Author: Uri Blass
Date: 12:29:15 06/08/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 08, 2003 at 14:07:45, Russell Reagan wrote: >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. People can today also use arena. I doubt if people buy chessbase product for the interface and I suspect that a lot of people buy it only for the new engine. > >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. I do not think that we need a special protocol for chessbase. We only need engines to support the chessbase interface correctly so the result will be the same as under winboard or arena(for UCI engines). I think tha a list of mistakes of programmers that cause the engine not to do the same thing under chessbase and under winboard can help. Uri
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