Chess And Checkers Programs For Atari Personal Computers

SUNNYVALE, CA — January 22, 1981 — Personal Software Inc. has introduced MicroChess^™ and Checker King^™ for the Atari^™ 400 and 800 personal computers.

The MicroChess program turns a computer display screen into a chess board, and is the industry's first "gold cassette" software product with sales over $1 million. The board and all its pieces are illustrated in high-resolution color graphics.

MicroChess has eight levels of play, and lets the player pick the appropriate ability level. MicroChess plays by tournament rules and allows no illegal moves, making the program an excellent chess teacher.

Checker King brings the popular game of checkers to Atari home computers. The program turns the computer display screen into a colorful checkerboard, where all pieces are — like MicroChess — illustrated using high-resolution graphics.

Checker King allows single, double and triple jumps, forces jumps and performs according to the tournament rules of checkers. And, again like MicroChess, Checker King allows no illegal moves at any of its eight levels of play.

In both Atari versions of MicroChess and Checker King, tournament excitement is generated by an on-screen, real-time clock that ticks off the seconds while the player and the computer ponder the next move.

Both MicroChess and Checker King for the Atari are available on cassette for Atari 400 and 800 personal computers and both require 8K bytes of memory. MicroChess was written by Peter Jennings; Checker king is by Michael Marks.

For more information, please contact Jeff Walden, Personal Software, Inc., 1330 Bordeaux Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94086.

Atari, Atari 400 and Atari 800 are registered trademarks of Atari, Inc. MicroChess and Checker King are trademarks of Personal Software Inc.