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Subject: Re: new autoplayer interface standard

Author: Rémi Coulom

Date: 12:49:51 09/15/98

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Hi,

Here are my thoughts about what you suggest :

The first thing to do would be to design a low-level protocol for exchanging
messages on the serial link. Chrilly Donninger already did this with auto232 and
many DOS & Windows chess programs support it. So I think any new autoplayer
interface should be upward-compatible with auto232 low-level communication
protocol on the serial link so that unix engines could play against  Genius,
Fritz, Rebel, etc.

Once the goals and specification of the low-level layer is defined, building a
driver to connect a text-based chess engine via pipes should be relatively easy
(a bit like the noname driver for DOS programs).

I have very recently implemented Windows autoplayer support for TCB (in version
0038) and installed Linux on my PC. Maybe the first thing to do would be to make
a linux auto232 compatible program that does not make any extensions to
Donninger's interface. I think I could do this in TCB relatively easily when I
have understood how to do i/o on the serial link in Unix (maybe multithread is
needed also to do like Stefan Meyer-Kahlen does ?), and publish the source code
so that people can test it in Unix.

By the way, I corrected two bugs in the code distributed by Chrilly Donninger
for Windows Autoplayer ( version of 08.07.1997) : extended mode does not work
and there is an error in the game number transmitted to the slave program when
saving a game. The corrected source code will be published on my web page for
the next release of TCB (0039).

Rémi



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