Winboard Forum

Hi, I have a question, and please move this topic to appropriate subforum is this is the wrong one, thanks.

As I love to play chess variants, I searched for some variant playing software. I found a few engines like Sjeng and Pulsar (do you know some others, please?). But I'm struggling a week now to get them work, I can't find any software that can play variants and accept those engines, and the Winboard seems to be only GUI that can run those engines and play those variants. I tried following engine installing guide to WB but everything failed. I'm not a programmer or so, so it's too difficult to import the engine to me. GUI's like Arena, ChessMaster, Shredder, ChessBase, ChessAssistant and so on only accepts the regular chess and regular chess playing engines.

Can you please tell me some easier way, if it's there, to import engines into WB, or some interface that can play those engines and variants like suicide, giveaway, crazyhouse, bughouse, atomic, losers, fischer random, 960 and so on?

Thank you!

Vispilotion wrote:Hi, I have a question, and please move this topic to appropriate subforum is this is the wrong one, thanks.

As I love to play chess variants, I searched for some variant playing software. I found a few engines like Sjeng and Pulsar (do you know some others, please?). But I'm struggling a week now to get them work, I can't find any software that can play variants and accept those engines, and the Winboard seems to be only GUI that can run those engines and play those variants. I tried following engine installing guide to WB but everything failed. I'm not a programmer or so, so it's too difficult to import the engine to me. GUI's like Arena, ChessMaster, Shredder, ChessBase, ChessAssistant and so on only accepts the regular chess and regular chess playing engines.

Can you please tell me some easier way, if it's there, to import engines into WB, or some interface that can play those engines and variants like suicide, giveaway, crazyhouse, bughouse, atomic, losers, fischer random, 960 and so on?

Thank you!

If you want to play chess variants, you probably want Greg Strong's chess engine.
http://samiam.org/chessv/

Unfortunately there are no my preferred variants like those I wrote in the upper post... Thanks anyway.
Maybe something else?

There still SMIRF is to be found as a donation-ware within a standalone GUI. See at the bottom of page:
http://www.10x8.net/Octopus/C.Schach/Eintrage/2009/12/29_10x8-Schachprogramm_SMIRF_in_einem_internationalen_Turnier.html

Unfortunately again, non of the upper variants is supported except 960... I'm grateful for your help, but it seems I'm forced to figure out Winboard... Thanks again.

(Please post here if you find something)

I downloaded the latest free version of Sjeng (11.2), WindBoard reported that bughouse mode is only available when runing in ICS mode.

I was able to run crazyhouse. This is how my WinBoard shortcut looks like (you will have to create and edit your own shortcut accordingly):

Code: Select all

C:\WinBoard\WinBoard\winboard.exe /variant crazyhouse /fcp="c:\Release\Sjeng112.exe"

As you might know; for suicide, giveaway and losers variants you need the commercial release from lokasoft:
http://www.lokasoft.nl/deepsjengintro.htm

Cheers,

Vispilotion wrote:Can you please tell me some easier way, if it's there, to import engines into WB, or some interface that can play those engines and variants like suicide, giveaway, crazyhouse, bughouse, atomic, losers, fischer random, 960 and so on?

Sorry for the late response. I normally don't read this forum section (and was on holiday on top of that).

The WinBoard installer comes with the Pulsar engine pre-installed. It even creates a menu item for it in the Windows start menu. If you want to have the choice between a variety of engines, the easiest way is to use the PSWBTM start-menu item, select the engine-manager from the tools menu, select an engine, and then click the 'launch engine' button. To install a new engine, like Sjeng, you would first have to somehow download (and unpack) it. You can (in the engine manager) first click 'new', then 'browse' to browse to the Sjeng executable, complete the name under which you want it to appear in PSWBTM (some exe files have awkward names, so you are no bound to use those). Then click 'save' and 'save changes', and you are ready to run it.