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Subject: Re: SMIRF licencing - open formats

Author: Reinhard Scharnagl

Date: 23:09:58 01/13/06

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On January 13, 2006 at 18:15:36, Dann Corbit wrote:

>There is an excellent free open source interface that supports all kinds of
>chess variants, including large boards.  It also comes with its own chess
>engine.
>
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessv/

Hi Dann,

first let me say that I have much respect for Greg Strong's one man project
ChessV. But it does not at all provide an interface for chess engines. Neither
there is a protocol to be used by other engines, nor you will find a support to
store games in PGN format.

SMIRF proposes a free TMCI (Third Millennium Chess Interace) protocol, which is
free and open, but has not found any interest. Its GUI makes it possible to
load and store games in PGN, and even to comment moves. I extended the old FEN
to X-FEN to support e.g. Chess960 / FRC and 10x8 Capablanca Random Chess in a
compatible way. With its last Fritz update the Chess960 numbering scheme defined
by me now finally is accepted world wide, so there is hope for the incompatible
Schredder-FEN for Chess960 to be also substituted in time by the much longer
existing and well working X-FEN.

Thus ChessV could not be the base for independent 10x8 and other board chess
like games. Nevertheless ChessV has become much stronger during the last time.
If that project would not be OpenSource I would have thought to participate, but
patchworking code from others is not my style. Instead I am arguing for open in-
terfaces, protocols and file-formats like X-FEN or PGN.

Reinhard.



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