UCI and Winboard download page

[Rebel]

http://rebel13.nl/download/uci%20and%20winboard.html

Authors who want their brainchild on the list can contact me via email or by the contact form.

[Dann Corbit]

Your entire web site is very well done.

One suggestion on the engines download page:
If all the engines join in (which would really be excellent to have a single point hub to find these things) then you will have chaos with the current format.

I know because it mirrors Windows 10, which tries to throw 10,000 apps on the desktop, if you have 10,000 apps installed.

As you can imagine, that makes it a bit hard to find things.

So (If you get a lot more contributors) I suggest a categorization menu so that people can find what they are looking for.

[Rebel]

Thank you Dann. I am aware and already planned an alphabetic list. It will do for the moment.

http://rebel13.nl/download/uci%20and%20winboard.html

[Ferdy]

http://rebel13.nl/download/uci%20and%20winboard.html

Authors who want their brainchild on the list can contact me via email or by the contact form.

You can add Deuterium. It is very convenient to see these engines in one place.

If you like variants you can pick up there too. Almostchess and atomic variants are coming soon.

Deuterium site.
https://sites.google.com/site/deuteriumengine/files

[Rebel]

Done.

[hgm]

Your entire web site is very well done.

One suggestion on the engines download page:
If all the engines join in (which would really be excellent to have a single point hub to find these things) then you will have chaos with the current format.

I know because it mirrors Windows 10, which tries to throw 10,000 apps on the desktop, if you have 10,000 apps installed.

As you can imagine, that makes it a bit hard to find things.

So (If you get a lot more contributors) I suggest a categorization menu so that people can find what they are looking for.

This reminds me of one of the things I still dream about: a Windows engine distribution and installer system.

The concept would be this: there are 'maintainers' which have websites that host lists of engines. Per engine (version) it would contain the following info: links to where they can be downloaded, a command-line for unpacking / installing them, the command for running them, and of course information like the author / country, release date, approximate rating. All in some standard format.

People would have an 'engine-manager'on their computer, which could be configured to download (at startup) the most recent list of engines from their favorite maintainer site. It would present the info in the engine list in multi-columnar format: name, date, author, rating, variant it plays... The user could sort the list on any of those columns, to make it easy to find the engine(s) he is looking for.

If he has found the engine he wants, he can select it from the display, and click an 'install' button. This would then download the engine package from the URL specified in the downloaded engine list, and execute the installation command (also in the list) on it to unpack it. In addition it would 'register' the engine with the various GUIs present on the user's PC (as told to it by the user during configuration of the engine manager), a process often erroneously referred to as 'installing'. E.g. it would make sure the engine appears in WinBoard's winboard.ini file, with the startup command indicated by the downloaded engine list. So that it would be immediately selectable as engine in any of these GUIs.

[ZirconiumX]

Your entire web site is very well done.

One suggestion on the engines download page:
If all the engines join in (which would really be excellent to have a single point hub to find these things) then you will have chaos with the current format.

I know because it mirrors Windows 10, which tries to throw 10,000 apps on the desktop, if you have 10,000 apps installed.

As you can imagine, that makes it a bit hard to find things.

So (If you get a lot more contributors) I suggest a categorization menu so that people can find what they are looking for.

This reminds me of one of the things I still dream about: a Windows engine distribution and installer system.

The concept would be this: there are 'maintainers' which have websites that host lists of engines. Per engine (version) it would contain the following info: links to where they can be downloaded, a command-line for unpacking / installing them, the command for running them, and of course information like the author / country, release date, approximate rating. All in some standard format.

People would have an 'engine-manager'on their computer, which could be configured to download (at startup) the most recent list of engines from their favorite maintainer site. It would present the info in the engine list in multi-columnar format: name, date, author, rating, variant it plays... The user could sort the list on any of those columns, to make it easy to find the engine(s) he is looking for.

If he has found the engine he wants, he can select it from the display, and click an 'install' button. This would then download the engine package from the URL specified in the downloaded engine list, and execute the installation command (also in the list) on it to unpack it. In addition it would 'register' the engine with the various GUIs present on the user's PC (as told to it by the user during configuration of the engine manager), a process often erroneously referred to as 'installing'. E.g. it would make sure the engine appears in WinBoard's winboard.ini file, with the startup command indicated by the downloaded engine list. So that it would be immediately selectable as engine in any of these GUIs.

So more or less Linux package management for Windows?

Matthew:out

[hgm]

It is indeed inspired by that. But only for engines. And even the plain package-management system on Linux did not automatically register engine packages you installed to the GUIs you use. Only recently we designed a system for that (the 'plugin standard'). But not all engines and GUIs implement that yet.

[mar]

Thanks Ed, very nice!

[stegemma]

[...]
This reminds me of one of the things I still dream about: a Windows engine distribution and installer system.[...]

Maybe this could be done using InnoSetup; this is a full setup program that uses text scripts, very easy to learn. You could write a script with multiple options, to create a single setup for all engine, or you can create a single default script and then use it multiple times.

InnoSetup is free and works very well, I use it for hundreds of installations any year in a commercial software and never had have a single problem.