The Mirage was completely designed by me state side. Please do not mention Eric in the same sentence as The Mirage.spacious_mind wrote:
So if I am reading it correctly the invention of Mirage robot was stateside and not from Krypton originally but they were contracted to build the computer?
I think we can mostly figure out which programs had your 4 bit engine. Some of these would be I assume King Arthur's or Kingmaster II & III or the LCD Model 375's etc, New York Times, Chess Station and some others.
What is still a little unclear are the computers that played in the middle range below Grandmaster but higher play strength than the above mentioned.
These would be Alexandra, Ivan II, Phantom Force Robot, Touch Chess and Deluxe Talking Chess, New York Times Deluxe. These programs play a good game of chess but all lack the ability to think on opponents time. Would these be based around your H8 program but with Ponder removed?
Best regards
When Eric White copied my CC10 ROM bit for bit and started selling CC10's in the States made in Hong Kong, I grew a dislike for him. He was stupid enough however to buy them from our Stateside ROM vendor. I called them and said, look they are buying a copy of the ROM you make for us. They looked, they compared and that was the end of Eric White's CC10 in a plastic housing.
He didn't care, it got him into the business. It irked me no end that I had to work with him on producing the Ivan for us in HK.
I never agreed with Sid Samole about the lucrative business possibilities in the high end chess market. I wanted the average Joe consumer chess player or chess player want-a-be's.
The Hitachi H8 was being phased out for masked chip production, but the OTP was still available at a premium but had to be individually programmed.
So I made a huge effort and translated my H8 chess engine to the Sunplus later General Plus SPLB or GPLB series with 6502 core and LCD dot matrix drivers.
I seem to recall it didn't have as much ram as the H8, so I could not use the Attack Bit Map tables. In masked ROM releases you sweat bullets worried that it wouldn't work or had a bug. So I minimized risk, and commented out the call to the Ponder Routine, and knew battery life would double, since the chip went to sleep while the human thought. A better trade off in my system design philosophy.