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Well, usually chess programs must have a beautiful user interface to be played, as well as playing chess very well (so not only "Minimax" algorithm, but also some openings).
Looking back to these old days of CP/M computers, screen graphics were rare and properitary programmed. Usually the screen output was characters only.

Sargon is a well known, famous chess program for vintage computers. The first version was SARGON for Z80, and runs (adapted already) on *any* CP/M 2.2 computer. The screen output is ... unique (not beautiful at all). But it is playing chess very well, I lost a few games even with Level 1.

SARGON looks like this:


SARGON 2 starting screen:


... and board display (this time, Sargon started first):


Related link offers the CP/M binaries. It was taken from >Udo Munks download page< (the files from the disk image there can be extracted with cpmtools, disk format is 'ibm-3740', use 'cpmls' and 'cpmcp').