initsring

[Gábor Szots]

I use WB 4.8.0b and I noticed that when I install an engine with special options, no initsring is appended to the line of the engine in Winboard48.ini, only the command, e.g. for Rebel Century BookOff\n. Now when in a tournament the engine is called, WB tells me a fatal error has happened because there is no such file as BookOff\n. I appended initstring manually and it works OK.

[H.G.Muller]

I don't understand what exactly you want to do and did.

If rebel.exe would need a parameter BookOff in its engine command, this should be done by entering "rebel.exe" in the 'Engine' field of the Load Engine dialog, and "BookOff" in the 'command-line parameters' field. WinBoard should then combine this into a properly quoted -fcp "rebel.exe Bookoff" in the engine list. The error message you get suggests that the quotes are missing, so that WinBoard thinks the -fcp valule is just "rebel.exe", and that BookOff is a new WinBoard option. (And because it does not start with '-' it then assumes it is a PGN file, and imagines a -lgf in front of it.)

Can you show the line it makes of it in the engine list?

[Gábor Szots]

I don't understand what exactly you want to do and did.

If rebel.exe would need a parameter BookOff in its engine command, this should be done by entering "rebel.exe" in the 'Engine' field of the Load Engine dialog, and "BookOff" in the 'command-line parameters' field. WinBoard should then combine this into a properly quoted -fcp "rebel.exe Bookoff" in the engine list. The error message you get suggests that the quotes are missing, so that WinBoard thinks the -fcp valule is just "rebel.exe", and that BookOff is a new WinBoard option. (And because it does not start with '-' it then assumes it is a PGN file, and imagines a -lgf in front of it.)

Can you show the line it makes of it in the engine list?

I want Rebel to switch off its book. It cannot be done from the command line so I used to put BookOff\n in the Special Winboard Options field while installing the engine. This used to create the following line in winboar47.ini:

"Rebel Century" -fcp "Century.EXE w6 century.eng" -fd "E:\Sakk\WB-engines\Rebel Century" -fn "Rebel Century" -firstProtocolVersion 1 -fNoOwnBookUCI /firstInitString="BookOff\n" /xreuse

/xreuse was put there by me afterwards.

This was under Vista. Now I have Win8.1 and use WB 4.8.0b. When I do the above, putting BookOff\n in the Special Winboard Options field, the line created is different, it looks like this:

"Rebel Century" -fcp "Century.EXE w6 century.eng" -fd "E:\Sakk\WB-engines\Rebel Century" -fn "Rebel Century" -firstProtocolVersion 1 -fNoOwnBookUCI BookOff\n

So, /firstInitString is missing.

I did a new install to reproduce things for you but, strangely, I now do not get the error message, maybe it occurred only in engine matches.

[H.G.Muller]

OK, now I understand what you are trying to achieve, and the connection with the initString.

But the first time, where it worked, you must have typed /firstInitString "Bookoff\n" in the 'special WinBoard options' field. Not just "BookOff\n", like you are doing now. The contents of this field is simply appended to the line in the engine list, and not prefixed by anything. (It should also be usable for other options than /initString, like /firstTimeOdds, /firstNPS, /firstScoreIsAbs etc.)

Btw, note that the default value for /first/secondInitString is "new\nrandom\n", and that it is important to keep at least the "new\n" in there, otherwise the engine would not receive the WB "new" command when it is supposed to start a new game. So you probably should use /firstInitSting "BookOff\nnew\nrandom\n". (I must admit this is weird, and I have no idea why it was designed this way. "new" is mandatory in WB protocol, and I cannot imagine there ever would have been engines that would not need it, or would need something else instead of it to start a new game. So it would be much more logical to have WinBoard always send the "new", and have options /firstPreNew and /firstPostNew that by default would be "" and "random\n", respectively.)

[Gábor Szots]

OK, now I understand what you are trying to achieve, and the connection with the initString.

But the first time, where it worked, you must have typed /firstInitString "Bookoff\n" in the 'special WinBoard options' field. Not just "BookOff\n", like you are doing now. The contents of this field is simply appended to the line in the engine list, and not prefixed by anything. (It should also be usable for other options than /initString, like /firstTimeOdds, /firstNPS, /firstScoreIsAbs etc.)

Btw, note that the default value for /first/secondInitString is "new\nrandom\n", and that it is important to keep at least the "new\n" in there, otherwise the engine would not receive the WB "new" command when it is supposed to start a new game. So you probably should use /firstInitSting "BookOff\nnew\nrandom\n". (I must admit this is weird, and I have no idea why it was designed this way. "new" is mandatory in WB protocol, and I cannot imagine there ever would have been engines that would not need it, or would need something else instead of it to start a new game. So it would be much more logical to have WinBoard always send the "new", and have options /firstPreNew and /firstPostNew that by default would be "" and "random\n", respectively.)

It must have been as you say. I checked my old winboard ini file and I had 'new' everywhere except for Rebel Century, still it worked. Maybe Rebel is special. To remain on the safe side, though, I am going to include new even for Rebel.

Thank you.