Winboard Forum

Indeed, the Load First/Second Engine dialog is provided for doing that. Did you experience any particular difficulty while using it? For a WB engine like Crafty it should just be a matter of browsing to the executable for the Engine (*.exe) field, and clicking OK. It would be difficult to make that any simpler.

New engines are indeed always added at the end of the list. There are currently no buttons in the Load Engine dialogs that could be used to re-order them. Perhaps this is an idea for future enhancement. (Providing Up / Down and Delete buttons to manage the list that is displayed there.) The best way to re-order them is use the Engine->Edit Engine List menu item. You will then see the entire list as it would also occur in the winboard.ini file, one line for each installed engine, and you can use the normal mous and keyboard shortcuts for editing, to cut the crafty line at the bottom and paste it back at the top of the list. (Or anywhere else you would want it.)

Note that the Startup Dialog is sort of losing its importance; If you often run Crafty, and want to start WinBoard with it, you might as well press OK in it immediately (without bothering to select an engine, so it starts with the default engine), and then select Crafty from the "most-recently used engines" section of the Engine menu. That doesn't require more mouse clicks than selecting it from the Startup Dialog. If you have a shortcut for starting WinBoard in game-viewer mode you would even by-pass the Startup Dialog alltogether (and then select Crafty from the recently used engines). You could also achieve that by double-clicking the fairy.xop file in the WinBoard folder, or any PGN file, instead of winboard.exe itself to start it. Or (if you haven't made the file associations) dragging those on top of the winboard.exe.

You could also make a file crafty.xop, containing

Code: Select all

-cp
-fcp "CRAFTY.exe"
-fd "CRAFTYFOLDER"
-scp "CRAFTY.exe"
-sd "CRAFTYFOLDER"


Then double-clicking that file, or dragging it on top of winboard.exe should immediately start Crafty. You could also run WinBoard once through the Startup Dialog specifying as Additional options

Code: Select all

/viewerOptions={-cp -fcp "CRAFTY.exe" -fd "CRAFTYFOLDER" -scp "CRAFTY.exe" -sd "CRAFTYFOLDER" -saveSettingsOnExit false}

Then Crafty would be loaded automatically any time you use WinBoard as game viewer (by double-clicking a PGN file), so you could immediately start analyzing with it.

If you tried to do this by editing the winboard.ini file (which is not recommended), and it did not work, you might have been editing the wrong one. (The one in the WinBoard folder in stead of your AppData folder.) What was the second line of text in the file you have been editing?