Bootchess

Bootchess is a playable chess program only 487 bytes in size. It is designed to run from a floppy disk boot sector (512 bytes), not requiring any operating system.

The game was created to beat the record of the smallest playable chess program, held for over 30 years by 1K ZX Chess, created by David R. Horne, which required 672 bytes to run the program on a ZX81.

The game features the chess board as text characters (small caps for black, large ones for white) and can be controlled by entering the moves in chess notation ("e7e5"). The program knows pawn single and double moves and queen transfer, but lacks the king castling. Despite the size, even an computer controlled opponent is included -- although the capabilities of the AI are limited.