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Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a novice player but I reached a stalemate in my first game. I am not a big fan of the graphics, they're really really cool but I made at least two big mistakes because I misread the pieces - and now I have a headache :D

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I thought the graphics were brilliant. Reminded me of playing Battle Chess on 4-color CGA.

Ok, maybe if you have fond memories of playing CGA games... for everyone else, those colors (especially the cyan/magenta palette) are just a garish eyesore. But I guess the engine needs every advantage it can get ;)

It's common to draw too, as it tends to do 3 move repetition, perhaps to avoid losing material.

When I finally beat it, it seemed to let me fork it's pieces in the corner, and then in endgame, it knows nothing about the positional strategy to avoid forks or mating combinations, since it only has 4 move lookahead. It let me material with king and rook even though it had a knight that could have interfered.

Yeah, the pieces are a bit illegible. I accidentally moved my Queen instead of castling, which is when I quit. Otherwise pretty impressive

The pieces were meant to be displayed on a composite (NTSC) display rather than with 4-color CGA graphics. Check out the Twitter thread at https://mobile.twitter.com/pinot/status/1330544777847332879.

Don't get me wrong, I dig the retro art style, but at that resolution, dithering gets in the way of legibility. I think for the chess pieces themselves it makes more sense to trade off some of the realism (i.e., shading, specular) to better communicate the shapes, particularly as it's so important to game play

The point of composite is they the dithering isn't visible on a proper monitor, because compositing creates an antialiasing effect.

I'm aware of that composite signals tended to bleed pixels horizontally. I used to draw my own pixel art when I owned an Amiga (though to be fair, the monitors were often sharper, and I wasn't always using composite). I grant perhaps it's more legible on a composite display, though I think that's a hard thing to appreciate when delivered on the modern web.

Bishop looks similar to a pawn unless you look closely.

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