DC Studio
A native Mac chess database. Open a PGN file and its games are your list; click through them, annotate, run Stockfish, see what the opening statistics say, and save back to the same file. Free, open source, Apple Silicon.
What it does
Files and games
Open any .pgn — a book converted from PDF, a lichess study, a tournament export, your own file. One window per file, as tabs; the files you had open come back on launch. Enter games on a blank board with a ChessBase-style save mask, delete, export, copy games between files (duplicates by the moves are skipped), and merge several games into one variation tree. Saving writes the PGN back atomically and keeps a .pgn.bak from before the session's first write.
Board and notation
Click or drag to move, a promotion picker, a variation chooser at branch points, board flip, coordinates. The notation panel renders the whole variation tree the way ChessBase does — main line as paragraphs, first-level variations indented, deeper ones inline — and every move is a click target. Letters by default (Nf3); figurines if you prefer.
Annotation
!/? and evaluation symbols, comments, promote and delete variations, arrows and coloured squares stored as the [%cal]/[%csl] tags lichess and ChessBase share, diagrams stored as $220, undo and redo over the whole game.
Engine
Stockfish 18 is built in. A horizontal eval bar under the board, MultiPV lines below the notation, click a line to insert it as a variation. Analyze Game walks a whole game at a fixed depth and marks the losing moves ?! ? ??, writes what the eval did and puts the engine's line beside each — both sides or just one, main line or every variation, one undo step.
Openings
Opening statistics for the current position — moves, game counts, a win/draw/loss bar — from the open file (transposition-aware) or from lichess's Masters, Lichess and Player explorers, cached per position. A move the chosen book has never seen is flagged as a novelty, with a button to write the N mark.
Paper
Print a game or export it as PDF: a title block, then the notation exactly as the panel shows it, diagrams included.
Filter and search
Search by player or event; filter by result, date range and Elo; sort every column. Position and material search are not there yet — see the comparison.
Requirements
- Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later), macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. No Intel build.
- Nothing else: Stockfish and the piece set are inside the app. A lichess account is only needed for the online opening databases (a free read-only token).
Questions
- Does it open ChessBase (.cbh) databases?
- No. Export them to PGN from ChessBase; that file opens here, and what you save opens back there.
- Does saving change my file?
- It re-serializes it: moves, variations, comments and headers survive, but formatting becomes DC Studio's. The first write in a session leaves a
.pgn.bak. - Why does macOS say it cannot verify the app?
- The build is signed but not notarized yet. Two ways past the dialog, both one step.
- How big is it?
- About 110 MB installed, most of it Stockfish's neural network.