TalkChess.com

I don't see much difference between what I was doing and what Arena is doing. Arena sends the option settings in reverse order, but I cannot imagine this would make any difference. The 'ucinewgame' and 'isready' are not logged by UCI2WB, but they are always sent immediately after each other (and I know they were sent, as the readyok reply of the engine is logged), but I sent ucinewgame after isready, while Arena sends it before. That is the only other difference I see. Plus that we are using other executables, of course. (On Arena you must use a Windows binary, I suppose.)

Can you e-mail me the binary that you were using here? I will PM you my e-mail address.

OK, thanks. The Windows .exe you sent me worked. On the first attempt it crashed, but then I had forgotten to tick the options PlayFRC in the Engine Settings dialog. Funny enough it did not complain about the KQkq castling rights in a FEN with no corner Rooks, but when the search on the first move reached 8 ply it crashed. (Presumably when it first tried to play a castling in its tree.) After ticking PlayFRC every thing seemed fine, and it could play a game against itself where both sides castled.

How does ChessGUI solve this problem of the non-compliant engines each having their own options (like PlayFRC) that have to be set to make them play Chess960? Do you have to do that by hand? It seems kind of hard to do this automatically. (E.g. Gothmog-frc has a combobox option 'FRC' with only one possible setting: 'aware'...)

I still have to figure out what caused the problems with the Linux version.

hgm wrote:How does ChessGUI solve this problem of the non-compliant engines each having their own options (like PlayFRC) that have to be set to make them play Chess960? Do you have to do that by hand?

I think this "FRC aware" combobox was one idea to set a kind of standard. I think Arena doesn't care about it, it tries to run a Chess960 game regardless which engine is loaded.

This PlayFRC option has to be set by hand, but I guess most people would run Chispa as Winboard engine. In general several engines have problems playing Chess960 in UCI mode while working perfectly in Winboard mode.

Gothmog is afaik the only engine that plays Chess960 only in ArenaUCI mode.

One way to address the option problem would be to look for every check option with name 960, fischer or frc in its name, and setting that to true when the GUI tells the adapter to start playing fischerandom. Just in case the heuristic backfires we could still display the option in the Engine Settings dialog.

hgm wrote:...
How does ChessGUI solve this problem of the non-compliant engines each having their own options (like PlayFRC) that have to be set to make them play Chess960? Do you have to do that by hand? It seems kind of hard to do this automatically. (E.g. Gothmog-frc has a combobox option 'FRC' with only one possible setting: 'aware'...)

...

It is embarrassing that even I do not know how I did it in ChessGUI.
ChessGUI does not check for options like "PlayFRC", etc.

At each move, ChessGUI creates an matrix[MOVES][FORMATS]. All valid moves in all valid formats/notations are in there.

But how does ChessGUI tell Arena960-UCI engines to play FRC ?

There are several UCI engines that play Arena960 chess in old versions.
I am quite sure that Hermann did it before switching later to SMK960.