your computer; RAM just keeps getting cheaper, and programs aren't getting any smaller. 12. What's the chess game being played at high speed in the CDB splash panel? That's Morphy vs. Brunswick and Isouard, 1859. 13. What the heck is this ECOtree.PGN file? It's a single game in PGN format with a separate variation for every major ECO opening code. If you import this file into a CDB database, CDB will automatically recognize the best ECO classification for new games and will support ECO code search capabilities. 14. Why is CDB free? I don't have the time or interest or motivation to commercialize CDB. I wrote it because (a) I wanted a cool chess database like CDB, (b) I'm cheap, and (c) I could. I give it away because I think that some other folks will find it to be useful and will help improve the program by reporting problems and suggesting improvements. Please note that you're not guaranteed any more support for CDB than you've paid for (i.e., zilch). If you really feel compelled to part with your money in return for whatever usefulness you've gained from CDB, then give $20 or so to a deserving cause like Habitat for Humanity, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or your local food shelf. Seriously. 15. What's the point of having the Analyze Position command as well as the Crafty Co-Pilot? The Co-Pilot will give you continuous commentary on positions as you browse them, whereas the Analyze Position window will keep working on a single position. CDB is multithreaded and you can do multiple deep analyses of positions and games in parallel, checking their results later. 16. What is that annoying black window that appears momentarily the first time that I run a Crafty command in CDB? You don't really want to know... but if you're brave, read the CDB internal documentation shipped in Internal.TXT for the details of how CDB sends signals to Crafty child processes. If Crafty someday acquires a DLL interface, CDB will use it and things will become less clunky. To answer the original question, the black window is a DOS console that CDB must create in order to be able to abort a Crafty analysis.

17. I asked for this feature a month ago and CDB still can't do ...; when are you going to do the work? When I have the time. Please be patient. Not all programming chores in Win32 are as easy to do as one might think, and I actually have a more interesting real job that consumes most of my time. 18. Hey, can I see the source code? No, sorry. 19. How come there are no games in the database? Isn't CDB a database? CDB is a chess database program. You get to build your own databases for it with the games that you want. There are hundreds of thousands of games available for free downloading from the Internet in PGN and convertible formats; go to Pitt, The Week in Chess, and other popular sites and make some good use of your modem. 20. I make a move; why doesn't Crafty respond? CDB is not a game-playing interface to Crafty. Get Winboard for that.