Previous Next

An impressively packaged, all singing, all dancing chess program featuring a menu of 14 different options including saving/loading separate moves and boards, listing moves to printer, replaying moves, Blitz-chess, and even a demo mode. Add to this castling, "en passant" and promotion, together with interesting options of being able to go back as many moves as you wish, to rectify mistakes, or even remove your opponent's Queen, and you can see how comprehensive this program is.

If offers six levels of play. While the response time on level one is a few seconds, level four upwards takes between 10 minutes and six hours. Don't be too alarmed by this. The Spectrum, in common with most home computers, can't compete with a mainframe on speed, and you'll have to be very good to cope with level six.

Why "The Turk?" This was a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, but I'm sure it didn't do all this. What more could you want? It's fair to point out however, that Mikrogen's Master Chess offers similar facilities for £2 less, and screen displays and built-in clock are very similar too.

D.M.