The GA-Sho engine is new, and the exclamation points seem to be part of its name. (
http://minerva.cs.uec.ac.jp/~uec55shogi ... 2%E7%B2%F1 ) It was always 1/28 Rigan that was the big opponent these past years.
Shokidoki already does 9x9 Shogi, but (as expected) it sucks at that. It was in fact originally written as a 9x9 Shogi for the occasion of the 2010 ICGA Olympiad in Kanazawa. Only at the Olympiad I learned that mini-Shogi existed, and was actually on the program. I adapted the engine to it overnight in my hotel, and it finished second. In the 9x9 Shogi it only won two games. (But that was my goal: not lose everything.)
Regular Shogi is a highly knowledge-driven game, and state of the art in computer Shogi is to use knowledge-extraction algorithms from huge databases of human professional games. Shokidoki does none of that. It just has a simplistic evaluation written by someone who doesn't play the game at all (namely me). In mini-Shogi the other players face the same problem, though, as the game was invented as recent as 1974, and huge game databases on it do not exist. It is much more tactical than 9x9 Shogi, because of the absence of a closed rank of Pawns.
Since 2010 I have been optimizing the engine for mini-Shogi, but in general this benefits its 9x9 Shogi capabilities as well. The previous version was only slightly weaker there then the well-known Shogi engine SPEAR (scores >40% against it in 20-min games, >50% in 1-min games). Which is not nearly world top, but written by a strong Shogi player, and has an evaluation of ~200MB.
And Shokidoki also plays 6x6 (Judkins) Shogi and 7x7 Tori Shogi (the latter not being a sub-set of regular Shogi, but having completely different pieces).
Since then I