I was maintainer of the Chess app from the early 2000s to about 2015. We first noticed in 2004 that level 1 (which was then "Computer thinks for 1 second per move) was getting stronger with each hardware generation (and in fact stronger than myself).
So we introduced 3 new levels, with the Computer thinking 1, 2, or 3 moves ahead. This solved the problem of the engine getting stronger (though the jump from "3 moves ahead" to "1 second" got worse and worse).
A few years after I had handed off the project, somebody decided to meddle with the level setting code (I was not privy to that decision). The time based levels were entirely replaced with depth based levels (which eliminates the strength inflation problem, but unfortunately was not accompanied by UI changes). But for some reason, parsing of the depth setting was broken as well, so the engine now always plays at depth 40 (stronger than ever).
This should be an easy fix, if Apple gets around to make it (Chess was always a side project for the maintainers). I filed feedback report 21609379.
It seems that somebody else had already discovered this and fixed it in a fork of the open source project: https://github.com/aglee/Chess/commit/dfb16b3f32e5a6633d2119...
Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means.
There is a thriving community with a couple different choices for servers to play on. So I'm sure there's a fix for your mouse speed issue.
Check Twitch for people streaming it: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/warcraft-iii
Grubby, one of the early esports stars, still streams it regularly and hosts his own for fun tournaments with other streamers.
You probably knew this, but wanted to make sure others knew that the reason they ended the franchise is not because there was no market, but instead it was pure unadulterated greed that led to that situation. In an alternate reality they would have actually done the remake justice and there would be a lively competitive scene
The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane.
I suppose, technically, that's one way to make the Scimitar feel more responsive...
These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game.
I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this.
Wow.
1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed!
I guess some lessons don't get passed on?
It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines.
