H.G.Muller wrote:This is a bit puzzling. I downloded the winboard.zip from my own website to make sure I have not mixed up versions (it should say version 4.4.0j), and when I start it in a virgin folder through the startup menu, putting -noGUI in the "additional options" field, the option does seem to work. (There should be no true or false argument with it.)
It does not start as iconic, though, which is normal: I have not programmed that,( although I fully agree that it would be better, and I would like to), simply because I don't know enough about Windows API to know how to do it.
You will still see board and pieces (but no clocks); it is only the update during play that is suppressed. Board updates in reaction to operator commands, e.g. using the <<, <, > or >> buttons, will work normally. (It seemed useful to keep the possibility to peek at the games, e.g. you are doing a match, and one of the games sees to drag on forever, and you now wonder why. People that don't want this can simply refrain from operating the buttons. So I only suppressed what happens automatically.)
I tried both starting through the startup dialog and with -noGUI -cp -fcp ... -scp ... -mg 2 from the command line, and in both cases the board pops up in the opening position, but is not updated when the engines play, there are no clocks, and there is no update of the icon on the task bar.
Starting as iconic would be more convenient; when I programmed the -noGUI option I was under the impression that there already existed an option to do that, but it turns out I was wrong. (The field for it in appData does exist, but it is not used.)
It seems like I mixed things somewhere : I just retried and everything works like you say.
For those who do prefer WB starting as iconic there is a simple way to do it : just do launch winboard throuh a "start /MIN winboard.exe" command. For example I use a little tournament management utility of my own for some test.
Each game is launched through a line in a batch file. A typical line looks like this :
- Code: Select all
start /MIN wb.exe /cp /mg={1} /ponderNextMove=false /noGUI /sgf={.\test-04d-01.pgn} /fd={.\} /sd={.\} /scp={pg14.exe PG-Glaurung12-Def-perf.ini} /fcp={pg14.exe PG-GF4bx-def-perf.ini} /tc={0:14} /mps={120} /inc={0} /td={2.0}
This works very well with your 4.4.0j version (by the way, would you consider naming it winboard-4.4.0j-beta.exe or something like this on your site instead of simply winboard.exe?)
Thanks again, and sorry for the erroneous report.
Marc
