Many thanks for the information. Sorry to ask if it is possible to make a contemporary GUI and for the program to run in 64 bit.orac81 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 10, 2024 13:22Hi,
The MS-DOS version of DYNAMO compiles with Microsoft Visual-C 1.52, the last 16 bit version of that compiler. I think the ISO used to be a free download from Microsoft, but you have to try archive.org /wayback or similar to find it. It actually runs in 32 bit mode, at that time it used Windows 3.1 with win32s driver (DOSBOX might run that), but should be possible to run it under win32 compatible versions of windows, or Linux with WINE.
The simplified text version (v9.20) is extracted from the DOS program, altered to be portable C99 code, and should build on any modern system with a C compiler. The simple text move entry is there mainly as a mechanism for testing, rather than a proper front-end. The program should be functionally the same as the DOS version, ie same node count for fixed searches of the same position. The idea was to convert this to a portable engine format to work with other front ends, maybe to convert my SAGE draughts program to act as graphical front end for DYNAMO. SAGE has quite good PDN database management and search ability. But this work is very incomplete, and when I look at the very untidy code for DYNAMO I sometimes think it better to rewrite it!
As for PDN, well I cannot really say I "invented" this since it copies PGN, but I was the first to do that.
As for history, by the time of DYNAMO we had good tools like turbo-C. I always thought ORAC was the harder thing to write, written on an 8k commodore PET, with very few or no tools or resources. I had to write my own 6502 assembler!
Krzysztof
