Winboard Forum

Hello, a new Delfi is available.
Futility pruning and an improved king safety brought approx 30 ELO points.

Kind regards,
Fabio Cavicchio.

Fabio Cavicchio wrote:Hello, a new Delfi is available.
Futility pruning and an improved king safety brought approx 30 ELO points.

Kind regards,
Fabio Cavicchio.

Thanks Fabio! Also thanks that you did not quit after those
'absurd articles'! I can imagine quite good the content of those
articles you mentioned.

I hope your source code will inspire interested programmers.
Your license should be clear enough.

Best regards,
Guenther

Thanks,
Just a note: in case of clones I offer forever my experience to detect possible Delfi clones. Feel free to send them to me.
Delfi has some hidden "bugs" which I only know.

Fabio Cavicchio wrote:Thanks,...

Thanks from my side too!

Can you give any hint how to build the program for Linux? The executable plays well from the command line with wine. Unfortuntely it chrashes when using it with xboard.

Volker

I'm sorry, I think that the problem is all the Win32 functions in the parsing code in "Winboard.pas". Delfi does not poll the input, it uses a separate thread since version 1.0 (well I would like to change it and switch to polling).

Hello,
Fabio.

Here I have no problem in using the windows executable of Delfi under Linux with wine, even with Xboard.
Xboard version is 4.2.7, wine version is 20040813.

I simply called xboard ..... -fcp "wine Delfi.exe"

HTH

Regards,
Marco

Marco Grella wrote:Here I have no problem in using the windows executable of Delfi under Linux with wine, even with Xboard.
Xboard version is 4.2.7,...

Same here.

Marco Grella wrote:...wine version is 20040813...

Mine tells me it is version 0.9.9. Delfi simply exits after the first move. However, Arena also doesn't work for me with wine, Rybka is running without any problems. There is no guarantee that all programs run under wine.

That it works for you is remarkeble considering Delfi is using this windows type of code.

Regards

Volker

P.S. Thanks for changing the name

Fabio Cavicchio wrote:Hello, a new Delfi is available.
Futility pruning and an improved king safety brought approx 30 ELO points.

Kind regards,
Fabio Cavicchio.

Thanks Fabio.

Delfi 4.6 is a fine under rated engine, so I'm really looking forward to trying out Delfi 5.0

Regards, Graham.

Hi , Dottore Cavicchio,

first of all many thanks for your new version of Delfi!#

But there's one thing I still miss: the possibility to play with egtb's.
I believe a high-rated engine like Delfi should allow it.
I only know the author of "Amyan" disliking egtb's.
Hope, you make it. Or is there a serious reason not to do?

Best regards

Hartmut Woldeit

Graham Banks wrote:

Fabio Cavicchio wrote:Hello, a new Delfi is available.
Futility pruning and an improved king safety brought approx 30 ELO points.

Kind regards,
Fabio Cavicchio.

Thanks Fabio.

Delfi 4.6 is a fine under rated engine, so I'm really looking forward to trying out Delfi 5.0

Regards, Graham.

Maybe the numbers are misleading and people who hear about the numbers 4.6 and 5 think about Junior when Junior4.6 and Junior5 are weaker than delfi4.6 and delfi5

Uri

Hello,
I will continue in my bitbase development. At the moment Delfi support only one 5 pieces ending (KPRKR) but I will improve in the future.

Hello Fabio,

I didn't notice until now that Delfi is now open source. Thank you very much for releasing the source code!

Do you think there is any chance that will be possible to port the program to Mac OS X using the Free Pascal compiler? I understand from the rest of the thread that it won't work without any changes, because you use some Windows-specific system calls in your IO code. I hope it will be possible to port it to OS X (and other Unixes) without too much trouble, though.

Delfi 5 would be a perfect sparring partner for my engine, and I hope I'll manage to make it work on my machine.

Tord

Tord Romstad wrote:Hello Fabio,

I didn't notice until now that Delfi is now open source. Thank you very much for releasing the source code!

Do you think there is any chance that will be possible to port the program to Mac OS X using the Free Pascal compiler? I understand from the rest of the thread that it won't work without any changes, because you use some Windows-specific system calls in your IO code. I hope it will be possible to port it to OS X (and other Unixes) without too much trouble, though.

Delfi 5 would be a perfect sparring partner for my engine, and I hope I'll manage to make it work on my machine.

Tord

I think it will be hard to change it to use freepascal.
Delphi is an OO language like C++ or .NET stuff, and the Delfi engine has lots of classes and inheritance stuff in it.

I think that a port to freepascal is almost hopeless. It would probably be much easier to port it to mono or java or C++ than to freepascal (unless freepascal also has the same object extensions as delphi does)

Here is the inheritance model for the delfi chess engine:
http://cap.connx.com/chess-engines/new- ... iagram.gif

Dann Corbit wrote:I think it will be hard to change it to use freepascal.
Delphi is an OO language like C++ or .NET stuff, and the Delfi engine has lots of classes and inheritance stuff in it.

I have no experience with either Free Pascal nor Delphi, I just saw the following text at the Free Pascal web page and thought the languages were mostly compatible:

The language syntax has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as with most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces).

I suppose I was too optimistic.

Tord Romstad wrote:

Dann Corbit wrote:I think it will be hard to change it to use freepascal.
Delphi is an OO language like C++ or .NET stuff, and the Delfi engine has lots of classes and inheritance stuff in it.

I have no experience with either Free Pascal nor Delphi, I just saw the following text at the Free Pascal web page and thought the languages were mostly compatible:

The language syntax has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as with most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces).

I suppose I was too optimistic.

Maybe it will work then. I just expected that freepascal was a pascal dialect and not a delphi dialect (the two things are VERY different langauges).

Another possibility is to convert it to C++. Here is a tool that may get the job started:
http://ivan.vecerina.com/code/delphi2cpp/

I gave it a run through, and it barfs on the inline assembly and a few other things and none of the output C++ files are compilable, but it is still a long way along towards the goal compared to hand conversion. I don't think I will be tackling it, but I am curious to understand how Delfi works. I will find the C++ code easier reading than the Delphi source and so I have gotten as far as I need.

I downloaded and tried freepascal (gads, what a horrid IDE).
Got 39 errors on the first file I tried. I guess it won't be simple to convert from Delphi to Freepascal.

I seem to recall that Kylix is supposed to be pretty much a clone of Delphi. Maybe a port to Kylix would not be too difficult (Kylix runs under Linux).

http://www.borland.com/products/downloa ... kylix.html

Dann Corbit wrote:

Tord Romstad wrote:

Dann Corbit wrote:I think it will be hard to change it to use freepascal.
Delphi is an OO language like C++ or .NET stuff, and the Delfi engine has lots of classes and inheritance stuff in it.

I have no experience with either Free Pascal nor Delphi, I just saw the following text at the Free Pascal web page and thought the languages were mostly compatible:

The language syntax has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as with most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces).

I suppose I was too optimistic.

Maybe it will work then. I just expected that freepascal was a pascal dialect and not a delphi dialect (the two things are VERY different langauges).

Depends on your definition of Pascal. I am not familiar with the Pascal community, but I doubt that any Pascal programmer today would dispute that Delphi is a Pascal dialect. Old standard Pascal is essentially a dead language (or so I think, but I could be wrong). It has been replaced by numerous modern variants, most of them supporting some kind of OO. Delphi (which is descended from a Pascal dialect known as "Object Pascal", developed by Apple some time in the 1990s) is one of those, and because of its immense popularity it has almost become a de facto standard. It is my impression that most of the Pascal implementations in active development today (including Free Pascal and GNU Pascal) attempt to be at least partially compatible with Delphi.

People know Pascal or the Pascal community better than me (Mark? Fabio?) are welcome to correct any incorrect statments I have made above.

Another possibility is to convert it to C++. Here is a tool that may get the job started:
http://ivan.vecerina.com/code/delphi2cpp/

I gave it a run through, and it barfs on the inline assembly and a few other things and none of the output C++ files are compilable, but it is still a long way along towards the goal compared to hand conversion. I don't think I will be tackling it, but I am curious to understand how Delfi works. I will find the C++ code easier reading than the Delphi source and so I have gotten as far as I need.

My experience is that machine-translated code sometimes works, but it is is usually utterly unreadable. I would expect it to be much easier (as well as more fun) to learn enough Delphi to be able to read the original source code than to try to decipher some machine translation to C++.

I downloaded and tried freepascal (gads, what a horrid IDE).

IDEs are always horrid.

Got 39 errors on the first file I tried. I guess it won't be simple to convert from Delphi to Freepascal.

I'll still give it a try. I will probably find the Delphi code slightly easier to work with than you do. I'm a programming language junkie, remember.

I seem to recall that Kylix is supposed to be pretty much a clone of Delphi. Maybe a port to Kylix would not be too difficult (Kylix runs under Linux).

Yes, but I don't run Linux.

Tord

Hey,

In Free Pascal, go to Options, Compiler, and click "Delphi compatibility", and "Delphi 2 extentions on" etc. and see if that helps.

Yup Free Pascal (and GNU pascal, etc) should be pretty much compatible with Delphi. I know many people who use both without much problems.

What sort of compiler-errors were you getting Dann?

If any internal assembly gives any compile errors with Free Pascal you can go to Options, Compiler, Assembly, and turn the switch to "Intel style assembler" and see if that helps.

There are several good replacement IDE's for Free Pascal for several platforms..

Regards
Stan