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Subject: Re: xboard + FRC/Chess960

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 14:50:08 09/22/05

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On September 22, 2005 at 15:37:57, Joshua Shriver wrote:

>
>I'm running xboard-frc now. I used xboard to setup the position, then saved the
>FEN to a .fen file which I use via -lpf.

With xboard-frc, there is no need to use '-lpi' and '-lpf'.  You just choose
"New FRC Game" from the "File" menu.  You should then get a little dialog
box where you can enter the number of the FRC position you want to start
from.  Note that pressing the Return key doesn't work, you have to use your
mouse to press the "OK" button after entering a number.

>But it still doesn't seem to let me
>play the game. I've Glaurung and Baron and both seem to crack. Either they don't
>move, or give a "varient not supported" error. Hrm...

There is one little quirk (common to xboard-frc and xboard-960) which makes
it somewhat cumbersome to play white against the machine:  Just entering
the first move doesn't work.  You first have to choose "Edit Game" from the
"Mode" menu, make your first move, and then choose "Machine Black" from
the "Mode" menu.  I am not quite sure why this happens.  It is probably not
very difficult to fix, but I've been too lazy so far.  Playing black against the
computer works better, you can simply choose "Machine White" from the
menu at the beginning of the game.

In the case of The Baron, the downloadable Linux version does not support
FRC.  Perhaps Richard will send you an FRC binary of his program if you ask
him.

>Do you have to have the file with all fen's for 960? or can you just have a file
>with 1 fen that you want to play? Maybe that's the problem as my 960.fen file
>only contains 1 entry for the one I want to play.

You'll find a file containing all the positions here:

http://www.glaurungchess.com/frc-fens.txt

This is more useful with xboard-960 than with xboard-frc.  If you want
to try xboard-960, start the program with a command like this:

xboard-960 -fcp polyglot -fd . -lpf frc-fens.txt -lpi 100 -variant fischerandom

Of course, you can replace the number 100 with the number of the position
you want to play.

Using xboard-frc is easier.  You don't need the '-variant fischerandom' thing,
and you can use the menu (as explained above) to choose a position instead
of using '-lpf' and '-lpi'.

>This could be a problem too, I'm using an older version of polyglot, thanks!
>I'll try this tonight and see if that fixes my problem.

Yes, older versions of PolyGlot will definitely not work.

>Any thoughts about forwarding a diff of the source tree to Tim Mann? Maybe he
>can fuse it into the next official release of xboard/winboard.

In the long run this is obviously desirable, but at the moment the code is still
too hackish and incomplete to be included in the official XBoard distribution.

Tord



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