Certabo, Millennium Chess Link and Novag UCB drivers

[GONeill]

A few years ago I wrote a UCI "engine" to control my Novag UCB board and then converted it to a DLL library that allowed it to interface directly with Arena and LucasChess. I have now updated it to work with the new LucasChessR and have also added support for the Shredder GUI.

I saw Lars Nowak had UCI drivers for the Certabo and Millennium Chess Link boards:

http://www.solanosoft.com/index.php?page=certabo-uci
http://www.solanosoft.com/index.php?pag ... sslink-uci

With his help, and lots of assistance from Pietro at Certabo, I have now converted my Novag library to also work with those boards. So now the Certabo and Millennium boards can interface directly with Arena, LucasChess, LucasChessR and Shredder.

They already come preinstalled in LucasChessR (from R0.35a) but need to be loaded manually for the other GUIs. For those GUIs my drivers all use the same file name, so if you have more than one type of board you will need to be careful about which version is loaded! Other Instructions are included in the downloads available here:

https://goneill.co.nz/chess

There is no support for Chess960 or setting up positions using the board yet, but I hope to add those later.

I looked at Aquarium but it doesn't appear to use a DLL file so I can't implement this driver there, although Aquarium 2020 already has Millennium support built in. I also looked at Fritz, and although I can get it to load and run my driver it seems to be doing some validation I'm unaware of. Unless I can work out what, I won't be able to implement my driver there either.

These are still first release so there might be some bugs but between Lars, Pietro and myself I think we've caught most of them!

[GONeill]

I found a problem in the processing of 'Auto' when searching for the board's COM port. I've uploaded a fixed version to my web page.

Thanks,
Graham

[PeterO]

Great Newss!!!

Thank you very much. Its turning my Milennium Board in a GREAT chesscomputer.

Thank youuuuuuuuuuuuu

Peter

[mikebock]

I have to agree, it's nice to be able to pick whichever engine I want, play on a physical board, and have the game saved on the laptop.

[GONeill]

I've updated the Certabo and Millennium versions. If you are using Shredder or the older LucasChess and want to start the game from a different position you can now skip the step of setting up the pieces in the normal starting position first.

This doesn't affect use with Arena or LucasChessR, and doesn't affect the Novag UCB driver.

Thanks,
Graham