Chess Prodigy 1

About Chess Prodigy 1

Chess Prodigy 1 describes an amateur chess computer developed as a hobby project.

At the heart of this project, lies an ATmega644 microcontroller running at 8MZ which hosts a chess engine entirely written in embedded C language.

It implements all rules of chess and, performance-wise, plays up to a club level (about 1600 ELO). Tactical strength is somehow higher, going up to 1856 ELO points, according to Colditz tests.

The last (and probably final) firmware release is version 1.2. For implementation details, license and download section, please refer to "Technical Information" page.

The user input interface relies on four push buttons labeled as MENU, UP, DOWN, ENTER, whereas for output, a 16 x 2 1602 LCD type along with a passive buzzer was used.

The following settings can be tweaked with, before or during the game:

  • Move

    Enter your move

  • Hint

    Recommended move

  • Level

    Move time, ten settings possible (2s, 5s, 15s, 30s, 1min,  3min, 5min, 15min, INFINITE)

  • Guess

    Thinking on opponent's time

  • Back

    Take move back

  • Swap

    Swap collors

  • Verify

    Read out position

  • Analyze

    Add more detail about this feature, such as benefits, appearance, components

  • Save

    Save position to EEPROM

  • Load

    Load position from EEPROM

  • New

    New game

  • About

    About message