response 195 of 198:

Dec 21 02:34 UTC 2000

They have not worked quite yet (see coop 218).  I finally got hold of mate,
mystic, lasker, lazerchess and gnu chess for dos.  I forget which was which,
but one was for playing over the phone or a nullmodem (Q for Quit), most had
German documentation and/or required typing in the move instead of using arrow
keys or mouse, one was a variation on chess in which you rotate the king and
blast the other pieces with a laser, which reflects off the mirrors of most
pieces but goes right through the queen (try explaining that one in Russian!).
I had to reboot from a couple of these to exit, and two I very quickly
crashed, one by simply typing the number 1 to choose a command marked 1. 
Reboot did not work here, and the other crash made a lot of noise until I
turned it off.  They should have let a few ignoramuses loose on these before
publishing them.  The one that crashed with #1 had typos in the German
instructions - not to be trusted at all.   I found siberian chess 2.15, a
later version of another nice program that gave several ways to enter moves
(type the coordinates, arrow keys, or mouse) and various ways to access other
commands (menu, keyboard).  Alt-X exits, Enter key for a new game.  Even our
Russian should be able to learn this, or to use the Game menu and the Level
menu.  Best of all the author is Russian.  We will give him this and Chess
Master (which has way more options that I would have to explain) and Clueless
for his grandson (I won on my first try - the computer was set to present me
with as many takeable pieces as possible while refusing to take any of mine
unless it had to get out of check.)
        I have learned to ftp with Arachne - see coop 218.  Yay!!!!!  The
search for a way to download something other than text files from m-net
continues.  I will try ASCII capture again when it is earlier.  I am off to
crash a browser first while I still remember how I did it last time.

response 197 of 198:

Dec 21 18:32 UTC 2000

I crashed the browser on my first try.  Not quite 'stable' yet.  Andy, I don't
think I was asking you to phone m-net -- see if you can get the browser to
stop crashing instead.  What might cause it to continuously flash the image
while 'formatting'?