This program requires Windows 95 or higher .Send comments and suggestions, to subra@cox.net.

This program is distributed as freeware and may be freely distributed with all its accompanying files.

The current version of Maniac (version 1.11), has been significantly altered, so that it does not access it's data from an Access data file. Hence Maniac, now uses a set of simple ASCII text files to access all it's data on players, chess boards, chess sets, chess variants and save games - so the file size has been significantly reduced, and the extra dll files are not required. Therefore, Maniac is now fully compatible with Windows 95, Windows 95 osr2, Windows 98, Windows 98se, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.

Click here to download Maniac 1.11(3.36 MB zip file)

Please note: During installation (assuming you have a previous version of Maniac installed -if you don't then this does not apply to you - so skip ahead), if the installation program, informs you that the new Maniac.exe is of an older version compared to the existing Maniac.exe, then please ignore this message and replace the old file.

Click here for Maniac screenshots

Click here to view a simple tutorial on using Maniac to play online games

If you have downloaded the previous versions (either 1.1 or 1.0), then the following is the patch for the new one (or you can download the whole thing):

Click here to download Maniac 1.11 patch (744 KB zip file)

Now the patch contains it's own installation program (it did not have one, in the past).

Please note that as far as program features are concerened, Maniac 1.1 and Maniac 1.11 are virtually the same (even though Maniac 1.0, is very different since it did not support Internet games, and had plenty of bugs in it, which have been resolved in the newer versions) - except for the internal implementation, where the former uses an Access datafile while the latter uses delimited ASCII files. Therefore, if Maniac 1.1 is working for you (that is, if you have the required data-access dlls - Windows 98se, Windows ME and Windows 2000 have these files by default -or they must be downloaded from Microsoft), then you need not download the new version, however if Maniac 1.1 does not work, then do not bother installing those dll files and just download the new version, which will work flawlessly.

Please note that, the documentation for the program, is actually the paper I submitted for my senior project, so it will contain added info on the program's inner working, and the HTML version was actually converted from the word version - so the layout might not be appropriate, since the word version was originally intended to be a 40-page paper.

Click here for Maniac's documentation (this does not include the docs for the 'internet' version of Maniac)