Chessmaster Grandmaster Mods

I don't think that was removed. (The opening book editor was though).
To autoplay famous games , start in
Learn -> Famous Games and select the game.
If you want spoken moves, go to
Preferences -> Sound and turn on the following:
Piece Movement -> Spoken Move Announcement,
Voice -> Automatically Play Auto-Annotation,
Voice -> Automatically Play Natural Language Advice
Ensure Windows -> Game Status is open and press the play button (second from the right above the move list.
Hopefully that works for you. The games I tried did not have any annotation.

Tournament games, not famous games...

Sorry that I got that wrong. I'm not familiar with the older interface. Are you able to play them back 1 game at a time by loading them in practice?

No, what we mean if that if you set up a new engine tournament, say 100 games --- You'd like to be able to start the tournament and have all 100 games be played automatically to completion. The pre-CM10 versions would let you do that. CM10 and CM11 require that *each* game be started manually...at least as far as I've been able to determine.

When I was running a lot of engine tournaments with CM10 and 11 personalities, I had to resort to installing the CM personalities into Arena - which is NOT a fun job, lol.

i must admit I've never set up Chessmaster for a tournament between engines. Lack of UCI support makes it harder and I've never bothered to set up a Winboard to UCI adapter. Perhaps there's an easier way that I don't know but it seems like a lot of effort and when I did play with it I wasn't impressed.

I have only really ever used Arena for matches and tournaments between engines. Arena has its own limitations and idiosyncrasies but it does seem to work best of all the interfaces I've tried for this use case.. I've loaded Chessmasters's TheKing engine into Arena but against most modern engines it's not even a contender.

I just set up and ran a quick tournament between personalities in Chessmaster 11 and I can see what you mean. Very annoying.

CHESSMASTER 11 GRANDMASTER EDITION REVISITED

I last played with CM11 Gm Edition back in 2007. That was eons ago. Yesterday I was intrigued by some of the current chess games on Steam, boasting high quality graphics. I soon discovered that the new chess programs, meant for the non-professional chess mass market, score very high in the graphics department, but low in overall functionality. I then decided to blow the dust of my CM11 GM edition DVD and gave it a reboot on my Dell laptop. 9th July 2021. Thirteen years later, in the midst of a global pandemic.

Ater I reinstalled CM11, I then proceeded to download the tons of sets, wallpapers and skins from these sites:
1. Chessmaster old site
2. Qix77's tripod site
3. CM Awesome blogspot

To my dismay, the links to the Dat Texture Extractor program were broken. Without the software, I couldn't do any modding. Fortunately, I stumbled upon it on the Wayback machine.

I was enjoying the plethora of downloaded 2D and 3D boards, when I soon discovered that no one had created 2D boards for Chessmaster 10 or 11 that will emulate today's much visited chess platforms. I then decided to do something about it by creating my own mods. This would be my first time doing this.

After many hours of reading stuff and downright hard work, I have created 3 new mods of 2D Boards which I am sure most folks here will recognise their origin. To know where I got the designs from, click here.

So now I am enjoying my Chessmaster 11 more than ever. Take a look at my 3 mods (not the first screenshot which is the 2D Chess.com board created by Shaykh, but the last three screenshots).

Regards and cheers,
Frankie "Durian Defense" Kam 
Malaysia

P.S. If you're interested in a very strong Winboard engine for CM11, you can't go wrong with Slow Chess Blitz Classic Version 2.6 (20th June 2021). I've included the folder to the engine in the Google Drive link above. Yesterday I ran a 5-round-robin, 1-minute bulltet tournament on CM11 with these Winboard engines:
1. Crafty 25.6
2. greko-2021.06.MP
3. Slowchess 2.6 (latest as of June 2021) - Slow Chess Blitz Classic Engine
4. SOS
5. Grandmaster Chess (The King)

...and Slowchess 2.6 creamed them all, winning all its games, losing none. If anyone other there can tell me which is the strongest free Winboard (non-UCI) engine, and it can run on Chessmaster 11, please do let me know in this forum.

P.S. again. My first 3D chessboard for Chessmaster 11. Inspired by TopGun.

-End-

this is awesome i still use chessmaster to this day. It just has this personality that fritz simply lacks. Having more 2d sets is always welcome!

Thanks for sharing these, appreciated 🙂

My magnum opus....

...Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition Topgun chess set.

What's new:
1. Emblems are now visible on the pieces;
2. Mouse hover TOPGUN badge on any square (see h1 example in the screenshot above);
3. Black and white squares consist of carrier deck white and turquoise painted metal plate textures; symbolically, white represents the sky and turquoise the ocean; the main purpose of these colors are to make the main pieces visibly stand out;
4. Blacks pieces are now more visible - I changed the previous all-black to dark gray tones;
5. White pieces have a flesh-tone hue between Maverick flight helmet and khaki vest;
6. Piece shininess has been reduced, enhancing the look;
7. Compared to my previous attempt, overall there is now better contrast between the chessboard and the chess pieces. The carrier deck chessboard is less distracting compared to the earlier RIO radar display (light squares) and target recticle (dark squares) look.

You can download the latest topgun.dat files from here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MP0wMgyAMNhuB1JTnkDnmU9E4Lq-ZIew?usp=sharing

I spent hours on this labour of love. Hope you like it.

Regards
Frankie "Durian Defense" Kam
Texture resource: https://www.sketchuptextureclub.com/

Thanks, added to my collection 🙂

Chessmaster is alive forever, no matter how many years pass by

Thank you all for those wallpaper, board and pieces designs, they are so impressive!

Welcome Xenius_YKK, p8q and NamelessBeggar. Latest is I updated the first two 2D sets so that the square where the last piece moved, and the square where the last moved piece currently stands, are indicated with yellow highlighted squares. Just as in the actual chess playing websites those 2D sets represent.

Thank you! your 2D sets that look like those in chess websites are great!

Hi p8q

I've enhanced the first 2D chess set. Why? The pieces are too small compared to the, ahem, real thing. The pieces have too much whitespace around them. So I decided to scale them up a few notches. So here's my result after 4 hours of hard work (multi-tasking with other jobs around the house):

I've uploaded the dat file as "B0_GA_Chess.com 2.dat", available from here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MP0wMgyAMNhuB1JTnkDnmU9E4Lq-ZIew?usp=sharing
Drop the dat file inside the "D:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition\Data\Dat" subfolder.

In the same folder you will find the "GA_Chess.com 2.bmp" BMP file. Drop that inside the "C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition\Data\Dat\BMP" subfolder. After this, you are good to go.

Cheers
Frankie Kam

Hi p8q

I spent the Sunday weekend enhancing the second 2D set as well. You know, the "light peach/taupe" colored one. The pieces are now proportionate to their squares and surrounding whitespace. 

It took me a while to figure out how to make the pieces to the correct proportions.

Thank you very very much! 

woow, that's so nice

I didn't know how to thank you and how to thank the previous artists too, for all your work. So i've thought the best way was to learn how to do this boards myself and share it here to contribute. So, these are the screenshots of what i've done:

These are the Merida pieces (i like these style a lot), but i have changed some details, i don't know if you can notice those changes, they are very subtle

About this chess set i've made two versions, one with bigger pieces and another one with more proporcionate pieces. You can delete the one you don't like afterwards, or you can keep both

This one is similar as the previous one, but the pieces are merida with ivory color for white, hand-painted, hehehe. 

Here i combined the Merida pieces with chessmaster brown board. I did it because i didn't like Chessmaster Merida style, for example the bishop's hats i made them round, and chessmaster had them in a triangle shape. I made other subtle changes.

Here's the download link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GQwEvDzPovJLRJTeKs4Tq5vqqi2eCMay/view?usp=sharing

You already know how to install: the Dat folder files into the Dat folder, the BMP files into the BMP folder.

The downloaded .rar file will have 7 files Dat and 6 files BMP. It's because i modified the original "B0_B&W wood" file in chessmaster, because i didn't like the highliting. So, if you like the original be careful not to install this one, and if you want to try this one, backup the original.

I hope you like them and enjoy

By the way, can i ask a question about a resolution problem in chessmaster?

As you can see in the screenshots, the top menu bar doesn't show the words, it doesn't show when i have in compatibility mode "Override high DPI scalling behaviour. Scalling performed by" --> Application.

My screen is full HD 1920x1080, so i have to configure that setting to allow chessmster to work well with full HD, otherwise everything is blurry, but then the words appear. So the words only appear when that setting is off and is blurry.

Maybe it doesn't have a solution, because chessmaster is too old, but i'm just asking in case someone found a solution.

Well done p8q on your modded sets! DOWNLOADED! The second set has a 3D-ish touch to it. It's a nice feeling creating your own set, isn't it? Keep up the good work and thank you for sharing it here.

As for the missing  menu word options, I have never seen this phenomenon before. Above is my screen at 1920x1080 resolution. The menu words can be seen. So no idea why you're facing missing menu words.