Software-Expert Robert Pawlak from USA writes:

I reviewed the complete Chess Academy 99 system, containing all the tutorial modules (23 of them). Various configurations of the program are available, the principal difference among them is the number and types of tutorial modules that are included.

Prospective purchasers of this software should check the Chess Academy Website to determine the combination of modules that best suits their needs.

I believe I can sum up both reviews by saying that the tutorial functions are the best feature of this program. There is truly an incredible amount of instructional material included in them.

I found the database portion of the software to be well-designed, and relatively easy to work with. Most searches can be accomplished very quickly …

Chess Academy 99 was exceedingly stable, and I think that there has been a significant amount of time poured into testing. Indeed, the pre-release version that I reviewed was more stable than many final releases I have seen.

All in all, I think it is a very good value for the money.

Software-Expert Dr. Francesco Di Tolla from Italy writes:

Now we have a new release, which brings various improvements with respect to the previous edition, especially in the database capability and the interface. The Tutorial functionality of the program is a very powerful one. In general, the interface was improved quite a lot.

The handling of databases was in general greatly improved, with respect to a former version which was a bit “lagging” with respect to competition.

Some general limits were removed totally or in part: the maximum number of moves in a game was raised to 250; the maximum number of games that can fit in datasets (kind of multiple clipboards) is now ~524.000 (before it was 65.000), and the maximum year which can be stored in the date is now 4096 (was 2003); the content was greatly enlarged, from nearly 500,000 games (as in the biggest database of former version) to nearly 1,600,000 games of this version, also the quality of the spellings was further improved; the database format was improved to include multimedia extensions…