Winboard Alien

[keyol]

Hello everyone, I am hoping that someone can help me with an issue that I am experiencing with winboard alien. I love this winboard because it is very light, I have been able to install winboard engines in it with no problems but I am having difficulty trying to get uci engines to run on it. I have tried various attempts with no success. When I try to install the latest stockfish development uci engine I get the error message "Failed to start first chess program polyglot-noini-ec "stockfish_14010705_x64_modern_sse42.exe"_ed "C\Users\Derrick\Desktop\Engines\Stockfish Dev" local host Can't open file "polyglot.ini". No such file or directory." The strange thing with that is I am using polyglot 1.4 with cygwin and the gui has recognized the polyglot in it's directory. I don't know what I am doing wrong to be receiving that error message, any help will be gratefully appreciated. And by the way when I try to use polyglot 1.4w29 I get the message polyglot not found but gui has no problem finding polyglot 1.4 with cygwin, I have even tried making an ini file using polyglot gui and that doesn't work either. I don't know what to do anymore but I am going to keep on trying.

[H.G.Muller]

It sounds like you are using an old Polyglot version, which does not support the command-line options (-noini ...) for specifying engine, and thus starts to look for a polyglot.ini file. 1.4w means nothing; almost all Polyglots are called 1.4w. 1.4w29 might even be a different fork; the Polyglots I know where numbered like 1.4w10UCIbnn, later renamed to 1.4.nnb (nn = two digits), and I have seen upto 1.4.70b. I don't know where you obtained the one you are using, but it would be best to use a Polyglot 2.0, as distributed with the binary WinBoard install. This is, as far as I know, the only Polyglot that supports move exclusion in analysis. The polyglot.exe file should be put in the same folder as WinBoard.exe.

I am not sure what you consider especially 'light' on the Alien Edition. I think it is distributed as not much more than a zipped winboard.exe, but other WinBoard versions are also often available in this form (e.g. http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.8.beta.zip ). But using an unconfigured .exe leads to exactly the problems you are experiencing now: you have to collect all support programs yourself, and might get wrong versions, etc.

[keyol]

Thank you for your advice Mr. Muller, I did have an outdated polyglot the newer one solved the problem. I didn't even know there was a newer polyglot available otherwise I would have been using it. And what I had meant about winboard alien being light was that it does not come preloaded with a lot of internal files and by the way I love the new winboard 4.8 beta. I hope that winboard just keeps getting better and better, it's my favorite GUI.

[H.G.Muller]

To include all support files has advantages and disadvantages, as you experienced when having to provide your own Polyglot. But I guess there would be use for a very light 'portable' version (i.e. which would not need an installer). Something like winboard.exe, polyglot.exe, and winboard.ini (to enable some of the newer features that would be disabled by default, and which then would also be used to save the settings on), but no graphics and no engines. And perhaps small settings files viewer.xop and tourney.xop which people could use to easily configure any special desires they have in tourney or viewer mode.

The main problem without installer is that it would not be possible to make automatic associations between WinBoard and its file types. So you could not open PGN game files by simply double-clicking them in Windows, unless you would make this association by hand. (I.e. use "Open with" after right-click, and select "Choose application" and then tick "Always open this kind of file with this application".) But dragging PGN files on top of the winboard.exe icon works as well, and is perhaps sufficient.