Stupid Software Tricks: Updated piece sets for Convekta

I've more-or-less settled on Convekta software for training, despite the fact that I dislike their chess piece graphics. The "standard" pieces are downright ugly; the "modern" pieces are better, although I find the 3D-style a little unclear.

One of the things that I prefer about Personal Chess Trainer (PCT) is the piece graphics: the Merida font is very clear, and pleasing to the eye.

Therefore, I decided to update the chess piece graphics in Chess Tactics for Beginners, CT-ART, and Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players with the Merida chess pieces. A little digging showed that the pieces are stored as bitmap resources in the executables, one bitmap per board size; using a resource editor, it is possible to update these bitmaps. I wrote a small C# program to draw the updated pieces on the bitmaps, and used the resource editor to update the executable. I just updated the standard pieces, and left the modern pieces unchanged. The results are below.

If you want to try this yourself, download the open source XN resource editor, and the updated piece bitmaps ConvektaPieces.zip.

Back up the Convekta executable before you do anything! I opened the updated bitmaps in an image editing program, and used copy-and-paste to replace the bitmaps in the resource editor. Email me if you need help with this -- my email is on the sidebar.

The standard pieces -- feh:

The modern pieces -- better...:


The updated standard pieces: