WELCOME

Welcome to Sigma Chess 6.2, a very strong chess program for the Macintosh with an intuitive graphical user interface and many features. Sigma Chess is distributed with the unregistered version of the World Chess Championship strength HIARCS as an optional engine!!

We feel confident that Sigma Chess will provide many hours of fun and intellectual challenge. This manual contains all the instructions needed to install and use Sigma Chess. It is assumed that you are familiar with the basics of Macintosh.

Features

Sigma Chess has knowledge of a variety of endgames. Apart from basic endgame knowledge such as the rule of the square and opposite coloured bishops, the program has a complete built-in database of the KPK endgame (King and Pawn versus King). Furthermore, Sigma Chess includes complete external endgame databases for a number of 3 and 4 piece endings, such as KQKR, KRKN and KBNK.

Sigma Chess supports transposition tables up to a size of 320 Mb. Transposition tables are used for storing chess positions during the search to avoid re-searching positions. This can have a dramatic effect on the speed of the search, particularly in the endgame.

Sigma Chess supports the UCI (Universal Chess Interface) protocol. This means that you can use third party chess engines such as HIARCS (which is already included with Sigma Chess) instead of the built-in Sigma Chess 6.2 engine. The Sigma Chess web site contains a list of other UCI chess engines for Mac OS X. Note: UCI support is only available under Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

Sigma Chess supports game annotations, i.e. textual move comments including the standard move suffixes (!, ?, !! etc.). The built-in annotation editor lets you annotate games yourself, and the new improved printing facilities let you print games complete with annotation text, diagrams and move suffixes, using figurine notation (optional) and either long or short algebraic notation.

Sigma Chess also supports game collections, which can contain thousands of games, such as the games of tournaments, matches etc. The built-in collection browser and the database search facilities lets you scan through and select the games that are of interest.

Sigma Chess has a built-in position library editor, where you can edit or create new opening libraries.

Sigma Chess is compatible with the PGN (Portable Game Notation) format, which is a cross platform standard for the representation of chess games and positions using ASCII text files. This, for instance, gives you access to thousands of games on the Internet, which are available in the PGN format. In particular, you can import multi-game PGN files into game collections. Additionaly, you can export any part of a collection to the PGN format.

Sigma Chess can be used as an engine from within the powerful chess database ExaChess. Simply make an alias to the Sigma Chess application and move that alias to the ExaChess "ExaChess Tools/Engines" folder.

System Requirements

Processor
PowerPC or Intel.

System Software
Mac OS X 10.3 or later. Sigma also runs on the old Classic Mac OS, but this is no longer officially supported.

Display
800 x 600 resolution or higher with thousands or millions of colors.