Author: Tim Mann
Date: 23:04:14 07/20/02
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In general, xboard/winboard will accept an illegal move if you turn of Test Legality in the options, and will reject it otherwise. This seems reasonable to me, though the option of having a dialog box pop up asking you what you want to do could be nice too. There are a couple of limitations in xboard/winboard, though. First, it wouldn't even notice that this particular game had an illegal move because it doesn't bother to keep track of whether castling has been ruled out by pieces moving. It will reject other kinds of illgal moves, though. Second, if you have an engine connected, xboard/winboard tries to feed the moves to the engine. An engine will (if programmed according to the spec) reject an illegal move and xboard/winboard will undo it. (This compensates for xboard's incomplete legality checking.) However, this happens even if you have Test Legality turned off. I suppose that if you turn off Test Legality and there is an illegal move that the engine rejects, you could argue that xboard/winboard ought to force-feed the move to the engine by resetting the position to what it would look like after the move.
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