Wim+Rens

a Dutch retired IT professional and analyst, and in the 80s as chess programmer author of Gambiet, which was the first commercial chess program from the Netherlands, written in Z80 assembly language for TRS-80 home computers. After some years of success in the early 80s and involvement with Microtrend, he had several ideas to further improve the program, but most failed due to hardware limitations and the complexity barrier. About thirty years later, he became challenged to try his old ideas about chess programming with Visual Basic with the result of GambitVB. || toc =Gabmol= Inspired by the the book //Sargon: A Computer Chess Program// by Dan and Kathe Spracklen, Wim Rens started chess programming in early 1979. His first program dubbed //Gabmol// written in Z80 assembly language for the TRS-80 home computers made some publicity in the Netherlands when it won a match versus Peter van Diepen's program IGM which ran on a UNIVAC 418 III.
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 * [[image:WimRens.JPG link="http://gambitvb.info/Contact.aspx"]] ||~ || **Willem (Wim) J. Rens**,
 * Willem Rens ||~ ||^ ||

=Microtrend= Wim Rens in his June 1981 Databus article //Grondslagen van computerschaak// on how it began with Microtrend and Gambiet :

=Gambiet= Wim Rens was hired by Microtrend and his program went commercial called Gambiet 80. After the shared third place at the first WMCCC 1980 in [|London], Gambiet further evolved and became the software of the Videopac C 7010 module of the [|Philips] [|Videopac G7000] [|video game console] in 1982.

=GambitVB= When Microsoft introduced the [|.NET framework] in 2002, Wim Rens tried his old chess programming ideas with Visual Basic, and performance critical parts of subsequent versions rewritten in none [|managed] C++. GambitVB plays reasonable chess, has an own GUI, and is open source distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.

=Publications=
 * Wim Rens (**1981**). //Grondslagen van computerschaak//. [|Databus] 06-81, pp. 13-15, [|pdf] hosted by Hein Veldhuis (Dutch)

=External Links= > [|GambitVB Chess - History]
 * [|Welcome to GambitVB]
 * [|Wim Rens' ICGA Tournaments]

=References= =What links here?= include page="Wim Rens" component="backlinks" limit="40"
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