Author: Jon Dart
Date: 20:54:32 09/02/00
Arasan has been a Windows-only program since its original release in 1994. I now have a port of the chess engine (not the GUI) that runs under Linux using xboard. It is pretty much identical in terms of algorithms and evaluation to the released Windows version but has a few bug fixes and tweaks. One of the motivations for doing this port is that I've had a lot of problems with the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. In fact Visual C++ 6.0 can't compile Arasan correctly using full optimization. I've been stuck on version 5.0 of VC++ for a while and even that requires some hacks to make it build right. GCC 2.95 on the other hand seems to work ok. Also I've now got a home network set up with a DSL line and a couple of Linux machines. Formerly I had only a dialup connection and since moving a while ago I've only had one phone line .. so Arasan hasn't been online at the chess servers very much. Now I have a dedicated internet line independent of my voice line (and hopefully more stable than dialup, although I've had the DSL connection drop sometimes too). So Arasan should be available online more often. Note that it's now on a P3/733, which is a little slower than the Athlon 750 Windows box. And the GCC executable is also slower than the Visual C++ executable, athough I've no doubt got room to tune it smoe more. I plan to release the Linux version (including source) eventually although I'd like to shake most of the remaining bugs out of it first. I'm not currently planning to port the Arasan GUI to X. I did a bunch of X & Motif coding years ago and it was not fun at all. Plus xboard is a fine GUI as far as I'm concerned. --Jon
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