Winboard Forum

Where can I find the official & latest winboard protocol? I guess it's version 4.5.2 now?
What does this phrase mean: "WinBoard requires Win32 engines" - does the mean it doesn't work with x64 engines?

No, the protocol document is very old, and obsolete in places. This phrase means it cannot handle 16-bit DOS engines. I once started to write a new one, but never found the time to finish it.

The version of the specs included with 4.5.2 should be more or less complete, though. I did not add any new commands after that in the normal version. (At least, not documented commands.) Only the Alien version (supporting Checkers and such) has a lot of new protocol, but it is of no relevance for Chess.

Note I posted a model protocol driver in the 'Programming lessons' section of this forum. To a programmer that might be more helpful for a quick understanding of the protocol than the official specs.

OK and thanks a lot for your model protocol driver - I am using it.
BTW I added some code lines to write to a file, so I can trace the order of the commands from winboard,
this did not seem to work at first, but then I discovered that this file was placed in the winboard folder.
(looks like the engine is assimilated by winboard I'll have to check the engine installation parameters.

This is strange. Winoard is supposed to change to the engine folder (given in the /fd option) before creating the engine process, so that the engine process will inherit that as 'current directory'.

The notion of 'current directory' seems a bit fuzzy on Windows, though, like it is a global variable shared by all processes. We had problems with the save file when we did not extend it to a full path name first; it was then made in the folder the user last clicked, before pressing save. I can imagine that when you create the file not immediately at startup, but only later, engine-created files could suffer from the same problem.

BTW, a convenient way to have the engine report is to just let it print messages prefixed with '#' (if it has set feature debug=1), so they will appear in the winboard.debug file. That also makes it easier to see the relative timing of events, and the engine input is listed there anyway.