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Ultima is a play-by-email page. It is categorized as: Two dimensional, In a category all its own, Orthodox chess set but with different capturing rules.

Ultima. New presets that enforce rules and display legal moves. (Recognized!)

Author: Fergus Duniho. Inventor: Robert Abbott.

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The board used for this game has 8 row(s), 8 column(s), 64 cells/squares.

Invented in the year 1962. [1961-1963]. [1957-1967].

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Group ID 'Ultima'

Categories and Details

2d Other Usual-Capturing

Game Courier Logs

Game Courier Logs for Games of Ultima

Click on the above link to view logs of Ultima played on Game Courier.

Credits

Author: Fergus Duniho. Inventor: Robert Abbott.

Comments

Ultima.

Game where each type of piece has a different capturing ability. (Recognized!)

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on 2023-03-13 EDT

The new preset is allowing Chameleons to capture pawns with diagonal moves.

Okay, that's now fixed.

Daniel Zacharias wrote on 2023-03-13 EDT

The new preset is allowing Chameleons to capture pawns with diagonal moves.

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on 2023-03-13 EDT

The new Ultima presets are ready. Since the ones Antoine Fourrière had written were broken, and he is no longer active, I wrote entirely new ones that made use of the fairychess include file. These will display legal moves, and they will display piece names and descriptions in error messages. To test the new code, I replaced his preset with a new one and ran all the old Ultima games with it. Where a game complained about an illegal move, I checked which preset was at fault, and I made corrections in the new one when it was at fault. It turns out that the old preset allowed some illegal moves. In particular, I recall it allowing the King to move into check from a Coordinator. I also noticed that it handled suicide moves as deletions of spaces, which would be appropriate for Chesire Cat Chess or Wormhole Chess. For backwards compatibility, I enabled the substitute Galactic preset to handle deletions as suicide moves. But for the main fairychess preset, which the links on this page now go to, I did not. It will handle suicide moves as incomplete moves that do not include the destination. This is one of the standard ways that Game Courier handles suicide moves, and it works better with the mouse than the other ways do. One last thing is that I changed the notation to use co/CO for the Coordinator and ch/CH for the Chameleon. This should be less confusing than using c/C for the Coordinator and x/X for the Chameleon, especially if you are using the Abstract set, which displays the Chameleon in the form of the letter C. But this is only in the new fairychess preset. To be compatible with old games, the Galactic preset still uses the old notation.

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on 2023-03-13 EDT

Okay, I fixed the problem with suicide moves. I was thinking there were only two ways of writing them, but there were three, and by conflating two of these together, I had failed to update one of them to save values for $old and $moved when a suicide move is made. Given the multiple ways for writing these moves, I had decided to test for a suicide move by checking whether the moving piece and the last captured piece were the same, but for the full notation way of writing a suicide move, I hadn't done that.

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on 2023-03-12 EDT

I am working on a new Ultima preset, and it's mostly working, but I've hit one snag. While suicide moves of the form "@-e2" are working, suicide moves of the form "P e2-" are making things go haywire, and I would rather use the latter, since they are easier to choose with the mouse. Here are the moves I'll replay tomorrow to continue trying to fix this:

1. P g2-g5 
1... p d7-d4 
2. P e2-e5 
2... x c8-g4 
3. L g1-g2 
3... x g4-g1 
4. X f1-b5 
4... p g7-g6 
5. P f2-f4 
5... p d4-e4 
6. P b2-b4 
6... x g1-g2 
7. W e1-g1 
7... x g2-g4 
8. C h1-f3 
8... p h7-h3 
9. C f3-e3 
9... x g4-f3 
10. K d1-e1 
10... i h8-h4
11. X b5-d7 // - Check! -
11... k e8-d7 
12. K e1-f1 
12... i h4-e1 // - Check! -
13. P e5-g5 
13... x f3-e2 // - Check! -
14. P h2-f2 
14... p h3-h1 // - Check! -
15. P g5-g1 
15... x f8-h6 
16. @-d2 
16... x h6-h2 
17. P c2-e2 
17... i e1-d1

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First Created: Monday, January 1st, 2001
Last Modified: Monday, March 13th, 2023
File Timestamp: Mon, 13 Mar 2023 16:51:00 -0400
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