Xboard 4.4.0 and UCI engines

[H.G.Muller]

Hi Eric.If you minimize the terminal put the cursor over the dialogue box then it will accept your input.Also do not try Show Moves History it will crash xboard at least it did my version.What does --with-Xaw3d do? thxs

This at least is easily fixed. At some point I changed the name of this menu item from "Show Move List" to " Show Move History", to conform to the naming in WinBoard, thinking this was an innocent change that required no testing. But I did not realize that xboard sometimes accesses widgets by name, and that for menu items the name of the widget is the text that appears in the menu. So somewhere in another source file it wanted to put a check mark in front of the item "Show Move List" which did no longer exist, and this led to a crash. Also doing the name change there (in xhistory.c, in two places) repairs it.

I really should "grep" for every menu item I change to see if it occurs somewhere else in the source. And for menu items that are checked I can be sure it will occur twice, once to check and once to uncheck it.

Thanks for finding this major bug.

[H.G.Muller]

While we are at it there are a few other little things I noticed HG that might help (probably create need for Tylenol) . First is when I am playing against an engine the clock flashes in sync with the changing seconds.Very irritating.It does not do this in ics mode. Additionally I have to hold the mouse button down when I click the menu then scroll to the item and release.I do not know if this has always been the case or for that matter if it is just my build,but the menu does not stay up if I release the mouse button.Finally when I choose variant FRC then new shuffle game then random the numbers that appear are not the normal 960 start positions until after I press OK then recheck the new shuffle game menu at which point it tells me correctly which start position I have currently.My system is Linux jaunty 9.04 64 bit on dual core amd 64 bit 1.6ghz laptop. Perhaps Eric or other knowledgeable users can confirm or refute these few issues. Thanks for your efforts

For me the menus do not stay down by themselves either. It was also that way in 4.2.7, and is very annoying to me as well. But I suppose this is just how X-windows menus work; I am not aware of anything that can be done against it.

The problem with the shuffle game is that at that point the code is not aware of the total number of positions that the game can be shuffled. This becomes only apparent when the actual position is being set up. The code for setting up the positions does replace the number by the version normalized to the number of possibilities (by modulo division), which is why you do see the correct number later. I don't think it could be done in a different way: The actual setting up will have to be done outside the shuffle dialog anyway, because on subsequent New-Game commands it should use the same shuffle automatically. It would clutter up the code very much if I started to set up a new position from the dialog, and in theory people could first set the random, and only then select the variant, so that a wrong position would be set up.

So weighing all this against each other I did not think it a major problem that the first time you won't see the normalized position number. The reason you click "random" is that you want some random position, why would you care at that point what its number is. If you want a specific number, you can just type it. I even thought about omitting the later normalization completely, but I could imagine that there are some people that would think: "Wow, this was a really interesting setup. I should remember its number!". And then it would be really inconvenient if they had to remember a 10-digit number.

For me the clocks do not flash. I notice they do decrease at an irregular rate, though. I guess this is a matter of XBoard having to compete for CPU time with the engines. Indeed using the option -niceEngines 10 seems to make the irregularity go away. Perhaps it also helps against the flashing.

[Shiloh]

Eric Thanks for the screen-shots and the how to regarding xaw3d.I agree that ./configure with xaw3d has a more pleasing appearance. I will try a new build .Thanks Eric for your work on the new xboard 4.4.0.Good luck with the project

HG Thanks for the feedback and explanations! It lets me know that my build is probably OK. Glad to hear you have solved the crashing problem with Show Move History! . I will try -niceEngines 10 and see if the clock settles down. Hope you can correct the problem with focus.As it stands that is a larger problem. If you could or someone could provide more details on how to write a global.ini file that would be good.Then I could compile the newer polyglot again and it would not overide my engine.ini file. Lastly It would be good if you can figure out what is happening to the King not being displayed by xboard after a castle in FRC. Thanks for your contributions to the new xboard 4.4.0.Good luck with the project

[H.G.Muller]

OK, I was finally able to reproduce the King disappearance act! It happens on a castling where the King stays in place, like Kg1, Rh1. It seems to be linked to move animation; if I switch that off, nothing strange happens.

I set -animateSpeed 100 to make animation really slow, and what actually happens is that it moves the King to the Rook square (which is how FRC castling is internally encoded, as KxR), and then teleports the Rook to its destination, clearing the square it came from. (The Rook move in castling is never animated.) This leaves the original King square empty.

I will fix it by not anyimating FRC castlings at all. (Rook moves in castlings are never animated anyway, and the existing animation on FRC castlings only served to create optical confusion, as the King was moving towards the wrong square.) Not sure what problems there might be when stepping throughthe game backwards, though...

[Shiloh]

Great! Thxs

[rigao]

Many thanks Shiloh, I compiled it as you suggested and worked w/o a problem.

I suggest this help to be included in the package, so everybody can take advantage.

Now, yet another problem (well, two, the game history induces a segmentation fault, but this is already known, isn't it?), in winboard, if i just execute the program, i can select to play against an engine or to connect to FICS or ICC. But if i try to start xboard without any parameter, it tries to load fairymax, and as it didn't find it, close itself.

Is it possible to connect to FICS with xboard?

[H.G.Muller]

XBoard does not have a startup diaog. You have to tell it everything through command-line options. People typically use scripts for that. The command for FICS is

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -icshelper timeseal

Assuming you have timeseal and want to ue it. otherwise you could leave out the latter two arguments.

[Shiloh]

Additionally with the 64 bit OS you will need to download timeseal_x86 from freechess.org.Make it executable and put it in the directory where you have xboard. should be /usr/local/bin.

For more reading you can type help timeseal_unix when you are on the server.

And to learn more about xboard read the manual found in /usr/local/share/man/man6 or bring up a terminal and type xboard -ncp then click help menu then click xman .

[H.G.Muller]

XBoard normally installs in /usr/games, and the manual file in /usr/share/man/man6 (when you use "apt-get install" to instal it on Ubuntu). The Debian package I announced in the other forum section also does it this way.

[rigao]

The two of you are right.

Muller, when saying that "normally" ubuntu install all its games in /usr/games/

Shiloh when saying that it has been installed under /usr/local/bin

Because all my games went to Muller's directory except for xboard, which I installed following Shiloh instructions, which went to Shiloh's directory.

Anyways, lets go to the point:

I downloaded http://www.freechess.org/Download/timeseal_x86 which seemed to be the timeseal which i needed. I changed it to executable and moved to both directories (just to be sure) and i used the order:

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -icshelper timeseal

it told me that there was no file or directory called timeseal. So i tried this:

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -icshelper timeseal_x86

which is how it's called, but it told me:
Timeseal : unknown error
Xboard: connection closed by ICS


Any idea how to solve it? I rode the help of xboard and the ICS help, but the xboard is quite short, and the ICS is quite obsolet (around 1996).

[H.G.Muller]

Can you logon on FICS with telnet without any problems? The command is:

telnet freechess.org 5000

[rigao]

I can connect with

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org

w/o problems

[H.G.Muller]

Well, timeseal is supposed to be a sort of telnet. What happens if you try

./timeseal_x86 freechess.org 5000

[rigao]

It says

Timeseal: Unknown error

It also says when i just say ./timeseal_x86:

Timestamp (FICS) v1.0 - programmed by Henrik Gram.

Syntax: "./timeseal_x86 server-address server-port [-p port#]"

[Shiloh]

You could try:
xboard -ics -icshost 69.36.243.188 -telnet -telnetProgram timeseal_x86

This is what I have in a script and it works for me.

[H.G.Muller]

When I run timeseal with the two argument it reqests (freechess.org and port number 5000) I get the FICS welcome screen. There must be something wrong with this timseal, or it runs into problems it is not smart enough to solve (like firewalls or proxy servers). You could try an IP number in stead of freechess.org; maybe there is a problem with the name server.

[rigao]

Shiloh, you rock It worked perfect with your command.

Many thanks.