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I'm giving serious thought to slapping together a program that plays 
Renaissance in 68000 assembly language.  Maybe Ultima (Baroque), too. 
Regardless of the game, I don't expect it to perform very well against
machines with far faster processor speeds, but it just might produce some
useful benchmarks to test your programs against.  (And thanks for the
link
to Sourceforge; I'm sorry to say that all that C++ stuff at Sourceforge
is
a trifle over my head as I was raised on assembler instead of C.)  Still,
whatever I slap together, it only takes a handful of adjustments to
change
one game into the other.

The only things I'm a little bit uncomfortable about are:

   1  the multi-leaping rule for the Leaper, and
   2  the suicide rule for immobilized pieces.

Are those the main differences?

As for piece name nomenclature back in 1968, we learned 'Imitator' for
what Ultima calls a Chameleon.  Does anybody use Mime, Mimic, or Mirror
for that piece as well?  The one that looks like a Bishop.

You mentioned how one of the programs currently in vogue recognizes
checkmate as the proper way of ending the game.  But isn't the main
difference between capturing the King and checkmating the King a matter
of
one extra ply of searching?  When we used to play Baroque, we used chess
clocks, and capturing the King outright just made for easier play.

Finally, as for notational differences, it was my understanding that
captured pieces were set off by commas between each other, all enclosed
equally within a single pair of parentheses, e.g.,

  32. Pc2-c6 (Wc7, Lb6, Id6) <--- White's turn, taking 3 pieces
      Pf5-f3 (Pf3, Cg3)      <--- Black's turn, taking 2 pieces

The advantage to this kind of notation is that it makes for playing the
game backwards just as easy as playing it forward, assuming you have a
diagram to refer to.  However, with the Chessish 'x' symbol, do you
repeat the 'x' symbol between every piece you have captured?  I don't
mind much one way or the other, as the differences are purely cosmetic,
but if you could describe the notational standard that is currently in
place, that would be great.

So, if I slap together an Ultima game using run-of-the-mill 68000
assembly
language, does anybody using Windows out there have a good 68000 emulator
for trying it out?  For tournaments that are not face-to-face, but
involve
some kind of real-time processing, do you have a link that describes how
those kinds of tournaments are managed?

Feel free to send me email as my webbrowser tends to crash very
frequently.

Matthew Montchalin
mmontcha@OregonVOS.net