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BGonline.org Forums
Should I switch from GNUbg to XG? What about BGblitz?
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: Should I switch from GNUbg to XG? What about BGblitz? (Timothy Chow)
Date: Sunday, 8 May 2011, at 6:59 p.m.
If you frequently photograph and/or write down positions, then feed them to your bot-friend later on, IMO getting XG in addition to GNU is a slam-dunk. The amount of time you save with XG's easier input procedure, even if you don't assign a very high dollar value to your time, will quickly be well worth your $40 or $50. I also like XG's grayscale 2D board printouts, even though getting the comments printed along with them is klunky. Neither GNU nor Snowie has anything comparable.
Although saving the problems to the correct locations on your drive has a bit of an extra learning curve with XG, since it defaults to the XG folder instead of wherever you just were, it's nowhere close to a wash. Compared to GNU, XG will save you bookoo time if you like to input individual positions.
But don't delete GNU--you will still find it useful, especially for running comparison problems ("variants") for ones you already have rolled out with GNU, and for its statistics features that somebody noted already. I also like that it tells you when a rollout is done. (The GNU team is missing out on a profit center by not turning that distinctive three-note chime into a ringtone and selling it!)
I'm glad other people are answering your questions about BgBlitz, since my only experience with it was when in the old days, we used to have to convert different file formats to input matches from the online servers directly to the bots. BgBlitz was the only backgammon program that could do that, and maybe still is, if you use that utility. As for its phone app, I'm a Luddite and don't have Internet on my cell, and likely won't anytime soon--right now I don't even have texting--so I'll take other people's word for it that it's good.
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