April 24, 2026
When chess bots ruled the world
The Overtom Chess Computer Museum
Nostalgia checkmates tech: fans lose it over this retro robot chess museum
TLDR: A tiny old-school website catalogs vintage chess computers, from beeping plastic boards to early “robotic” sets that move pieces on their own. Commenters turned it into a nostalgia war, swapping childhood stories, wishlists for even older machines, and tales of outsmarting these stubborn little chess boxes.
The Overtom Chess Computer Museum looks like a time capsule from the early web, but the comment section turned it into a full-on nostalgia arena. Fans are losing their minds over these clunky plastic chess computers that once passed for artificial intelligence, treating the site like a holy shrine of geek childhoods.
One commenter, andrehacker, immediately flexed with a link to his favorite: a so‑called “robotic” board that slides the pieces around by itself. Suddenly the thread turned into a support group for people who bought half-broken robot chess boards off eBay and tried to resurrect them like retro Frankensteins. Others went even deeper, saying the museum needs the OG machines from the early 1900s and a legendary device by Claude Shannon, the guy who basically invented modern information theory, as if this were the Avengers of chess robots.
Then there’s bananamogul, who casually drops that as a kid they reverse‑engineered a Fidelity Chess Challenger’s brain with a notebook and sheer stubbornness, discovering a guaranteed win because the tiny processor always played the same way. Commenters treated it like a coming-of-age hacker story: half “awww, childhood,” half “this is how supervillains are born.” The whole vibe is part museum tour, part group therapy for people who once got absolutely destroyed by a small plastic box that beeped.
Key Points
- •The Overtom Chess Computer Museum page functions as an index to collections of standalone chess computers organized by manufacturer and category.
- •The page provides links to an introduction, the main Overtom site, a weblog, a Dutch version of the page, external chess computer sites, a sale/swap section, and a contact email page.
- •Brand-specific sections are listed for CXG/Sphinx, Excalibur, Fidelity, Mephisto, Novag, Saitek/Scisys and related brands, Tandy & Radio Shack, and a miscellaneous category (“Diversen”).
- •Each brand/category entry in the index includes a small image and a link to an English-language subpage (e.g., EngCXG.html, EngEXC.html), with a number indicating how many items are in that category.
- •The index layout and entries are repeated multiple times on the page, reinforcing the primary navigation structure of the museum site.