Chess Titans

Chess Titans
Developer: Oberon Games Publisher: Microsoft Platform: Windows Released internationally: January 30, 2007 This game has uncompiled source code. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has debugging material. This game has a bugs page

To do: See if more of the options work in the Vista version. This was tested with the Windows 7 version. There's much more to document. A good place to start would be to use Resource Hacker on the game executable and DLLs. Add sub-page for "Media Center Chess Titans", a full-screen version of the game embedded into the game's executable which although is technically used as it can be launched from Windows Media Center, it is not documented in any Help menus, and it also contains a whole bunch of unused content the normal game doesn't. Multiple prototypes of this game exist in various Windows Longhorn/Vista Beta builds, collect all of them and create a Prototypes sub-page. Win8 DP1 (6.2.8102.0 (winmain_win8m3.110823-1455)) saw the removal of the built-in Windows games from the edition manifest for Prerelease(ARM); this change would be later expanded through the removal of most Win7 client editions (excluding Starter(N), Professional(N) and Enterprise(N)) from the source tree during early 830x, orphaning the games entirely. The only catch to this, however, is that the Win7 games were still compiled from until as late as Win10 v1703, which is when MS decided to ditch the rest of the older editions entirely. The binaries were included in the provided repair content sources for the following builds: 8250 (Win8 Consumer Preview), 8400 (Win8 Release Preview), 9200 (Win8 RTM), 9431 (Win8.1 BlueMP), 9600 (Blue RTM), 10586 (Win10 v1511) and 14393 x86 (Win10 v1607). As the enablement flags for the games are still present in every SKU's product policies, it'd be a good idea if someone were to re-enable them through ProductPolicyEditor and look through any noticeable code changes from within their binaries. Related note: The main Chess Titans dynamic link library in the repair content for Win8 Consumer Preview (and later) use MSDelta compression (treated as a null update delta), and will cause DISM to complain about invalid SHA-256 hashes; this also causes the Win7 editions to fail staging entirely with code STATUS_SXS_FILE_HASH_MISMATCH unless the offending component is either decompressed first or removed from the respective edition manifest.

One of the new games included with Windows Vista and 7.

Sub-Pages

Bugs

Debug Menu

To do: See if the Full Speed Render does anything.

As with most other games shipped with Vista and 7, it has an internal g_debugEnabled variable. The options included in this menu are:

• Rotate Board - Rotates the board to the other side in the 3D view, but doesn't do anything in the 2D view.
• Self Play - View a game played by two computer players. If a game already began, the game will then start a new one.
• Toggle Top Down View - Goes to the top-down 2D view, but going back to the 3D view will cause the graphic setting to drop to the lowest-quality 3D setting.
• Toggle Full Speed Render - Supposedly would make the game run faster on slower computers.

XInput Support

An interesting feature that isn't documented anywhere (Help Menu-wise) is XInput (gamepad) support – if the game detects an Xbox 360 controller plugged into a USB port, the P1 corner on the controller will light up, signifying the controller can be used. Possibly undocumented because Oberon Games/Microsoft thought a gamepad would be odd to use. It's a neat little feature, nonetheless.

Controls

Button	Effect
Left analog stick/D-Pad/Shoulder Buttons/Triggers	Moves the cursor. Oddly, they can also be used to navigate the menu bar.
B/Back	Undoes the previous move.
A/X	Selects the square the cursor is on. Moving the cursor onto a piece and pressing A/X selects it. Pressing A/X on one of the highlighted squares moves the piece there.
Y/Start	Opens the Game Menu.

Unused Textures

To do: See if there's more to find.

There are some unused textures in the game files.

Environments

These images were likely intended to be backgrounds before being replaced with simple gradients.

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  Aurora

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  Stars

DXUT Controls

An unused texture for what seems to be a development menu.

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