TalkChess.com

[Sam Hamilton]

Hi,

With windows Arena was great for debugging, since I could see all the input and output. I have started a new project, my first one on a macintosh, and find it awkward to debug things like doing moves, undoing moves, move generation, etc. without my Arena crutch. Does anyone know of something similar I could use? I have tried xboard, stockfish, and the shredder demo and none seem to provide the same convenience.

-Sam

[Evert Glebbeek]

There's Sigma Chess, but I switched to using XBoard myself. I never used any of the other options you mention.

[H.G.Muller]

Could you elaborate on what exactly it is that Arena does? Is it that you can see the engine-GUI traffic real time? Wit XBoard you can do that, by setting the debug file to stderr. Then all debug output, which includes all time-stamped engine traffic, appears in the xterm from which you started it.

Of course you could pipe stderr to some filter, to pass only lines that contain 'first' or 'second', to be somewhat more selective.

If you want to see what the UCI traffic, you could can use UCIWB as adapter in stead of Polyglot, as it relays all the raw engine input to the GUI as debug statements, so they appear in the XBoard debug file.

[Sam Hamilton]

[Sam Hamilton]

[Miguel A. Ballicora]

[H.G.Muller]

UCI2WB is open source, ( http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi ), and compiles on Windows as well as Linux. I suppose you should haev no difficulty compiling it for Mac.

The easiest way to get rid of the fairymax error message is to actually install fairymax. I am not sure things like "apt-get install" work on a Mac-Intosh, but the XBoard binary package for Mac that is available from WinBoard forum should come with Fairy-Max pre-installed. (And probably also Mac binaries for Polyglot and UCI2WB).

Another way would be to edit the master settings file (on Linux /etc/xboard.conf) and change the -firstChessProgram setting from fairymax to another engine, or define -ncp mode to start without engine.

To run a UCI engine with UCI2WB from the command line, you could use

xboard -fcp "UCI2WB ENGINECOMMAND ENGINEFOLDER"

where ENGINEFOLDER is optional. (On Linux engines typically know where to find their own files.) Note that UCI2WB should be in your path, i.e. you should be able to type it from the command line. (If you put it in the current directory, you would have to give the command ./UCI2WB to run it.)

Normally XBoard is configured to automatically invoke Polyglot (for the first engine) when you use the argument -fUCI, or tick UCI in the Load Engine dialog. To configure it for using UCI2WB in stead, you would have to run it one time with the option

xboard -adapterCommand "UCI2WB %fcp %fd"

After that, use of -fUCI on an engine would automatically invoke UCI2WB. So you should be able to run, say, Fruit by

xboard -fcp fruit -fUCI

You could also just startup XBoard, select Engine->Load Engine, type "fruit" for engine command, tick UCI, and click OK to load Fruit (and next time you could then select it in that same dialog from the combobox).



To get the debug output you should start XBoard from a terminal window, by typing

xboard -debug -debugfile stderr

The debug output should then appear in the terminal window.

[Evert Glebbeek]

[H.G.Muller]

We hope to have a native Mac version of XBoard (tentative name 'OSXBoard') soon. I have just seen a screenshot, and it already displays the board and clocks!

[Robert Purves]