Progress in back-porting xboard

[H.G.Muller]

Zach Wegner and I made great progress on back-porting WinBoard 4.3.14 to Linux. We now have a version that compiles with the new back-end files, and thus basically supports all features of WinBoard 4.3.14 that are not directly related to the human interface.

At the moment, the options can only be controlled through command-line arguments, as the menus of xboard still need to be adapted. I added xboard command-line options for most of the features that I added. This means the adjudication options, time-odds mode, node-count-based timing and all variants can be used under xboard, albeit in a cumbersome way.

We are now preparing the release of version 4.3.14, which will come as a WinBoard executable package, and xboard executable package, and a joint WinBoard/xboard source package.

A screenshot, mailed to me by Zach:

[Volker Pittlik]

Zach Wegner and I made great progress on back-porting WinBoard 4.3.14 to Linux. ...

This are great news! Count on me as a tester! Is the "original" xboard team somehow involved?


Volker

[H.G.Muller]

The people from the GNU-Savannah xboard project are not involved. I had some brief contact with Daniel Mehrmann, who was kind enough to leak the confidential WB protocol version 3 proposal to me, under the condition that I would not make it public. As I guess that implementing it could be construed as 'making public', I asked his explicit approval to implement the one feature in there that was on my own wish-list as well: the engine comments for inclusion in the debug file. We agreed that it would be a good thing if I implemented this exactly as in the proposal (using '#' to comment out the output).

I had some brief contact with Tim, about clarification of some ambiguities in the WB protocol definition, but he was desinterested to the point where he considered my one-page e-mail too long to read...

Considering the 'recent' developments listed on the official project site, I really don't expect much support from there. If progress is to be made, we are entirely on our own. But we are doing fine! My own work is entirely based on Allessandro Scotti's WinBoard_x sources, at the time he already stopped developing, so all of WinBoard_x is included in the 4.3.xx series.