Welcome to CEZebra Homepage
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CEZebra is the smaller sister of WZebra
famous Othello* program for desktop PC by Gunnar
Andersson.
CEZebra, which is a Windows CE version of Zebra for Pocket PC is
written by Pavel Radzivilovsky.
It uses Gunnar's Zebra Othello Engine, which makes it the strongest
Othello program for the Pocket PC today.
This program is freeware.
Current version of CEZebra is 1.0 Final Release (released on Dec 29
2001), which means that we would like
to hear from you! Please send bug reports, ideas for future releases, etc to
Pavel (boss@bugpower.co.il).
More games by Pavel
Radzivilovsky
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News
- CEZebra 1.0 Final was released on 29/12/01. This fixes a Pocket PC
2002 bug and added some new features, like Save/Load game in SGF
format.
- CEZebra 1.0 Beta 3 was released on 30/11/01. New & improved
features:
- Fixed a major resource leak which caused PC to stop responding after
20 games (Reported by Steve Olin).
- Added a database of human openings
- Reduced the program size by half, by using run-time decompression of
the knowledge base with Zlib
compression library
- CEZebra 1.0 Beta 2 was released on 21/11/01. It fixes an important
Practice Mode bug, which caused to treat level incorrectly and lead to
a display bug in the endgame.
Current Features
- World-class othello playing (Sometimes mistakenly referred to as Reversi)
- Two player game
- 12 levels of difficulty
- Exact Solve of Othello boards
- Observation of two player game
- Practice Mode with on-board score display
- Famous ThorDB opening book
- Save/Load Game in format compatible with leading Othello software
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About the Authors
Zebra Othello Engine is made by Gunnar
Andersson (Sweden).
Windows CE GUI is written by Pavel
Radzivilovsky (Israel).
Graphics was designed by Hans-Erik Palmgren.
Pavel can be contacted by the following means:
Download
Note: Currently supported platforms are Pocket PC running Windows CE 3.0 (or
higher) with ARM, MIPS or SH3 CPU.
CEZebra 1.0 for ARM only (690K)
CEZebra 1.0 for SH3 only (720K)
Installation instructions:
Download the above file and run it on your desktop computer.
It will connect to your ActiveSync and install the software on your Pocket PC.
After installing, run CEZebra from Start Menu\Programs\CEZebra.
Enjoy!
If you don't have a desktop machine
Alternatively, If you don't have a desktop machine and you wish to install it
directly on the Pocket PC, you can download CAB file for your CPU separately
from the installation executable.
Here are 3 of them: ARM, MIPS
and SH3. (This installation method is not
recommended).
Usage Instructions
CEZebra user interface is designed to be easy enough to understand without
any special documentation or online help.
However, we came up with a few tips about using the advanced features:
- If you want a relatively fast computer response, don't set level any
higher than 9 when Zebra is playing. In fact, level 6 is enough to beat both
of us.
- All scores (in Practice Mode and Observe Game mode) are in terms of disks.
(Difference between the current player and his opponent, by the
end of a correct game, according to the "best estimation effort").
When Zebra is playing, it displays your predicted score. Positive means you
are winning.
- Score values are floating-point, which reflects the Zebra's,
far-from-objective opinion. Zebra, however, can know exact scores in the
endgame. When you start to see integer scores, they are exact and it
means that zebra knows the optimal line.
- On-board scores in Practice Mode are continuously updated as
you sit by and watch. CPU keeps thinking and improving the evaluations until
the move is made or exact values are obtained. Therefore, if you are close
to endgame and sit long enough, you will start seeing integer numbers
appearing - which means there're exact move values obtained.
Optional Opening Book
With CEZebra, only a THORDB opening book is shipped by default. An additional
opening book for CEZebra is available for download, since 6/02/02. Here're the
instructions to download & install this opening book.
PLEASE READ THIS before installing an additional opening book: First, make sure
if you need it. For most Othello players, Zebra's opening engine would be fast
and strong enough. Advanced Opening book should only be used by advanvced
players, for Othello practice or advanced game analysis. The additional opening
book is a heavy thing. You would probably need to have CEZebra installed on a
storage card for this. The optional opening book (currently version 3.11) takes
8MB (!) storage space and you have to provide about 15MB of free RAM at runtime
for Zebra, when using it.
Directions:
- Make sure you have a large Storage Device in your Pocket PC and that
CEZebra is installed on it. If not, uninstall CEZebra and reinstal install
again on the storage card.
- Download this book
- Quit any running instances of CEZebra.
- Unzip the new opening book to the directory where you put CEZebra files.
Replace the existing book.bin with the one you UnZipped. (If you like, you
can rename the original file so that you could restore the old book
quickly).
- Go to Settings/Memory. Make sure you have about 15 MB of free RAM.
If no, move the slider until you do, or shut down running programs.
- Try running CEZebra as you usually do. If it shouts "Memory
Allocation Problems", then you didn't do the previous part.
- In any case, if you want to restore the original state, either replace the
file back or reinstall CEZ.
- If you have any problems, either ask me questions or tell me to write an
automatic script doing all this.
- And once again, if you don't need an additional opening book, don't do it.
Note: soon we are going to release a smaller optional book.
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* Othello is a registered trademark of Anjar Co.