Socrates - DOS

Game is con­trol­led by the same keys that are used to playing un­der MS DOS. For full­screen press 'Right Alt' + 'En­ter'.

If the game e­mu­la­ti­on spe­ed is low, you can try to in­cre­a­se it by re­lo­a­ding this pa­ge with­out a­ds or cho­o­se a­no­ther e­mu­la­tor from this table.

Unfortunately, this game is cur­rent­ly available only in this ver­si­on. Be patient :-)

Game size:

   Socrates was a series of DOS chess programs by Don Dailey and Larry Kaufman. Socrates was initially the 8086 assembly port of the C program Heuristic Alpha, developed for Julio Kaplan's company Heuristic Software. It had its tournament debut at the ACM 1991. While the C program evolved to Mini and Titan aka Socrates II, winner of the ACM 1993 on a 486 PC ahead of Cray Blitz and HiTech, later sold to Electronic Arts as engine of the mass-market entry Kasparov's Gambit, its 32-bit x86 assembly counterpart Socrates, the best program at Harvard Cup 1992 with 3 out of 5, beating grandmasters Patrick Wolff, Maxim Dlugy and John Fedorowicz, incorporated knowledge from Titan and evolved to Socrates 3.0, finally released and commercially market in 1993 not by Heuristic Software, but through a company called MDI. Since Larry Kaufman mentioned in 1992 that Null Move Pruning doubles the speed of the search, NMP was likely also implemented in Socrates.

More details about this game can be found on Chessprogramming.org.

Find digital download of this game on GOG or Steam.

This ver­sion of Socrates was de­sig­ned for per­so­nal com­pu­ters with o­pe­ra­ting sys­tem MS-DOS (Mi­cro­soft Disk O­pe­ra­ting Sys­tem), which was o­pe­ra­ting sys­tem de­ve­lo­ped by Mi­cro­soft in 1981. It was the most wi­de­ly-used o­pe­ra­ting sys­tem in the first half of the 1990s. MS-DOS was sup­plied with most of the IBM com­pu­ters that pur­cha­sed a li­cen­se from Mi­cro­soft. Af­ter 1995, it was pu­s­hed out by a gra­phi­cal­ly mo­re ad­van­ced sys­tem - Win­dows and its de­ve­lop­ment was ce­a­sed in 2000. At the ti­me of its grea­test fa­me, se­ve­ral thou­sand ga­mes de­sig­ned spe­ci­fi­cal­ly for com­pu­ters with this sys­tem we­re cre­a­ted. To­day, its de­ve­lop­ment is no lon­ger con­ti­nue and for e­mu­la­tion the free DOSBox e­mu­la­tor is most of­ten used. Mo­re in­for­ma­ti­on about MS-DOS operating system can be found here.

5 different online emulators are available for Socrates. These emulators differ not only in the technology they use to emulate old games, but also in support of various game controllers, multiplayer mode, mobile phone touchscreen, emulation speed, absence or presence of embedded ads and in many other parameters. For maximum gaming enjoyment, it's important to choose the right emulator, because on each PC and in different Internet browsers, the individual emulators behave differently. The basic features of each emulator available for this game Socrates are summarized in the following table: