Free Chess For Palm - Open Chess - Clean Layout Version

Open Chess is a freeware project that turns your Palm into a serious chess opponent. It is based on GNU chess engine, which has been tested through many years by many players, and known to be strong.

Despite the great quality and unbeatable price, it seems to me that this project doesn't receive the due recognition. I nearly passed by it when I looked for a Palm chess program, because it wasn't clear from public descriptions that it runs on grayscale devices (such as my Clie SJ20). Good thing I investigated this deeper before turning to shareware alternatives. Nevermind that grayscale support is declared only in future plans - the developers have silently added that feature, and simply forgot to update the description! That could never happen to a commercial product. :-)

Another unfortunate thing I noticed, was a hardly recognizable set of pieces. As far as I understand, the developer wanted them to look like real-life pieces, but that lead to a poor contrast on a limited Palm screen. Many other people also complained about that in forums, so I decided to create my own set of pieces, more of a diagram type, and contribute them to this wonderful project. It turned out that layout change feature doesn't work yet, so I had to re-build the software from source code - luckily, I had the necessary experience.

So, now Palm owners will be aware of grayscale support in this great game, and have a clean set of pieces to play with comfort. Hope these news will spread fast, with a little help of you and other welcome guests of this site. I feel really joyful to pay back at least a little to the generous freeware community that gave us Linux, GNU C++, Apache, MySQL, and a whole lot of other useful software, including dozens of Palm games.

In an ideal case, I should contact the coordinators of this project, and let them handle the release - but I'm as lazy as they are, and very impatient about sharing this with public ASAP. So, I'll take advantage of my right to re-distribute this free software, and put it here with my changes, at least until they become a part of the project. (I will notify the developers, of course... Oh, you guys are here already?.. Welcome! :-))

By the way, if anyone needs a free set of pieces for a new chess-related Palm game, feel free to use these. They are licence-clear. You can give me a credit if you like.

System requirements: Palm OS 3.5 or higher; not sure about black & white devices. Grayscale works, and HiRes, too - tested on my Sony Clie SJ20. Try it and enjoy!

Download Open Chess - Clean Layout Version (openchessbeta2.zip, 223K)

P.S. For those who can hardly imagine how can someone play a complicated and boring game like chess at all - try to subscribe to our minicourse at top of this page, and maybe one day you will change your mind. And I promise you'll have some fun in your way! - Val Danilchuk, author.