XBoard version of Bonanza

[hgm]

I had big problems using the super-strong Shogi engine Bonanza Feliz 0.0 at the time controls I commonly use for testing (40/1 or 1+1). However I configured it as USI engine, it kept losing 90-100% of the games on time.

One problem was probably that Bonanza's native time management rounds everything to seconds, also the time it has to think on the next move. The other that it was effectively running through 3 adapters (UCI2WB + u2b + sikou.dll). And the fact that even with u2b it is not really USI compliant, and does not support winc, binc or movestogo commands, so that a work-around was needed probably did not help either.

This annoyed me so much that I changed Bonanza's time management to implement incremental and classical TC, with centi-second resolution. And while I was at it, I hacked the command interface to understand enough commands from WinBoard protocol to play ponder-off games from the intial position directly under WinBoard.

For those interested: I put the modified sources on line in my git repository at http://hgm.nubati.net . I could compile them under Linux and Windows + Cygwin. (But alas, the latter only as Cygwin1.dll-dependent executable.) The ncluded VS Makefile did not work for me with Visual Studio 9.0. (And I did not adapt it to add the -DXBOARD flag needed toactivate my changes.)

[Dann Corbit]

HGM, you are the man!

I will (eventually) see if I can make a pure Windows version that does not need Cygwin