hi guys,
I am currently looking for some good chess opening database which I could upload to my ChessBase program for analysis. Do you have any experience in this? I was searching through out the web and found many interesting ones, but also expensive. Any luck? So far my candidates are Mega Database from chess base (but it's quite expensive) and openingmaster from Opening Master World largest chess database which goes with yearly membership plan.

thanks for the hint, I need something not the biggest but rather a quality one.
George

Have you already dowloaded and explored around with the "Encyclopedia of Chess Openings" into your Chessbase? Here is the link- Encyclopedia of Chess Openings

You could download high quality games of interest off the various free Internet databases and copy them into the existing book or your own personalized db.

A couple places to start:
Chess Games Links maintained by Lars Balzer - Links to chessgames around the internet which you can download for free

Download Chess Grand Master games in PGN

The Week in Chess

thanks guys for some hints, I will check them all and compare I guess that's the only way how to do it, what I am afraid a bit is to download something huge from some party claiming they have millions of games and what you get is some low level computer or junior games which actually don't have any value add or what is worst, many of these databases have duplicates. I read over the forums, the duplicates of the game are really destroying the quality of the database

but thanks a lot for hints

G.

You have a legitimate concern. I think if you start with TWIC it shouldn't be a problem because they are all high quality games and are saved by date so duplicates shouldn't be an issue.

I used TWIC to create a database of games, which currently has 774,287 (and growing) games in it, so I think it serves as a good database. If you are thinking about using TWIC, sitting there and clicking "Download" 300+ times can be very boring and time-consuming, so I had wrote a small program that would download all the issues. Sadly, you couldn't use it because it was written for Linux, but this might serve as an idea for downloading games.

My TWIC database doesn't contain any games from earlier then 1998, so you might want to look into this: Chessville - Misc. - Downloads (this isn't classified as warez, right?)

Just Curious Octal, which language did you write this program in?
Sounds like Perl and at least a couple of others.....

Warez isn't classified it's simply copyrighted, to anyone who values their intellectual property, and avoiding lawsuits, this is important.

This might sound odd, but it was first a C program, that generated the URL starting at "http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/zips/twic211g.zip", and constantly incremented the last number until we reached the current issue. The program then outputed the string "wget http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/zips/twic211g.zip" (wget is a linux CLI program for downloading things from online; and the "211" part is constantly incremented) into a text file, which I made executable. This second program is a /bin/sh program, which would be difficult to import into windows.

So I wrote a program that writes a program to download files.

I'm sure Perl could work, but I never learned Perl, and I have lost a lot of the interest I used to have in computers, thus I have less inclination to learn the language.

Lastly, lets try not to get too off topic.

Nice.

I really like ChessDB. It's free and works great.

ChessDB - a free Chess Database