Homepage of evalboardchess.com

Introduction 

On this website you will find Information about chessmachines using evaluationboards with ARM-CPUs.

This project has started already in 2013.

Recently updated topics are marked with an preceding "*".

It is a non-profit hobby-project.

There is no guarantee for error-free information, if you find there is something wrong

I would be happy if you drop me an email.

Details of modifications will follow, perhaps I can contribute to further improvement

of chess-skill in machine, even though top-ranked chess-program reached already

around 3500 ELO today.

The program itself I named "Crafty-X", it is in fact based on the well-known

Crafty-engine from Robert Hyatt Ph.D. from USA.

The "X" stands for eXperimential.

I lay down my hat because Mr. Hyatt was not only a main-researcher in computer-chess ( Author of Cray Blitz ), his work is available for everyone who is interested.

The first US-chess-program based on bitboards was "Chess 4.x" from David Slate and Larry Atkin and dated back to 1973 written in Assembler.

First papers about bitmap-based chessprograms dated back to 1966

The Crafty-chess-engine was written in C and was ported using the uVision-IDE

from Keil ( now an ARM-company ).

The system does not use an operation-system.

It was in the beginning of the project in 2013 not at all easy to get a first version

running on an evaluation-board.

In fact I have started with the MCBSTM32E available in 2009 and used an didactical

chess-engine created by Christian Donninger and Dieter Steinwender.

This board has 64 KB of internal RAM available, but this is more than enough for classical programs to get running ( It has 1 MB external SRAM as well ).

This engine was a classical one and used an internal 10x10-board for the move-generator.

This was typical for many well-known chesscomputer

available in the 80' and 90's.

Back to the IDE used, I have started using uVision3 in 2009 and switched later to uVision5 in 2017.

Both versions I have still in use.

Compared with free IDEs uVision is a special IDE usable with evaluation-boards

and contains everything required.

There is available a free version but the drawback is that the code-size

is limited in size here.

For a chess-engine like Crafty-X a licensed full-version is required.

This costs in fact a few Dollars.

Most probably there will be only very few other people using uVision for a chess-engine, possibly I am the only one in the world.

If I am wrong I would be happy to hear / read from you.

Of course there are other ways available today to work with chessprograms,

like PCs or Smartphones, both I am using as well.

Beside chess I am as well interested in other aspects of microcontroller-programming.

The stuff needed I studied by myself using books about the topic.

At the beginning this was quite difficult, later things have gone pretty smooth.

In the meantime I have switched to the Stockfish-engine using latest NNUE-evaluation.

However Crafty-X will remain topic for evaluation.

If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop me an email.