UCI and Winboard download page

[Ron Murawski]

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.

Hi HG,

Have you ever heard of Chocolatey?
https://chocolatey.org

It's an apt-get for Windows.

Ron

[Ferdy]

Done.

Thanks.

[Rebel]

Update 5 new top engines.

http://rebel13.nl/download/uci%20and%20 ... d.html#new

Thanks J. for input.

[nionita]

Update 5 new top engines.

http://rebel13.nl/download/uci%20and%20 ... d.html#new

Thanks J. for input.

Hi Ed, do you take into the list weaker engines too? I see only strong there, for now.

[nionita]

But what HGM proposes is more than this, it is also the internet infrastructure to find engines, from trusted sources, with further information.

Once a guy heard I wrote a chess engine and he said, he wants to try it. I gave him instructions to download/install Arena and then to download and "install" Barbarossa. But, to my surprise, he found those instructions too complicated and eventually he could not follow them.

I think there are a lot of people which are not so computer afine that would need a "battery included" solution like HGM proposed.

[Rebel]

Update 5 new top engines.

http://rebel13.nl/download/uci%20and%20 ... d.html#new

Thanks J. for input.

Hi Ed, do you take into the list weaker engines too? I see only strong there, for now.

Sure, see the invitation on that page. Just added MatMoi.