Method to play against a Windows engine under Linux with XBoard

[Roland Chastain]

Hello everybody!

I was sad that there is no Linux version of Rebel 16.2, so I tried to run it with wine and I saw that it worked. After that I said to myself, why not try in XBoard? And it works too!

In case someone is interested, here is how I did.

I created a script named rebel16.sh with the following content:

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#!/usr/bin/sh
wine Rebel-16.2.exe

And another script, xboard.sh:

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#!/usr/bin/sh

SCRIPT=`realpath $0`
SCRIPTPATH=`dirname $SCRIPT`

xboard \
-size small \
-debug -debugfile xboard.debug \
-fcp $SCRIPTPATH/rebel16.sh -fd $SCRIPTPATH -fUCI

And then I open a terminal and type:

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chmod a+x rebel16.sh
chmod a+x xboard.sh
./xboard.sh

And I could play a game versus Rebel.



Thank you wine, thank you XBoard and thank you UCI2WB!

[chrjly]

Thank you for this trick. I was running Winboard under wine to make my program play against a windows program before.
I think that you can also add the entry: "rebel 16" -fcp rebel16.sh -fd <path of script> -fUCI
into the engine list of XBoard.

Christophe
author of KnightX

[Roland Chastain]

I think that you can also add the entry: "rebel 16" -fcp rebel16.sh -fd <path of script> -fUCI

Yes it works. But I had to provide a full path for both parameters.

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"Rebel 16.2" -fcp "/home/roland/Applications/moteurs/rebel/162/rebel16.sh" -fd "/home/roland/Applications/moteurs/rebel/162/" -fn "Rebel 16.2" -fUCI

I believe I need to do that for all UCI engines.

[hgm]

In principle that is not needed, but you should make sure that the engine command is prefixed by ./ in Linux if you want to execute it in a specified directory. The way it works is that XBoard (or UCI2WB) changes to the mentioned -fd before issuing the -fcp as a command.

[Roland Chastain]

Yes, I did as you said and it works. Thanks.