Wenn ich das Teil erst einmal zu Hause habe, kann ich mit Sicherheit nicht widerstehen!!!

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shine on...

Hi all,

I’m finally online thanks to Micha …

Apologies for my English ..

My Mephisto Phoenix arrived a few days ago, I’ll post a couple of pictures of what I’ve managed to add so far soon …

Al

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My Chess Computers
Picochess v3 on YouTube

Hi Al,

That's not a problem. As promised, I will try to translate more phrases in the forum.

If you have any problems, just ask.

Regards
Micha

Es kommt drauf an, welches Weihnachten gemeint ist.
Wer schon länger wartet, kann ja sein Geschenk von Weihnachten 2021 öffnen oder sein Geburtstagsgeschenk von diesem Jahr.

Hi all,

My Mephisto Phoenix arrived on Wednesday.

I’ve already had it apart to get access to the micro sd card, I now have a micro sd card extension and the card is now accessible outside the case, conveniently through the slot provided at the rear.

The sd card is split into 3 drives, a boot drive, an encrypted drive where all the menus etc are based and a data drive that contains the Engines, Books and some other interesting data.

I have access to the 1st and 3rd drives, but need root access for most of the 2nd drive.

The Operating system is 32bit Raspbian Buster and Stockfish 15.0 is a RPi binary compiled with gcc-8.3.0 on the 26th of July 2022:
“Stockfish 260722 by the Stockfish developers (see AUTHORS file)”

The other 3 Engines are not Raspberry Pi binaries, I already knew this as I had contacted all 3 authors prior to receiving my Phoenix. I don’t think they are Windows binaries, so probably Linux.

I noticed that out of the 5 supplied books, the fun book was exactly the same as our fun book on Picochess. So I added a Gambit book, which immediately showed on boot and is selectable. When I added another book, this didn’t show. However if I renamed the gambit or another book, it showed. So obviously the menu is set to show 6 books. I can’t change this without access to the encrypted data on drive 2.

So the books worked, so I set about adding another Engine. I compiled Stockfish 15.1 using the same gcc-8.3.0 and Buster that was used for v15.0. I noticed that some of the UCI options were changed in v15.0 so I matched these in v15.1. There is also a file named ‘pcs_dat_engsandr‘ that contains the uci options for all engines, Stockfish v14 was also in there, so they must have changed to Stockfish v15 quite late in the day. I added Stockfish 15.1 to this file and rebooted. It didn’t show, so the menus must only allow 4 Engines. I altered the name of the Stockfish 15.0 engine and renamed my 15.1 to 15.0 and rebooted.

As I don’t have access to the menus the engine still showed as Stockfish 15.0, but I knew it was 15.1 and it runs faultlessly. So theoretically I could add any Engine but it would have to show as Stockfish 15.

Here’s a few pictures …






(Click on a thumbnail for a larger image)

Cheers,

Al

__________________
My Chess Computers
Picochess v3 on YouTube

My dear old friend Al,

you can't leave away your fingers to make any chess computer even better.
Welcome to this forum!

Yours, Jürgen

Hallo zusammen,
ein moderativer Hinweis: Natürlich darf, kann und soll Al gerne berichten, wie er seinen Phoenix tunt. Also, wie er ihn verbessert, andere Bücher darauf installiert oder auch Engines. Das ist sicherlich für viele User interessant.

Nachfragen hingegen, ob und wie der Kopierschutz des Systems überwunden wurde, ob und wie man Backups der SD-Karte anfertigen und laufen lassen kann, egal ob auf dem Phoenix oder ggf. sogar auf anderen Computern, werden hier hingegen ganz gewiss nicht zugelassen.

Ich habe jetzt zwei Postings zu der Thematik gelöscht, ausgerechnet auch noch vom gleichen Mitglied ... offenbar reichte der erste "Wink mit dem Zaunpfahl" nicht, indem ich das erste Posting löschte. Sollte es in der Art weitergehen, werden nicht nur die Postings gelöscht.

Wer den Unterschied zwischen dem berechtigten Interesse, ein Gerät zu tunen und dem, eine Kopie von urheberrechtlich geschütztem Material anzufertigen, nicht unterscheiden kann und will, dem ist nicht zu helfen.

Gruß,
Sascha




Hi all,
a moderative note: Al is of course welcome to report how he tunes his Phoenix. That is, how he improves it, installs other books on it or engines. That is certainly interesting for many users.

However, questions about whether and how the copy protection of the system was passed, whether and how backups of the SD card can be made and run, whether on the Phoenix or even on other computers, will certainly not be allowed here.

I have now deleted two postings on the subject, from the same member ... apparently the first hint was not enough by deleting the first posting. If it continues in this vein, not only the postings will be deleted.

If you can't and won't distinguish the difference between a legitimate interest in tuning a device and making a copy of copyrighted material, I can't help you.

Greetings,
Sascha

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This post may not be reproduced without prior written permission.
Copyright (c) 1967-2025. All rights reserved to make me feel special. :-)

Hi all,

Thanks for the welcome etc …

I’d just like to add that I asked permission before posting this article and deliberately never showed screen prints showing the files on all 3 drives.


Cheers,

Al

__________________
My Chess Computers
Picochess v3 on YouTube

Er ist bei mir zu Hause angekommen!

Hier die ersten optischen Eindrücke:


Mephisto Phoenix - Sendungs-Verpackung


Mephisto Phoenix - in OVP


Mephisto Phoenix - ausgepackt


Mephisto Phoenix - Board


Mephisto Phoenix - originale Aufbewahrungs-Verpackung


Jetzt muss ich aber erst einmal mit meinen Hunden eine große Runde gehen.
Abends werde ich dann das Gerät endlich testen können.

Gruß
Rüdiger

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shine on...

Viel Spaß Rüdiger mit der wirklichen Wundermaschine

Gruß
Egbert