CHEKMO-II

Binary + UCI adapter

This is the setup needed for playing a classical 1970s chess program CHEKMO-II on modern computers. It will be useful for those who are interested in computer chess history. CHEKMO-II was created for PDP-8 computers by Digital Equipment Corporation instructor John E. Comeau. For detailed learning of programs's internal structure, see original PAL-8 source code, written in PAL-8, PDP-8 assembly.

Running in simulator

You will need to install SIMH, an archaic computers simulator.

On Mac, this can be done using brew:

brew install simh

On Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, you can use apt:

sudo apt-get install simh

To run CHEKMO-II use the run script at the root of this repository:

./run

To get to know the program's command set and other useful information, see the original user manual chekmo.pdf.

Using the UCI adapter

You can use any chess graphic interface program, that supports Universal Chess Interface. Set chekmo-uci.py as the chess engine executable to do that.

For example, in XBoard, set up the engine with Menu – Engine – Edit Engine List. Append the following string to the list:

"CHEKMO-2" -fcp "./chekmo-uci.py" -fd "/path/to/cloned/repo/" -fUCI

On Debian/Ubuntu you may will need to install polyglot manually:

sudo apt-get install polyglot

Now you can play against CHEKMO-II via graphic interface.

Using UCI clients, you can make CHEKMO-II to play against modern engines.

Example of CHEKMO-II, playing against the modern Fairy-Max engine: