Author: Alastair Scott
Date: 01:07:24 11/19/02
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On November 18, 2002 at 11:35:34, Mark Loftus wrote: >It would be nice if some of these old dos programs could come out as >winboard engines. Otherwise, they will soon be museum pieces for the >few with very old computers, and I think that's unfortunate. It's probable that source code has been lost after all these years, which would make a direct rewrite of the output routines almost impossible. But someone sufficiently skilled (ie not me) could probably write a screen scraper - a package which runs in the background, copies text off the screen, reformats it and presents it to other packages using an API or even a text file; in this case the scraper would have to format the text so that it looked like the output from a Winboard/UCI program :) As all chess programs display moves, in some form of notation, on the screen _somehow_ this is certainly possible; such scrapers are quite common when there is a need to present information in a PC GUI but the information is being produced by something antediluvian, typically a mainframe. The problem with this suggestion, as mentioned before, is that the old program has to run in the first place. This might be difficult or impossible because of the anti-piracy methods often then used; I can't imagine that NTFS 5.1 (as used in XP) would be happy with an ancient DOS program trying to write customised sectors to it ;) Alastair
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