WinBoard-AA beta release

[hgm]

What Lima did something wrong here?

No, the blame is entirely on WinBoard.

When starting the second engine for analysis, WinBoard fails to apply a feature timeout, and proceeds before it has had the chance to receive the engine's feature commands. So it treats Lima as a v1 engine, where it assumes the engine plays the currently selected variant. But it doesn't pay attention to the size overrides there (which arguably is another bug, in the support of v1 engines), so it assumes the engine plays plain 'shogi'.

In non-size-overriden variants you would not notice this bug, except that you would fail to get this popup when the second engine does not support the variant. (Well, you would notice it if other essential features were ignored, such as setboard=1.)

This only hurts when the second engine has not been used yet. If you have used TwoMachines mode before, or opened the Engine #2 Settings dialog, WinBoard would already know all the engine's features, and everything would work well.

[hgm]

OK, the winboard.exe in the WinBoard-AA package now also solves this problem of starting the second engine for analysis.

[Vinvin]

OK, the winboard.exe in the WinBoard-AA package now also solves this problem of starting the second engine for analysis.

I'd like to start WB with only first engine defined to analyze (second left blank) but WB doesn't like that (kind of crash).

[Ferdy]

OK, the winboard.exe in the WinBoard-AA package now also solves this problem of starting the second engine for analysis.

Thanks works fine now.

[hgm]

I'd like to start WB with only first engine defined to analyze (second left blank) but WB doesn't like that (kind of crash).

What do you mean by 'kind of crash'? For me WinBoard just throws up a fatal-error popup: 'no value provided for argument /fcp', and then exits. Apart from the fact that it should have said '/scp' in stead of '/fcp' (I guess this is an unintended side effect of using the same list for both engines now), this is intended behavior.

Just don't do it. WinBoard is not configured to suggest an empty line for the second engine, and when you are not interested in using it, just leave it as WinBoard suggests. I don't see what you expect to achieve by not specifying a second engine.

[styx]

I figured out, there might still be a small bug with the UCI2WB Adapter:

When you load any engine (that uses UCI2WB) from the quick load menu (last four used engines), you still cannot make any changes "persistent" in the setting because it says "saving failed: engine not from list".

[Vinvin]

I'd like to start WB with only first engine defined to analyze (second left blank) but WB doesn't like that (kind of crash).

What do you mean by 'kind of crash'? For me WinBoard just throws up a fatal-error popup: 'no value provided for argument /fcp', and then exits. Apart from the fact that it should have said '/scp' in stead of '/fcp' (I guess this is an unintended side effect of using the same list for both engines now), this is intended behavior.

Just don't do it. WinBoard is not configured to suggest an empty line for the second engine, and when you are not interested in using it, just leave it as WinBoard suggests. I don't see what you expect to achieve by not specifying a second engine.

yes, messages in popup.
May be WB can start the 2nd engine same as first when nothing is specified in 2nd engine.

[Vinvin]

OK, the winboard.exe in the WinBoard-AA package now also solves this problem of starting the second engine for analysis.

Where can we get this latest (windows) release ?

[hgm]

Same link ( http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-AA.zip ). But it was not the problem you were talking about, but the mini-Shogi problem Ferdy reported.

WinBoard could use the first engine also as second, if the second is specified as empty. This is in fact what XBoard does, when no -scp is explicitly given, as it has no startup dialog with comboboxes, and thus must use a single default.

But why would that be useful? In WinBoard the empty string is not default, and not even a choice in the combobox. If you want the second engine to be the same as the first (which also seems hardly useful; who would want to play an engine against the exact same version of itself, or analyze with two identical engines?), you can select it from the combobox. It seems much easier to simply leave the second engine at Fairy-Max, if you don't want to use it, than erase it as a crooked way to change it to another engine you don't need.

[Vinvin]

But why would that be useful?

I use WB to analyze games/positions with SF-zh, so it's completely useless for me to define a second engine.