Philidor/Parker Chess for PC (1983)

[BenRedic]

The Philidor program (Levy, O'Connell) was released as Chess by Parker Brothers for Atari 800 and IBM PC in 1983. I have the Atari 800 version, but I had no luck finding the PC version. Does anybody have it?

[lstlaure]

I have a copy of the Philidor program. Are you still looking for it?

[TracySMiller]

I have a copy of the Philidor program. Are you still looking for it?

I'd like to have it as well. Thanks.

[mclane]

Wow. Our research can continue then,
Would be a major step into research’s about David Broughton.

[lstlaure]

Hello Gentlemen, my name is Luc St-Laurent, I live near Montreal, Canada. I've been playing chess on and off since 1972, but I'm a very weak player. Although I like the game, I never invested the work and the time required to improve... I've always been fascinated by chess playing programs. Back in the mid '80s, a copy of a DOS chess playing program was circulating at my university. It was named Philidor, and the copy I had came without documentation. I had no idea who wrote it and where it was coming from. I was able to figure out how to operate the program and actually played a lot with it over the years. Eventually I discovered the story of this program that was developed by Mr. Broughton.

I think I own a piece of the puzzle you're trying to solve. Let me explain: some 20 years ago, I sent an email to Mr. Broughton to ask him some questions about Philidor. I was intrigued by the fact that the files structure of the program looked very similar to Richard Lang's program Cyrus. There is a series of files names *.OLY with both programs. Mr. Broughton was kind enough to respond to me and told me a bit of the story of Philidor as he rememembered it. I will gladly share this story with you if you're interested. He even sent me the latest version of his program!

Just let me know how to proceed to reach you guys...

[mclane]

That sounds marvellous, we would like to hear the story here. Please tell us all.

[Tibono2]

I have a copy of the Philidor program. Are you still looking for it?

I'd like to have it as well. Thanks.

+1

Just let me know how to proceed to reach you guys...

Thanks Luc for this kind proposal. Indeed, please tell the story here in the forum, a good way to reach all of us; unless you would like to keep it non public. If so, you can choose to use private messages (check the "You have no new messages" link top of forum page, you will access a "new post" button for private messaging). Same for sharing the program itself, are you in a position to upload it on some file hosting service, then share a link for us to download it? Same, you can choose to share such a link in private, no worries.

Best regards,
Tibono

[Fernando]

Hello Gentlemen, my name is Luc St-Laurent, I live near Montreal, Canada. I've been playing chess on and off since 1972, but I'm a very weak player. Although I like the game, I never invested the work and the time required to improve... I've always been fascinated by chess playing programs. Back in the mid '80s, a copy of a DOS chess playing program was circulating at my university. It was named Philidor, and the copy I had came without documentation. I had no idea who wrote it and where it was coming from. I was able to figure out how to operate the program and actually played a lot with it over the years. Eventually I discovered the story of this program that was developed by Mr. Broughton.

I think I own a piece of the puzzle you're trying to solve. Let me explain: some 20 years ago, I sent an email to Mr. Broughton to ask him some questions about Philidor. I was intrigued by the fact that the files structure of the program looked very similar to Richard Lang's program Cyrus. There is a series of files names *.OLY with both programs. Mr. Broughton was kind enough to respond to me and told me a bit of the story of Philidor as he rememembered it. I will gladly share this story with you if you're interested. He even sent me the latest version of his program!

Just let me know how to proceed to reach you guys...

Monsieur, nous tous voudrais d'avoir le programe. Vou pouvez le envoyer a une serviteur ou nous pouvons le decharger??
Pardon pour mon french, moi tres peu de fois doit l' occuper

Fern

[lstlaure]

Ok, well here it is... It will take me several posts to cover it all.

As I mentioned earlier, I collect old DOS chess playing programs. I like to play against them; using DOSBox and setting the speed to a few thousand cycles, I actually stand a chance to win some games. Since the mid '80s, I owned a copy of Philidor (version B1420, which I have unfortunately lost since...) which was one of my regular sparring partners.

I was curious to see if there was out there a more recent version of Philidor available. After some research I discovered that Philidor was written by David Broughton. It was easy to find his personnal web page, and I took a chance and wrote to him asking questions about Philidor...

[lstlaure]

... In early March '99 Mr. Broughton sent me a response. Here are some excerpts:

"Nice to receive your e-mail about my chess program 'Philidor' also called B1. You seem to have got hold of a non-official version. ... "

I had Philidor version B1420, which I have lost since.

" ... Philidor Software asked me to write the program for the IBM-PC when the IBM-PC was only just becoming available in this country, but they wanted the program for Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers had heard of Philidor Software and the program 'Philidor' as it had won the commercial class world championship for microcomputers in 1981 (known also as Chess Champion Mark V, produced by SciSys of Japan). But that was a self-contained machine version written in machine code for a 6502 CPU. (It was actually written originally by me for a Z80 CPU but was translated into 6502 by a person called Mark Taylor, who also worked for Philidor Software.) When I rewrote it for the IBM-PC it was changed quite a lot and was a lot weaker, mainly because of the slow speed of the first IBM-PC. But if you run it on a modern IBM-Compatible it gives a good game.

...

Philidor Software was run by David Levy and Kevin O'Connell in those days. They are both very strong chess players. ... I, on the other hand, am only an average club player. I was working under contract for them as a self-employed person.

Now to answer one of your questions: Is the version you have a early version? I think maybe it is. But as far as I recall, not many changes were made after the version you have so I doubt that any later edition would be significantly different. It is different from my copy but I haven't yet found out in what way. I will make further investigations and let you know."

More to come...

[Tibono2]

Monsieur, nous tous voudrais d'avoir le programe. Vou pouvez le envoyer a une serviteur ou nous pouvons le decharger??
Pardon pour mon french, moi tres peu de fois doit l' occuper

Fern

Fern, ton français est trop mignon, j'adore...
Your french is so charming, love it...

[mclane]

I will begin tournament games (40/120) with it. I do also have a Homecomputer tournament running at the moment. Maybe I can implement it there too.

We often forget that the first pc machines were very limited concerning ram , graphics and also speed.

An xt with 4.7 MHz.
Or at machines with 12-16.

This changed after a while of course.
And the breakthrough came with the 486 at 33 MHz. Which was much faster then the 386 because if the internal cpu cache.

In my first observations I see that the clocks in the program are running same speed even when I increase speed of the emulation lets say from XT level to the 486-33 level. That’s a good sign.
We get evaluation, 5 plies of main line and it has permanent brain.
It shows the game score. And even has a graphical board (toggle with CTRL A) .

That’s a very professional chess program !

[lstlaure]

Yes, it's a great program, very well made. Maybe not as strong as other programs of its era like Cyrus and Sargon III, but still very good. It's a pity that it has almost fallen into oblivion...

Here are other interesting facts about the Philidor program that Mr. Broughton shared with me...

"One of the interesting features of the program was the requirement to keep the memory requirements within the 64 K limit of memory. This was because the early IBM-PCs only had that amount of memory. As the program required considerably more than that, overlays had to be used. But IBM published no information about the overlay structure that should be used and certainly issued no supporting software. So I first had to design an overlay system for the IBM-PC before starting work on the main chess playing program. The program was started using C but at that time the only C compiler we could get hold of had so many bugs in it, it was useless. So I resorted to Microsoft 8086 Assembler -- a very early edition which also had bugs for which I had to find "work arounds". Quite a long story. But sufficient fo now!

I still use the program myself occasionally. I also have Chessmaster 3000 which is stronger, though Chessmaster 3000 is not good at solving mate problems whereas Philidor is very good indeed. And Philidor has a feature that I have not found in other chess programs: it can find a refutation to mate, if one exists. This is very valuable if you are composing problems.

It's nice to know my program is still around!"

Remember guys, he wrote this in 1999. I'm sure he'd be very happy to see that this is still true in 2020!

For those interested to have a copy, please send me a private message with your email address. I'll be very happy to share this piece of computer chess history!

More to come...

[Steve B]

It should be noted that the Philidor program was released as an upgrade module for the Scisys Mark V
interestingly...the Philidor module was required in order to use the auto-sensory board attachment..without the module the auto-sensory board could not be used. the sensory board converted the Mark V from keyboard input move entry.. to full auto-sensory:





Dedicated Chess Computer Regards
Steve

[mclane]

The first PC's were very limited. This is what David says too.
Chess master 3000 is from the early 90ies.
While philidor is a child of the 80ies.

One has to see that for the time it was done,
By the limited hardware that was possibly on the market, David did an excellent job.

The mark V and it's successor mk vI
Had all things a good dedicated chess computer has to have.

Permanent brain. Completely variable set of time controls. playing a decent chess with ideas and active play. All fide rules used. Simultan play. Good in solving problems. Etc etc etc.

David Broughton and Levys company made standards. Very high standards.

As I said before. I have the biggest respect for
David Broughton.