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Reinhard Scharnagl wrote on Sat, Jan 27, 2007 06:59 PM UTC:
The future of SMIRF: well, in the meantime there have been some questions
from different sides, what will be with SMIRF. 

First, I am about to migrate it to the Mac OS X. That is, because I am
angry about MS Vista and its unsufficient driver set (especially 64 Bit),
its bad behaviour against programmers and its several backdoors for
government, police or secret service investigations targeting every file
on a Vista system (as I prosume). In contrast Mac OS X is again going to
create a homegeneous 64 Bit user landscape starting with coming OS X
Leopard version.

SMIRF will become 64 Bit then. There will be no big speed step by that,
because SMIRF is no a bitboard based program. But it will use the grown
register set, and it will then benefit from any compiler optimization
improvement. I remember days, where I investigated to have an ARM RISC
processor based solution, but there are currently no fast desktop systems
or sponsors, which would provide me with such a development environment.
Thus I stay on Intel/AMD64 based hardware (unfortunately also without any
sponsor yet).

SMIRF will not be merely migrated to Mac OS X. I intend to have a lot of
new design elements:

a) redesign the internal data structure and caching logic
b) rewrite the position detail evaluation function (which is still the
first slow draft, may be a 200% speed up then)
c) support additionally also an additional piece (General = N+B+R)
d) support blocked squares (to customize the playable square zone)
e) build in prompting (instead of badly working permanent brain)
f) attempt to implement multithreaded multiprocessor usage 
g) create a separated unit for to contain move logic and pgn file
maintenance beside of the GUI
h) attempt to have a UCI protocol based GUI

That is a huge project and will need a remarkable amount of my free time.
So do not wait for a finished Mac OS X version in the near future. May be
some of then made progresses will be reimplemented into the working
Windows 32 Bit solution, but from now on possible updates would only be
published for the donators' bonus version.

Reinhard.

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