In my experience though compatibility layer software, like Wine or Crossover, is the best option for running chess programs inside another os. Performance is better than on a vm and native programs have direct access to pgn or database files - and the program running under Wine/Crossover has direct access to downloaded files.
More recently I started using the IDEA feature on Aquarium, and running long analysis sessions stress the processor and the resource consumption on the VM and my Mac slows down. So I think that if you use intense, prolonged analysis features (e.g. correspondence chess at ICCF, opening preparation, exploring new lines) it is best to have a dedicated machine. You can reuse an old machine if it fast enough, but if you would go with a dedicated chess machine, it would likely be a native Windows one, with at least 6 cores (e.g. i7 6800k or better) as it would have three to four times the performance of a Parallels hosted VM on the Mac. That said, I would just use the Windows machine through windows remote desktop from my Mac (instead of using Parallels) to avoid consuming local resources. Finally, if you run long analysis sessions (e.g. nightly) you might want to have a good cooling system for the processors running at 100% for hours, so that goes more in the direction of having a desktop cabinet (e.g. thermaltake) rather than a laptop, either Windows or Mac.
Fritz Chess Program For Mac
I am the author of Chess Insight for macOS. This piece of software is an original development written in first place for my personal use to address the issue discussed above. I just badly wanted to have a chess app with a nice look and feel and the app works natively on my Mac to allow me to rid of Parallels and Fritz, something easy to use to organize the huge collection of pgn files and books I have, something allows me to annotate and keep in order my own OTB games. Eventually, I published it in the Mac App Store. The app is not free the cost is $24.99 which I hope not a big price for upcoming maintenance and updates. And, still, it is much more affordable than any of "commercial monsters". I hope many of you will get a tool they wanted and I will get some work to do with your feedback.
I recently bought Deep Fritz 12. It is not all that different from Fritz 9 except that the interfacehas been modified. Actually I use the free Stockfish engine in it which seems to be stronger than Deep Fritz 12. Both Stockfish and the free Fire engines support multiple processors as does Deep Fritz 12. Rybka 4 is the strongest chess engine, but I don't have it.You can buy it with either the Fritz interface or its own interface.
I have both Fritz on my PC and Shredder 12 on my iMac. I love the latter program. I use it to analyze each of my games as I complete them, and I have learned some great things from Shredder that I incorporate in my repertoire. I love the fact that I simply click on the PGN file of the game and it brings up Shredder ready to analyze the game. I fail to see any difference in the interface of Fritz and Shredder.
I'm biased on this. I would say Fritz. It is one of the main reasons why I've gotten to be so good at chess lately. The interface is in "ribbon" format like the new MS-Word version. It's a terrific program but like I said, I'm biased
I have a 750 Gb drive on this IMac, and two drives of the same capacity on my big Mac at work, with the space equally divided between Mac and PC, and 2 Gb of memory on each. It is much more than I really need, so with less drive space you might want to look more closely at the division. I must add that I play a LOT of PC games, soome of which require a lot of space, so if you were using the PC only for chess, you could do with a lot less drive space.I use Windows XP, and I don't know how much space Windows 7 requires for the system.
Deep Fritz 12 also has some minor bugs, and the engine is significantly weaker than some free programs such as Stockfish. Stockfish has some disconcerting quirks such as a tendency to suddenly change is evaluation value as it digs deeper into a position, but IMHO is is better than Fritz for moderately fast analysis (say 10-15 secs per move).For that reason I would caution about using Stockfish for instantaneous evaluation of a position (say less than 10 seconds on a 3 GHz dual core processor) unless you can tolerate recommendation of "inferior" moves.
Thanks for the info. I wont be using the PC side for anything other than chess... Chessbase and Rybka or Fritz or would be it. I have the lower end macbook pro. I wouldn't think I'd need to much room for Windows and those 2 programs. Maybe I'll ask someone at the Apple store.
With Bootcamp you have to reboot to change from Mac to Windows. With Parallels and similar programs you can run both Windows and Mac without rebooting, at the cost of a slight slowdown. I use Bootcamp myself, so I can't say much about performance with the others. I have yet to fnd a Windows program or game tht will not run under Bootcamp.
Really, it's not even close, with the use case of a chess laptop. With almost any other use case, one has to do the dollar tradeoff. But you probably wouldn't need such a high-end device, so the price gap would narrow.
My wife recently bought an iPad (supposedly for my birthday but I have yet to use the thing!). It's a beautiful piece of engineering and very user-friendly but it's not much use for chess (even if I do ever get to wrest it from my wife or son)
If you think you won't be using the PC for anything other than chess... think about what will happen to the computer when you upgrade to a different PC for chess... it will for sure be used for something else!
Fritz is not compatible with Mac OS X. However, there exists software that may allow you to run it anyway. There is an application named WineBottler that can take a program made for Windows (such as Fritz) and turns it into a Mac program. It doesn't always work perfectly but I think it should work with Fritz 13.
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ChessBase, Fritz & Co. are programs for Windows but they do also run on Mac computers if you install Windows, which is nowadays easy to do using, for instance, Boot Camp, Parallels, or VMware Fusion. We compare these three alternatives and describe how you can use them to install ChessBase on your Mac. Having a Mac computer will no longer be a hindrance for you to work with ChessBase's powerful softwares like ChessBase 14, Mega Database, Fritz, Komodo and many others. A step by step in-depth tutorial.
Boot Camp is provided free by Apple and splits your hard drive into two partitions, allowing you to install the Windows operating system and Windows programs on the second partition. If you choose this solution you can run Windows on your Mac natively and the desktop looks just like as if you had a Windows computer. All Windows programs run on it. To switch between macOS and the Windows operating system a restart is necessary.
To beginners, virtualization programs such as e.g. Parallels Desktop might at first appear a bit complicated. But after getting used to them they offer more may appeal more to regular Mac users than Boot Camp (on its own). Under a virtualization program, a Windows system runs like an additional, though very large program under macOS.
Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion allow to choose between various operating modes: you can run Windows entirely in a separate program window or you integrate Windows into OS X. Parallels Desktop calls this mode "Coherence Mode", while VMware refers to it as "Unity".
Another alternative: An individual user can use the free program Virtual Box. But this software is far less comfortable than its competitors for which you have to pay. Virtual Box uses the PC operating system like an additional Mac program and can operate Mac and PC programs at the same time.
The reduced resources might affect the use of ChessBase programs in the virtualization. Fritz and ChessBase usually use as many cores as possible. However, tests run by our developers showed that even computing-intensive tasks were no real problem. The only thing that seemed to be a bit slower was the graphics performance.
If you already created a Windows partition with the Boot Camp assistant on your hard drive you can still additionally install a virtualization program. For this you can also choose to import the Boot Camp partition.
With the native program "Boot Camp" you can install Microsoft Windows on your Apple Mac in just a few steps. Thanks to the Boot Camp Assistant, which is already preinstalled on your MacBook, this is much easier than it sounds at first glance. The Boot Camp Assistant guides you through all steps of this process clearly and quickly. 2ff7e9595c
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