A wrong error?!

[Harry]

Hello,

in variant shatranj in this position

8/1R6/1p1rp2P/p1p1kq2/P1P5/3PB3/8/3K1B2 b 0 56

fairy-max want and I also want to go Ke5-d4, but winboard 4.5 detect this as an illegal move. In version 4.4.4 this move is ok.

Harry

[H.G.Muller]

Indeed, you caught me there. I broke that.

Because of the addition of Spartan Chess the number of variants where the Elephant can only jump 2 squares had become a minority, as in Great Shatranj and Spartan Chess, as well as in most unsupported variants the 'Modern Elephant' can do diagonal steps of 1 in addition. So I made that the new WinBoard default, (as even with legality testing off it is important to have WB understand as much as possible of the piece movement, as it produces better PGN), and I obviously had to make an exception for the historic variants Shatranj and Courier, which use the ancient Alfil. But I goofed, and wrote "Shatranj AND Courier", where I should have written "Shatranj OR Courier". And of course the variant is never Shatranj and Courier at the same time...

I guess this means that Courier and Shatran are broken in this WB version, and can only be played with legality testing switched off (in the General Options menu). This is not a huge disasterforplaying against Fairy-Max, as the latter does legality checkin itself. (Not so sure about Pulsar, though.) Sorry about this. I will fix it s quickly as possible. (We will have a 4.5.1 real soon, perhaps even next week,to fix the packaging errors in the source tar ball, so this fix can go in as well.)

Thank you very much for reporting!

[Waldemar]

Hi ! I dont know what I did wrong but when I try opening a PGN file or even Winboard.exe I got this error, can you help me? I think is a line in my winboard.ini...

[matematiko]

Hi ! I dont know what I did wrong but when I try opening a PGN file or even Winboard.exe I got this error, can you help me? I think is a line in my winboard.ini...

This happens when running different versions of WinBoard in the same directory, the different WinBoards create different winboard.ini files and overwrite each other.

[Waldemar]

Thx Mate, was an easy solution, I just deleted the winboard.ini and opened winboard.exe, it created a new default winboard.ini file without problem now.

[H.G.Muller]

I can add that for the newer WinBoard versions, (since 4.5.0), this even happens when you install them in different directories. Because they all share the same user settings file (winboard.ini in the user's Appliation Data folder). The winboard.ini in their own directory is merely a master settings file, redefining defaults, and redirecting WinBoard to this user settings file.

Deleting the winboard.ini in the WinBoard folder in that case would solve the problem, but also destroy the master / user hierarchy for the settings files, because it would from then on create the user setting file in its own folder. That way you would lose the possibility to define non-standard settings for volatile options in the master file.

So a better solution for running several WinBoard versions next to each other would be to alter the name of the settings file that the master settings file redirects you to. To this end you would have to change the last two opions in the master settings file (/settingsFile and /saveSettingsFile) to refer to another filename.

[Waldemar]

Thx Muller for reply !

[Jonathan Hilton]

Thanks, I turned off legality check and this worked--I use Winboard to work with Stockfish for Shatranj (which I play on chess.com). Does anyone know if this bug has been fixed in a more recent version of Winboard? I am using Winboard 4.8.

[H.G.Muller]

Sure. I typically fix bugs as soon as they are discovered.

[Jonathan Hilton]

Thank you, I will try whatever the latest version is!