GNU Chess 4

This document discusses the issues related to running the
GNU Chess 4.x engine together with eboard.

Felipe Bergo <bergo@seul.org>

1. What is GNU Chess 4 ?
2. Getting GNU Chess 4
3. Compiling and installing
4. Playing

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1. What is GNU Chess 4 ?

GNU Chess 4 is a Free Software chess engine, that
can be modified under the terms of the GNU General
Public License.

It is the predecessor of GNU Chess 5 and newer
versions, but the 5.0 quite screwed it up.
Unless you are a very strong player, the excess
bloat and weirdness of the 5.0 and later versions
will do you more harm than good.

2. Getting GNU Chess 4

You may be able to find GNU Chess 4.x in some GNU FTP
mirrors or in old source code CDs of operating system
distributions. I'm keeping the last GNU Chess 4 version,
4.0pl80 in eboard's anonymous FTP directory at

ftp://eboard.sourceforge.net/pub/engines


3. Compiling and Installing

Directions about installing are in the src/README and
src/INSTALL files. More likely you'll just

cd src
./configure
make
(become root)
make install


4. Playing

The 'gnuchessx' binary must be in the PATH.
The book location is defined in compile time, if you
didn't change the prefix, it'll be
/usr/local/lib/gnuchess.data

To play against GNU Chess 4, use the
"Peer -> Play against Engine -> GNU Chess 4" command.

gnuchessx will be run without change to the
current directory. If you want to change
bookfile location, recompile GNU Chess.