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I have patched ChessV to be able to play as an engine under WinBoard. There
are still a few minor issues, but in general it seems to work., and I was
already able to play a full game ChessV vs. Fairy-Max. The issues are that
it does not seem to accept Kf1-c1 as a valid way to enter castling move,
and that it won't accept promotions automatically yet. (These will cause a
popup to ask to what piece you want to promote, in stead of taking the
piece specified in the input move.) At fast time cntrols (<5 sec/move) it
seems to crash often, but I have not seen crashes at longer TC (40 moves/15
min). I am pretty sure these issues can be fixed.
For those that already want to try: the ChessV executalbe (plus source
files I modified to make it a console app) can be downloaded from
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/ChessV.zip
To run it as WinBoard engine, it needs to be started with a command-line
argument specifying the variant it should play (exactly spelled as it
normally appears in the selection dialog, e.g. 'Capablanca Chess', case
sensitive). To run it under WinBoard, one could type the line in the
WinBoard starup dialog's combo box for the engine:
'ChessV 'Capablanca Chess'' /fd=CHESSV_FOLDER /xreuse
(That is double quoutes around Capablanca Chess, to indicate it is a
variant name containing a space, and then single quotes around the whole
engine command including variant name, which is of course messed up by this
message board.)
When you specified 'Capablanca Chess' on the command line, better play
Capablanca Chess with it, as it will ignore the variant WinBoard will tell
it to play. I did it this way to make it possible to play variants that WB
does not know as similar variants (e.g. Schoolbook as Capablanca), by
switching WB legality testing off.
The /xreuse parameter tells WB not to re-use the engine for multiple
games, but start a new one for every new game. Setting up a position does not work yet; this is simply ignored. (But you could still do it for the benefit of the other engine, to laod it with an opening array that ChessV already has by default.)