eboard README ------------- eboard is a chess board interface for ICS (Internet Chess Servers) and chess engines. Currently it supports the following protocols / engines: - Generic XBoard protocol v2-compliant engines Almost full support. Engines that behave on the edge of protocol may fail. Works with GNU Chess 5. - Particular Engine Support (most of them comply with the XBoard protocol, but eboard supports additional features): - GNU Chess 4 - Crafty - Sjeng (multi-variant engine) See the eboard site for links to get them. - Crafty Full support. Tested with 18.9 thru 18.13, won't work with versions earlier than 18.x Crafty is *NOT* distributed with eboard, see Documentation/Crafty.txt for information on installing Crafty and the game books. - FICS Support most features. (about 98%) Current status is: It will allow you to play regular, suicide, crazyhouse and bughouse chess games. Wild variants are supported (tested with Fischer Random and Wild/5, but weird castlings are not directly supported and you may have to type in the castling moves by hand) It will observe games. It will examine games (but the move list may not be retrieved correctly) Supports premove and drag-and-drop. Nice, customizable, colorization of FICS output. bsetup mode not supported by the interface yet (but you can enter bsetup and add pieces with FICS commands) FICS is a no-charge service, operating since 1995, and over these years it has fostered the building of a huge community of chess enthusiasts. It's a great place to play chess and to make friends. Besides regular chess, it supports bughouse, crazyhouse, suicide, losers and several wild variants (in wild rules are the same as regular chess but the starting position isn't) FICS recently introduced thematic games - you don't get the initial moves but rather an ECO code. You can play and watch those with eboard, but PGN saving and game browsing (moving back and forth while watching) are still quite nuts. This should get fixed soon. For timeseal support see Documentation/FICS-Timeseal.txt For information on getting an account to play at FICS, visit FICS at http://www.freechess.org +==============================================================+ | | |IMPORTANT: if you get timeseal from FICS's FTP site, on Linux | | PCs you should get the i386 one, not the i586 ones.| | The i586 ones, despite the name, are linked against| | very old libraries no one has anymore, and the i386| | one is statically linked - works most anywhere. | | Most "timeseal doesn't work" complaints I get are | | due to people getting the i586 ones. | | | +==============================================================+ If you have problems with firewalls, the best approach is to use a third-party TCP port-forwarding tool. I have a nice experience with portfwd (http://portfwd.sourceforge.net), but many other packages like this exist. For automatic login scripts for FICS see Documentation/Scripts.txt Features: --------- - Scroll locking on text pane: if you scroll up in the text pane, it won't auto-scroll to the bottom when new output comes from the server. - Input history. The Up and Down arrow keys work like the bash history in the text entry box. - The board can be resized on the fly. - The piece set can be changed on the fly. - Scripting - PGN reading/writing - Seek Graph (FICS) - Multiple text panes (Windows|Detached Console) You can use, modify and redistribute eboard under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. The license is included in the COPYING file. To compile/install it: ./configure make (become root) make install For further instructions see the INSTALL file. You'll need: - the GTK+ library, version 1.2.1 (>= 1.2.6 recommended) - the Imlib 1.x library. Tested with 1.9.7, you may get it working with earlier versions, or not. Imlib must have PNG support. Notice that Imlib 1 and Imlib 2 are different libraries, eboard uses Imlib 1. - the C++ standard library (libstdc++) eboard is being developed by Felipe Bergo <bergo@seul.org>. The eboard web site is at http://eboard.sourceforge.net There is an alternative mirror for the source at ftp://ftp.seul.org/pub/chess/eboard and the project page (for bug reports, mailing list, CVS access) is http://sourceforge.net/projects/eboard Have fun!