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ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Oct 4, 2009 07:32 PM UTC:

Sam, your idea of having WinBoard force moves into an engine that refuses them by loading the engine with the position after the move works really great. I implemented in WinBoard now, under control of the option -forceIllegalMoves. In combenation with -testLegality false, this now allows me to completely autmatically play a Schoolbook-Chess match between ChessV and Fairy-Max. Now and then (about 10% of the games ChessV plays a non-standard castling, which then shows up in the PGN as Kf1h1 or Kf1b1, and Fairy-Max is simply restarted. It was a bit of a pain to implement it, because initially the engine will still think the opposite side is to move, and the WinBoard-protocol edit command (which Fairy-Max uses) does not alter that, and the commands that do are deprecated, so the side-to-move has to be flipped by playng a dummy move. But that works smoothly now.

In reaction to some earlier remark you made: there was no reason for hacking WinBoard to suppress the popup after a match: there is a command-line option that controls it (-popupExitMessage false/true), which is remembered in the WinBoard settings file. I use PSWBTM to play the match, in stead of the scripts you use, and this uses that option automaticaly.