Backgammon Software

Software

Java: BG-Blitz (player, analyzer)

From:   Frank Berger
Address:   frankb@netcologne.de
Date:   19 September 1998
Subject:   new version of BG-Blitz is out!
Forum:   rec.games.backgammon
Google:   01bde3db$a56d7940$021010c1@no5

Dear Backgammon enthusiasts, A new version of BG-Blitz is out! (http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-bergerfr) new features: - extract your matches from the Fibs-logfiles - easy-installation and comfortable launcher-scripts - slow and fast replay modes - some more features in the position-database - as usual some bugfixes ;-) You don't know what BG-Blitz is? Read on. BG-Blitz is a Software intended as the Swiss-Army Knife for Backgammon. Current Blades are: - Replay of Matches from Databases. Prebuilt is a Database with all BigBrother matches and all Jellyfish vs. mloner games. This are about 2,300 matches and more than 9000 single games! Naturally you could create databases of your own and import matches from FIBS, GamesGrid, Jellyfish and PBEM, you can comment every move, and you can build queries for certain games. - Replay of Matches in FIBS, GamesGrid and PBEM format from text files. - Analyze Cube strategy in match game. It answers when to double, match winning probabilities and much more. - Databases for single positions. You could create your own or use prebuilt databases. Currently there is a database with all positions from Dwek:"Backgammon for Profit" and complete rollouts from Jellyfish 3.01. There will other follow and I hope that many people contribute with their own high-quality databases. I will make them available on this site. - full support for the Jellyfish-Matchfile format. You could replay your games comfortably in BG-Blitz and annotate them. You could import your own matches in a Database and can export every game from a database and analyze it by Jellyfish. - convert between FIBS-oldmove, PBEM, Jellyfish, GamesGrid and BG-Blitz files - additional position-database available. All positions from former champion Tim Holland's book: "Better Backgammon" rolled out 5184 times! Curious? Look at "http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-bergerfr". A Java-version of Bgblitz is now there for your download. I think it's worth to have a look! And it has an unbeatable price, just one email with name and city :-) Have fun! If anyone with Java - programming skills likes to spend endless hours on a non-profitable project, he/she may contact me. Backgammon players which like to setup position for position from a book, are also invited. Frank Berger frankb@netcologne.de frankb @ Fibs frankb33 @ PBEM

Frank Berger writes:

[April 2002] Although the Website isn't 100% ready, the version 1.0 of BGBlitz is ready, and the address has changed to http://www.bgblitz.com. You'll find match-databases with more than 3000 matches and Position-databases with several hundred Positions. ciao frank

Frank Berger writes:

[June 2005] It has been quite a long time since the last release. I needed far longer than I expected (should have been ready in December!), but the cubeful match equities were quite difficult to understand and there is very few information about it available and this little is not free of errors or complete. Further I was a little delayed because I was asked to make BGBlitz the AI behind a BG-server, so now play65.com and gammonempire.com use BGBlitz to evaluate interrupted games :)) And I'm working on another BG related project, which you will see the later this year (I hope...) Well what's new in this release? - Finally! BGBlitz uses cubeful equities in match play too. This improves the cube play in matches considerably. - The evaluation in matchplay, especially at double match point was improved. - Improved cubeful equities in money games. - BGBlitz got configurable random number generators (RNG). With a network connection you could even have *real* random numbers from www.random.org Additionally the state of the RNG is displayed during the game in the upper right half of the status bar, so you can control the numbers always and you can even look at the *future rolls*. I wrote some additional explanations on the "Does it Cheat?" page. Will this stop the "BGBlitz is cheating" mails? ;) - A Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" compatible version is included. This version is about 30% faster than the "Panther" version. - A Turkish translation is included. Thanks to Özgür Albayrak - There is a new graphics artist supporting BGBlitz! Russ Taber brought us a "fishy" board, with different sounds. Michael Darooge contributed an excellent board with transparent checkers. (Both need Java 1.2 or higher, so they don't work with Mac OS 9). Further I wrote a little documentation: "How to create your own theme". So if you ever wanted to create your own theme, this should give you the necessary informations. - The "Select Theme" dialog box now shows previews of the themes. - BGBlitz now resigns in hopeless situations. - Shortcuts for "Quit Game" (^G) and "Concede Game" (Shift-^G) were included. - The "Best Moves" dialog box shows the actual equity difference to the best move - I fixed two difficult to find bugs, that happened only under rare circumstances. Many thanks to all people sending error reports to me, especially to Rainer Schmid who gave the decisive hint. Some minor errors has been fixed too. - A bunch of small improvements in functionality and usability are included in this release too. - I planned to raise the requirements to (at least) Java 1.3 with the release 2.0 and support Mac OS 9 with release 1.9.4. Unfortunately I ran in some bugs of the MRJ. I spent nearly a week to find some workarounds but it was in vain. So the release 1.9.0 is the last release with works with Java 1.1.8. Many thanks to Özgür Albayrak, Alex Cumbers, Michael Darooge, Linc Davis, Peter Grotrian, Tom Hipschman, Jan van't Hull, Radu-Dan Sabau, Christian Schmid, Rainer Schmid, Michael Stein, Russ Taber and to all people providing error reports, made suggestions or helped in any other way to improve BGBlitz. You could download BGBlitz at http://www.bgblitz.com. All the best Frank

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