Total Noob, install external xiangqi engine winboard xq

[bmacpoland]

Hey guys,

I enjoy playing xiangqi a lot, and googled around and found winboard and its assortment of xiangqi engines. Seeing as how HG Muller has kindly assembled a total listing of xiangqi engines, I was curious to play the strongest such as cyclone, bingsuwusi..etc. Anyway, problem is I'm a total programming noob, 0 experience (well except some matlab and python in school but don't see how that's relevant) and after reading the readme, still can't for the life of me figure out how to install the engines.

For reference, the winboard I downloaded is "Winboard-XQ.exe" from this link: http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/XQwinboard.html
The engines I downloaded are: kou, swallow, xqcyclone, bhws, 3dchess. These came from this link: http://translate.google.com/translate?u ... en&ie=UTF8

I would appreciate very much if step-by-step instructions can be listed on how to install these engines, because the readme style instructions I guess assumed a prior level of familiarity which I unfortunately don't possess.
Thanks a lot for your help, and thanks for taking the time to develop this great program.

[H.G.Muller]

The WinBoard-XQ package is organized such that you install everything in a folder C:\WinBoard-XQ (unless you gave another path name during install), which contains a folder 'WinBoard' for the WinBoard 'core components' (WinBoard itself, protocol adapters, graphics files, GUI book), and is intended to also contain a folder for each engine (like HaQi, EleEye for the engines included in the package). So first step would be to put the engines there. E.g. for Kou you would create a folder C:\WinBoard-XQ\Kou, in which you would put the kou.exe and any encompanying files such as books.

The next step is to start WinBoard (in any mode, e.g. from the start menu by selecting MaxQi), and use the Engine->Install 1st menu item to call up a dialog with a list of all installed engines. (The dialog title says "Edit Tags", but that is a bug and you can ignore it.) This is the list you can select from in the first combobox of the WinBoard startup dialog. As installed, it should contain 5 lines, that can be used as example for the different type of engines. Kou is a UCCI engine, like Elephant Eye, so you should use the latter as an example. Actually there are two lines for Elephant Eye, because it can be done in two ways, but the first way is the simplest. It says:

"UCCI2WB -noini ..\EleEye\ELEEYE.exe" /firstLogo="..\EleEye\logo.bmp"

So you can add a line to the list

"UCCI2WB -noini ..\Kou\kou.exe"

(the quotes are essential, and don't forget to add the newline if you add it at the end!), and this should make Kou appear as an option to select from the first-engine combobox next time you start WinBoard through the Startup Dialiog.

If you would have Kou already in another folder, (say F:\XQ\Kou\kou.exe), you could simply have used that path name in stead:

"UCCI2WB -noini F:\XQ\Kou\kou.exe"


Note I left out the logo stuff, which means you would not see a logo displayed when running Kou. But if you want a logo, you would have to make it yourself (as a 100x50 or 130x65 .bmp file, e.g. with MS Paint), and specify where it was with the /firstLogo option.

If you want to be able to use Kou as second engine (in an engine vs engine game), you should do the same with the Engine->Install 2nd menu item, but replace "first" with "second" everywhere.

That is all. Note that the Cyclone version from xqbase.com (the last free one) is also UCCI. There is a far stronger (commercial) UCI version, and many illegal copies and hex-edited clones float around in the web, more often than not horribly loaded with viruses. The example line for Cyclone in the install is for this UCI version.

[bmacpoland]

Thank you very much for your help sir. Do you have BugCChess 2010.05.23 and the cyclone uci variant? Couldn't find these anywhere.

[bmacpoland]

never mind. found cyclone v 6.2. Thanks a lot HG!