Crafty is a chess program written by Bob Hyatt. It is the "son" of Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships. Crafty is designed around bitboards (a 64-bit data structure) for reasons of speed of execution, ease of adding new knowledge, and a significantly cleaner overall design. It is written entirely in ANSI C and runs on UNIX, Linux, DOS, Windows, OS/2, and now . . . the MacOS.
The Macintosh port really is a port. It uses the same text interface that is used on all the other platforms. On the plus side, Crafty is one of the stronger chess programs available for the Macintosh. And it's definitely one of the cheapest.
Crafty is freeware and is copyrighted by Bob Hyatt. Parts of the Macintosh port are copyrighted by Lloyd Lee-Lim and by Metrowerks. You can do anything you want with Crafty, as long as it isn't for any commercial purpose.
You need the following to run Crafty 9.31:
You can obtain the appropriate version of Crafty from Lim Unlimited's ftp site:
There is also an unofficial version of Crafty (11.14d1) with a graphic chessboard. This version is experimental and is not supported.
If you're interested in Crafty's source code, you can obtain a copy from Bob Hyatt's ftp site.
Read Me
installation instructions and credits
Frequently Asked Questions
answers to common questions
Version History of Crafty
the gory details about each version of Crafty
Version History of Macintosh Port
the gory details about each Macintosh version
Macintosh Chess FAQ
info on all Macintosh chess programs, databases, and utilities
comp.sys.mac.games FAQ
has a section on freeware chess games for the Mac
Please send comments about Crafty to Bob Hyatt. Keep in mind that Bob doesn't know much about the Macintosh port, just that it exists.
Please send comments about the Macintosh port to Lloyd Lee-Lim <ltleelim@mail.limunltd.com>. Keep in mind that Lloyd doesn't know much about Crafty's internals, just enough to make it work. Also keep in mind that Lloyd sucks at chess.
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