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Roberto, the stock 520 ST with 512K ram is fairly rare to stumble on, as
most people by now have already upgraded their systems with an extra 2
megs of RAM. Luckily, I have both an unexpanded (vintage) 520 ST with
512K ram, and another one with a total of 2.5 megs of ram. But I am in
the minority, as it appears that most ST users have 4 megs of ram.
I'd mentioned that I can get a handful of fully evaluated tiers or plies
from any given starting position squeezed into 80 to 90K of ram. That way
there aren't any obvious losses of pieces that are 'en prise' two times
over, or otherwise pinned. A series of 2, 3, or 4 continuous captures -
one after the other - can be entertained, and those are the ones that are
first evaluated - all within a 3 or 4 ply search - but a 5th capture is
likely to be missed unless it lies in the 'footprint' of a piece that is
attempting to maximize its movement capabilities.
As for other kinds of computers attempting to emulate the ST, let's put
the shoe on the other foot, your typical ST emulator has a full range of 4
megs of ram, or a lot more - usually 8 megs, I think (I've never been able
to get one of those emulators to work, myself, as my experience with PC
compatibles has led me to believe Intel systems are very flaky, unstable
platforms to work on) - it all depends on how the emulator is configured.
Unfortunately, suppose you do use a PC to emulate an ST - you miss out on
the opportunity of networking real ST's together through the MIDI port.
With the ST, you can connect several of your ST computers together by
cabling them up through their MIDI ports, and telling the ST systems to
poll the port and see how many are there. Something similar to that must
be available to the PC, but before you boot up an emulator you should read
the documentation to see what specific features are missing from what users
expect of real ST systems.
The point about booting up a whole bunch of emulators is having the
pleasure of conducting a Baroque tournament between several different
programs, and seeing how their personality profiles enhance their
performance against each other. My interest in getting a copy of ChessV
is mostly for benchmarking purposes. That ChessV can play so many
different kinds of Chess is amazing, true, but I'd like to employ it as a
benchmark so I can tell how well I am programming my own stuff.