Chess960 / FRC on ICS

[jshriver]

Curious has anyone played or tested an engine on an ICS in FRC mode?

I'm toying with the idea again of running FRC tournaments outside my standard ones. However I haven't been successful.


What client to use? xboard/winboard is my go to GUI for ICS interactivity but I've read mixed reports of it's FRC support (some even requiring a special fork that is FRC specific).

Know Arena and a couple GUI's support FRC but lack ICS mode.

Appreciate the commentary, and hope everyone is well.

-Josh

[Roman Hartmann]

I had my engine playing Fischer Random Chess on ICC about 3 years ago. I used the combination Winboard + Polyglot in order to play the games. This combination didn't make any problems.
If I remember correctly the Winboard-executable in question was a beta version provided by H. G. Muller. I also remember that only few FRC-games were actually comp vs comp games. DanaSah is the only engine I remember that also played FRC-games back then.

Roman

[Ajedrecista]

Hello Josh:

Know Arena and a couple GUI's support FRC but lack ICS mode.

Appreciate the commentary, and hope everyone is well.

-Josh

I have never connected to an ICS but I want to note a thing: I have Arena 2.0.1 (I know, an oldie) and indeed I can see an option with an icon of The Earth that is aimed for playing chess over ICS. You can also reach this feature at Extras\Internet Chess Server (ICS)... or with key shortcut Ctrl + I. It offers the following servers:

• freechess.org
  chessclub.com
  chess.net
  jeu.echecs.com
  other:
  • chess.unix-ag.unik.kl.de
    icchess.net
    jogo.cex.org.br
    chess.mds.mdh.se
    queen.chessclub.com

I do not know if that ICS mode works correctly.

Regards from Spain.

Ajedrecista.

[Modern Times]

I'm toying with the idea again of running FRC tournaments outside my standard ones. However I haven't been successful.

Great idea But outside ChessGUI and ShredderGUI I have no experience.

My guess is for Winboard - most WB FRC capable engines will play directly, and UCI FRC engines might play through polyglot.

[Michel]

Don't forget icsdrone! Although I have not tested it on ICS lately. On FICS it apparently runs flawlessly.

[jshriver]

Don't forget icsdrone! Although I have not tested it on ICS lately. On FICS it apparently runs flawlessly.

I respect icsdrone a lot it's made my life a lot easier. However I can't get it to work for my windows engines. (Flawless under Linux).

In windows it spawns a couple windows, with no output so not sure why the engines themselves don't run.

To get around this (think it's part of the terminal emulation) I downloaded cygwin and tried compiling natively so I could screen it and run it from the cli but it wouldn't work due to some kind of terminal emulation layer that icsdrone seems to insist on.

Will have to try it again.

[Michel]

However I can't get it to work for my windows engines.

The Cygwin version used to work. But Cygwin has changed a lot since then. Perhaps it is broken now.

Someday(TM) I will make a native Windows version. Unfortunately icsdrone uses the "select" call rather heavily to communicate with the ICS, the engine, the console and the proxy. Select is not available Windows so the functionality has to be rewritten using threads which is a pain.

[jshriver]

However I can't get it to work for my windows engines.

The Cygwin version used to work. But Cygwin has changed a lot since then. Perhaps it is broken now.

Someday(TM) I will make a native Windows version. Unfortunately icsdrone uses the "select" call rather heavily to communicate with the ICS, the engine, the console and the proxy. Select is not available Windows so the functionality has to be rewritten using threads which is a pain.

That's fine, I meant no disrespect in my post. Just grateful you changed it to work with H.G. Muller's ICS codebase. Without it, OICS wouldn't be nearly what it is today since keeping this many bots running 24/7 with a GUI app would be a nightmare. I've never had icsdrone crash, and the remote access capabilities make it gold in my book.

[hgm]

WinBoard / XBoard of course supports FRC. Both for WB and UCI engines (the latter through Polyglot). Just make sure you select FRC in the match command of the ICS, and everything should work automatically.

It is not really different from playing Knightmate, Gothic Chess, Spartan or Xiangqi on ICS. Only Bughouse is a bit different, as you need a partner there.

If you want the bot to accept challenges in these variants, don't forget to set the -zippyVariants option accordingly. Note the variant names there cannot bee shortcuts, but needs the full name. (Which is fischerandom, with a single 'r'.)