TalkChess.com

hi,
after many many years PC and Windows i tried out Apple.
Bought a little mac mini with Lion 10.7.5 and core2duo cpu.
I would like to get my UCI stuff ready there too.

Which programs or GUIs do i have to install under Mac that
i can do

1. engine tournaments or matches and/or
2.UCI engines for game analysis

i tried a few but it seems more complicate then on my windows pc. or for ME it looks more complicate because i do not understand how to do.

Please give me some advice. i never tried apple hardware/OS before.

You can take a look at "Scid vs Mac", that can be found on sourceforge.

You can use the XBoard OS X app, which is a native OS X version of XBoard, bundled similar to WinBoard (i.e. with Polyglot, Fairy-Max, Fruit, timeseal, timestamp, board-textures, and pre-configured to use all of those).

I was going to ask this in the Winboard forum - I installed the OSX version of winboard, but whenever I try to start an engine I get a message saying "permission denied" - any idea what the cause of this is? Do I have to have the engines in a specific folder?

In answer to the OP, I have shredder which doesn't seem to run tournaments like the windows version, and HIARCS chess explorer, which does run tournaments.

Preferred choice would be winboard, of course.

I'm also about 50% of the way through my own GUI for the Mac - I am as far as having two engine play vs each other, but it's dawning on me slowly that there is a HUGE amount more to a gui than I first thought. It'll be a few months yet.

Richard Allbert wrote:I was going to ask this in the Winboard forum - I installed the OSX version of winboard, but whenever I try to start an engine I get a message saying "permission denied" - any idea what the cause of this is? Do I have to have the engines in a specific folder?

Is this for the engines that are included in the bundle, or for engines you installed elsewhere on the machine, and try to load in XBoard through the Load Engine dialog?

"Permission denied" usually points to files or directories having wrong access rights, or a wrong owner.

hgm wrote:

Richard Allbert wrote:I was going to ask this in the Winboard forum - I installed the OSX version of winboard, but whenever I try to start an engine I get a message saying "permission denied" - any idea what the cause of this is? Do I have to have the engines in a specific folder?

Is this for the engines that are included in the bundle, or for engines you installed elsewhere on the machine, and try to load in XBoard through the Load Engine dialog?

"Permission denied" usually points to files or directories having wrong access rights, or a wrong owner.

I just re-downloaded the latest version from the forum.

In fact, I must be doing something wrong.

I go to Engine -> Load New First Engine

In the dialog box there is a browse button next to the engine directory. I browse and save the path

/Users/taciturn_lemon/Documents/Chess/ChessEngines/Fruit_21/EXEs/OSX

In the box below for the engine command I enter

Fruit_21_x86

And I get a no such file or directory error.

I tried appending Fruit_21_x86 to the directory path but no joy - the dialog closed and starting first chess program appeared, but no thinking output was displayed or moves made.

Not sure how to run it in debug mode from the .app, otherwise I would show some debug output.

On linux you cannot run files in the current directory by just giving their name. You have to prefix by ./ This could be the problem.

If you don't browse for the directory but for the exe, and leave the directory field empty (by default it is "."), XBoard would automatically split it in ./exefile for the command an the rest of the path for the directory.

Ctrl-D is supposed to be the accelerator key for toggling debug mode, but I am not sure this works in the OS X App.

mclane wrote:hi,
after many many years PC and Windows i tried out Apple.
Bought a little mac mini with Lion 10.7.5 and core2duo cpu.
I would like to get my UCI stuff ready there too.

Which programs or GUIs do i have to install under Mac that
i can do

1. engine tournaments or matches and/or
2.UCI engines for game analysis

i tried a few but it seems more complicate then on my windows pc. or for ME it looks more complicate because i do not understand how to do.

Please give me some advice. i never tried apple hardware/OS before.

xboard, polyglot, and then the engine(s) of your choice.

I use my own match referee generally as I don't watch the games. I have been playing a couple of long games against scorpio this afternoon, running on 12 cores, to look for problems before I release 24.1, and I have been using xboard which really works quite well...

BTW Lion is way old. I'd upgrade to Mavericks because the next release is due out pretty soon and they might require Mavericks before you upgrade.

hgm wrote:On linux you cannot run files in the current directory by just giving their name. You have to prefix by ./ This could be the problem.

This I know, of course, spending most of my time on Linux, Mac these days.

Why I didn't do this is another matter!!

Anyway thanks, and so happy to run XBoard on my macbook.

bob wrote:BTW Lion is way old. I'd upgrade to Mavericks because the next release is due out pretty soon and they might require Mavericks before you upgrade.

Unfortunately, some of the earlier Mac Mini models with a Core 2 Duo do not support any version of Mac OS/X beyond 10.7 Lion.

See: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/m ... cmini.html