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At the 9th World Microcomputer Chess Championship, which was held at Portorose, Yugoslavia, from September 8th to 18th, 1988, MEPHISTO once again won the laurels for West Germany as it had done before in Glasgow (1984), Amsterdam (1985), Dallas (1986), Rome (1987) and Almeria (1988). MEPHISTO won all categories, finishing well ahead of its competitors. This long run of victories - unequaled in the annals of world microcomputer championships - is ample proof that Richard Lang, who is widely regarded as the best chess programmer in the world, has once again succeeded in substantially increasing the playing strength of his program, which he has been constantly revising and improving over the years.
Hardware:
The MEPHISTO world championship units are the first commercially available chess computers to have been fitted with 512 KBytes of (PORTOROSE 68000) and 1024 KBytes (PORTOROSE 68020) respectively of working memory, which has permitted their computing capabilities to be increased dramatically in comparison with traditional computers.
Software:
The program has been improved in all areas:
Opening:
The opening library has been increased to about 10,000 variations with almost 85,000 half-moves, which makes the program even more attractive to play with.
Middle game:
A more active and vigorous playing style with even better piece coordination in conjunction with even faster and deeper selective search techniques to spot possibilities for attacks and combinations.
Endgame:
Improved handling of advanced and connected passed pawns as well as greater activity in the endgame. Enormous increase of computing speed due to the use of so-called “hash tables”.
Excerpts taken from the “Hegener + Glaser Mephisto Portorose” User Manual.
The program was sold in three versions: Motorola 68000, 68020 and 68030 microprocessors. This version is the Motorola 68020 32 Bit version. The playing strength is approximately ELO 2350 USCF.
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