Assistance with Polyglot 1.4.50b and Xboard .Thxs

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Assistance with Polyglot 1.4.50b and Xboard .Thxs

Postby Shiloh » 10 Oct 2009, 17:17

Greetings! I have been enjoying the improvements to Xboard. But now I find a difficulty in setting up my engines with this new version of Polyglot.In that it now ads menu functionality to engine options and squares with Xboard's menu items (General settings,Engine#1settings etc) this is good.The bad part is that I do not know how to get the general settings info to remain as I set it.Each and every-time it overrides my preferences and sets the default values. I had polyglot 1.4.3 working perfectly? but of course the new functionality of xboard is not accessible. Unless I learn how to set this up so that xboard does not keep overriding the values I input I will have to return to using polyglot 1.4.3 and then certain menu items of xboard will be meaningless.Any help would be appreciated.Thanks
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Re: Assistance with Polyglot 1.4.50b and Xboard .Thxs

Postby Michel » 10 Oct 2009, 21:22

The bad part is that I do not know how to get the general settings info to remain as I set it.Each and every-time it overrides my preferences and sets the default values.


If I understand you correctly then this has nothing to do with Polyglot. xboard does not yet save genal settings (in contrast to winboard).

This means you can set the "Hash" option in the Polyglot configuration file but it will immediately be overridden by the memory command that xboard sends which defaults to 64Mb. This is indeed rather unfortunate currently.

You can set the amount of memory that xboard gives to an engine with the command line option -defaultHashSize n.
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Re: Assistance with Polyglot 1.4.50b and Xboard .Thxs

Postby Shiloh » 10 Oct 2009, 22:38

Yes I was afraid of that. Thanks for the command line suggestion for hash but I would need to keep entering other info as well.For my use it is better to ignore that General settings menu completely and just stick with Polyglot 1.4.3 .I like the menu box 1.4.50b makes available for engine settings but since some will be over written it is not too convenient. In the long haul this issue will have its solution I am sure and in the meantime what I have freely received is a terrific program that will only get better.Thanks
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Re: Assistance with Polyglot 1.4.50b and Xboard .Thxs

Postby H.G.Muller » 10 Oct 2009, 23:16

Which options specifically are overwritten? XBoard should overwrite _none_ of the option settings in the Engine #1 Settings menu; it does not even know wht these options are for. Only the standard options hash size, egtb cache size, max CPUs, and nalimov path are set from WinBoard, but these are general settings that you usually want to be the same for all engines.

XBoard has no ini file where it saves its settings, which is not only a nuisance for UCI engine settings, but for all options XBoard has (e.g. adjudications, time control, board size, etc.) But the traditional work-around is to run XBoard from scripts. It is very easy to have the settings of general options be set from such a script through command-line options; every parameter can be set from the command line. Even engine-specific options can be set from the command line, through the -firstOptions / -secondOptions arguments.
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Re: Assistance with Polyglot 1.4.50b and Xboard .Thxs

Postby Shiloh » 11 Oct 2009, 21:21

Yes ,creating a script did the trick.Thanks ever so much.
To be clear xboard was overwriting my selections in the general settings menu on startup with its defaults .It was not overwriting anything in the engines setting menu. Thanks once again
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