Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 13:00:45 04/06/02
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On April 06, 2002 at 15:12:01, Vincent Lejeune wrote: >Not help, but congratulation message ! > >I wanted use chest for some time now (about 1 year), I've read a part of the >help file to know how to solve "regular" mate (I think that most of user use >this feature) and try some positions in command line style, but a didn't like >CLI, and I thank you very much for you attempt !! > >An other idea : is it possible to convert chest into an UCI or winboard engine >(or better : in a mate searcher engine in chessbasse interface !!) > > > > >On April 06, 2002 at 14:59:55, Roy Eassa wrote: > >> >>I have gone through several iterations in my attempt to create a simple GUI to >>facilitate giving the contents of the clipboard to Chest under Windows. In each >>case I ran into problems that I believe are specific to either Microsoft Windows >>in general, to just Windows XP, to Visual Basic 6, or the interaction between >>them WinXP & VB. >> >>The most recent symptom is as follows: >> >>When I run a DOS shell and type the following command manually, it works 100% >>correctly. When instead this EXACT SAME command is sent to the OS by my app >>(using VB's "Shell" statement), it only works once in awhile: >> >>chest -b -Z 15 Chester!.tmp >> >>where the contents of Chester!.tmp are (in either case): >> >>8/8/8/p7/8/8/R6p/2K2Rbk w - - ce 1; >> >>Most of the time, Chest either does not run at all or perhaps runs and quits >>so quickly as to be nearly undetectable. >> >> >>Any ideas / help appreciated! Update: with quicker puzzles, Chest is running and quitting so fast you can't see it. I don't know how to make it stick around (or to capture its results -- using redirection with VB's Shell command does not work). With longer puzzles, all you see is a blank DOS window until Chest solves the puzzle, at which time there is a flash of text and the window disappears. A previous incarnation of my app tried to send keystrokes to Chest. It also worked occasionally. There were, among other problems, timing issues. I rewrote it as a state machine with delays between each bit of text and that helped, but ultimately it was too flakey (and there was another issue**) and I rewrote it to use a command text file. **The other issue was that my app does not try to interpret or parse the contents of the clipboard. It just passes it on to Chest. The problem is that, when you use stdin rather than a file to command Chest, you need to tell it whose move it is (White's or Black's) twice: once as a standard part of the FEN/EPD string and again in a separate parameter (e.g., "z5w"). However, I don't have that separate parameter and I thought it would be bad to require the user to re-enter that information (what if it conflicted with the EPD?) and too much work to fully parse / error-check / interpret the EPD to extract that one tidbit of information. But Chest will fail with an error if you do not supply it...
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