by H.G.Muller » 04 Nov 2010, 11:37
The hash size and number of cores will always be overruled by the setting in the WinBoard Common Engine Settings dialog with Michel's versions. But they are remembered in the winboard.ini file, so you only have to set them once, and then they apply to all engines simultaneously. For people who dislike using menus, they can do it by editing the winboard.ini file, in stead of the polyglot.ini files. For the EGTB cache size and Polyglot book settings, it will depend on how you invoke Polyglot. If you let WinBoard do it automatically, by usng the -fUCI or -sUCI parameter, it will also overrule these, as a part of the automatic invocation of Polyglot, where they are transferred together with engine name and directory. If you invoked Polyglot 'by hand' by naming it explicitly in the engine command line, these parameters are ignored in WB 4.4.x, (as they are not transferred through the protocol interface), and thus the values specified in the polyglot.ini will prevail.
WinBoard will never overrule any of the other engine options. The menu dialogs there merely work as a convenient way to _edit_ the poyglot.ini files. Just change the parameter through the menu, and press "save" in the Polyglot options.
There is a way to instruct setting of engine options from the WinBoard command-line. This could be useful for those using WinBoard in batch mode, or invoking it through a tournament manager. These are
-firstOptions "name1=value1,name2=value2"
-secondOptions "name3=value3,name4=value4"
With these options, winboard will set the options with the mentioned names to the mentioned value as soon as the spcified engine announces them.
If you are upgrading from an existing configuration of installed engines (in the winboard.ini file) and polyglot.ini files, I think Michel's Polyglot's will automatically use the polyglot.ini files given to them as argument. I am not sure if any changes you would make through the menu dialogs would be written back into those files, or that a copy would be made to a standard place (the _PG folder) first. In Version 1.4.38x which I supplied with the 4.4.x distribtion it saved into the original files.
