Alexander Schmidt wrote:One could say lousy Winboard implementation in Chess_v. It does not accept the positions sent by Arena.
No argument with that. My remark was referring to the inability to properly start up the executable for orthodox chess was blamed on WinBoard in general.
Though Arena uses the first FRC Winboard protocol and all other WB FRC Engines work fine with Arena
Well, in a limited sort of way. In general Arena does not handle castling rights correctly when setting up non-opening FRC positions.
No problem. Maybe one wanna fix that, would be nice and would result in more testing for the engine
HG, you did the winboard protocol implementation? You are mentioned in the credits. Ty for your efforts in chess variants
Indeed, the WinBoard patch was mine, and that also explains the remaining problems: ChessV is a program that I am not familiar with (I had not even used it before) written in a language I don't know (C++). So it is would be kind of hard for me to set up a board position when no pre-existing routine was present to do that (at least I could not find such functionality in the menus) and when I have no idea of the internal board representation used by ChessV. So I decided to simply have it ignore the WB setboard or edit command, which was good enough for my purpose (automatically playing Capablanca sub-variants). There I can always force non-opening positions by forcing in the first few moves from a PGN file, so I don really need setboard. I did not realize at the time that this is of course completely fatal in shuffle games. (None of my own engines plays FRC, so this is kind of a blind spot for me.)