Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 11:07:45 06/08/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 08, 2003 at 12:58:38, Mike Hood wrote: >Winboard and UCI use text pipes to communicate with the GUI, which isn't the >method recommended by Microsoft for interprocess communication, but hey! It >works! Chessbase's engines use the official Microsoft communications protocols, >whatever they're called nowadays... OLE, DLL, Tic Tac Toe, ..... Microsoft gave advice that when taken would bind someone solely to their OS? Come on, what do you think they are? A bunch of monopoly seeking money hogs? Oh wait... >The problem with the latter is that by using the Microsoft protocols, the engine >effectively ceases to be a separate entity and becomes part of the GUI. Speaking of binding someone to your product... >That >isn't a problem if the engine is working perfectly, but if the engine is buggy >and crashes it means the GUI will crash. For this reason Chessbase is reluctant >to make the Chessbase engine protocol public, since there's a danger of buggy >engines being written that will lead to hundreds of people complaining to >Chessbase that "Fritz 8 keeps crashing". Not to mention that keeping it private keeps people from implementing it in free GUI's (like Arena), which would mean people would use Arena instead of buying the ChessBase interface. If they cared about improving their poorly thought out protocol, I have no doubts they could do something about it. Create a better one. Use text pipes or TCP/IP, both of which are more or less portable, and I'm sure the world class programmers of the various ChessBase engines could spend half an hour to write some new protocol code. I won't be holding my breath.
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