Software

Hi

Maybe there is a hundred post before about this, but I cant find it. I was for many years a fan of chessmaster, but lost my program. So I have been looking for a new one. 

I have found arena, and tried to import Stockfish, but I dont like the layout. I think the program is not so easy to use to analyse, train, play etc.. Any one who has suggestions? Freeware or maybe something else... 

LucasChess

http://www-lucaschess.rhcloud.com/

Lots of features and a vast amount of preinstalled engines.

Weren't you the one who just turned me onto LucasChess the other day? Anyway, yeah - I can vouch for this program. Safe download, absolutely fantastic features. 

Thanks. But 960 is not a part of this software?

Any other suggestions?

If you must have Chess960 as an option, the free choices I know about are:

Winboard:  http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=51528

(Just look for the link for the 4.8.0 installer.)

ChessGUI:  http://www.chess.hylogic.de/

The disadvantages of these two programs are that you'll probably want to install more engines into the GUIs, since they don't have many to begin with, and ChessGUI doesn't have the best Help file in the world. (If you add engines to these GUIs, you'll have to make sure that the engines are Chess960 compatible. See Post #6 below.)

Arena is another free choice, but it doesn't correctly implement Chess960 castling rules; So I don't recommend Arena for playing Chess960.

Regarding commercial solutions, there's always the Shredder GUI:  http://www.shredderchess.com/

There might be other commercial GUIs that allow Chess960, but I don't know what they might be.

Here are a few links to some engines that are Chess960 compatible and that can be "dumbed down". (Listed in order of my preference)


Ufim 8.02
http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/Ufim.html

Tornado 6.0 (64-bit only)

http://chessengines.blogspot.de/2014/10/tornado-60-uci-chess-engine-new-version.html

Stockfish 6
http://stockfishchess.org/download/


Hamsters 0.7.1
https://web.archive.org/web/20130127073337/http://www.ascotti.org/programming/chess/hamsters.htm

(Pay special attention to the notice on the Hamsters download page concerning adding a required command to the command line.)

Just a quick update on the free GUIs for playing Chess960 (FRC).

Either one worked for me (Winboard or ChessGUI) if I just wanted to play games against an FRC engine, or even if I wanted to play an engine match between two FRC engines.

However, when I tried to play an engine tournament with more than two FRC engines, I wasn't able to do it reliably with Winboard. (It would run for about 6 games or so and then crash.) I don't know if the problem was with Winboard or me. (I was using an older Winboard version, 4.7.3.)

I was able to run an FRC engine tournament in ChessGUI with weakened versions of the four engines I listed, once I figured out a few eccentricities of FRC engine installation.

When installing an engine, there's a tab labeled "Chess Variants". In the box with the five castling choices, I had to check the "AHah_KxR" selection. Also, I had to make sure the "Chess960 (FRC)" box was checked.

I also discovered that I had to install one engine, then click on "Save engine options", then click on "Quit", before I could install a second engine. This procedure also applies to editing engines. In other words, if I tried to edit two or more engines and then click on "Save engine options" and "Quit", the castling choice that I had checked would change to a different choice.

Other than those glitches, ChessGUI worked great.

***Bonus pic of a ChessGUI FRC game -

I do have one minor update to mention. When running Stockfish 6 at level 0 in the ChessGUI interface, the engine occasionally lost games on time. Changing the engine's "move overhead" setting from the default of 30 to 2500 seemed to solve the problem. (In ChessGUI, it's in the "Eng Options 2" tab, then "Edit Engine parameters", then the "Page 1" tab.)

And while you're tweaking settings, you might as well change one more ChessGUI setting: In the "Miscellaneous" menu, "Preferences", "GUI 1" tab, check the "Parse UCI Junk" setting. (This will also reduce/eliminate time losses with some UCI engines.)

I am a bit worried about WinBoard not working for you. What exactly do you mean by 'crash'? Did WinBoard report a fatal error in a popup, or did you get such a popup from Windows (like "winboard.exe is no longer working...")? Or did the tourney just hang without new games being started?

I believe it was the latter case (the winboard no longer working popup). I think I set the engines up with polyglot adapters...not sure I did it right.

If you don't mind, maybe I can throw a few questions at you?

Should I be able to set up an FRC tourney with more than two engines in version 4.7.3? And if so, do I have to install the engines with polyglot adapters, or should they work with just direct WB or UCI installs? And if it should work without polyglot adapters, do I somehow have to tell the engines to operate in FRC mode?

http://www.playwitharena.com

No no no...Read Post #5. 

@HGMuller, I tried a new FRC tourney in Winboard 4.7.3 with 4 engines, without any polyglot adapters. It worked for 8 games, then I got the same error message.

The original reason why I thought I needed polyglot adapters was that I thought I needed to specifically tell each engine to run in FRC mode. However, it seems that if you first choose "File...New Variant...FRC" before going into "Options...Tournament", Winboard is smart enough to tell the engines to operate in FRC mode.

I've been thinking of upgrading to the latest Windows, so I think I'll just uninstall ver 4.7.3, install ver 4.8.0b, and try again.

I do have one last problem that you might be able to help me with. I was trying to install several identical copies of the same engine, the only difference being the strength settings (and a slight difference in the nickname). However, all of these copies appear to use the same ini file located in the "_PG" folder, and this ini file contains the strength setting. So, all of these copies end up using the same strength setting, which is not what I want to do. Is there a way to get around this problem?

Having different settings of the same UCI engine is indeed troublesome. This is because the name of the file that stores the settings in the _PG folder is derived from the name the engine reports at startup. So even making a renamed duplicate of the engine .exe would not help.

So the only way this is currently possible is to explicitly invoke Polyglot for the versions with altered settings. The easiest way to do this is start the version you installed the normal way (i.e. ticking the UCI checkbox in the Load Engine dialog), open the Engine Settings dialog for it, alter the settings the way you want, alter the name of the Polyglot Settings File in that dialog, (to .\_PG\newsettings.ini, say), and press Polyglot Save. This creates the necessary file with the new settings without overwriting the old one.

The problem is then to install an engine that will use that settings file, as there is no way WinBoard could guess what name you used to save these altered settings. So in the Load Engine dialog you should then type "polyglot" for the Engine .exe, "_PG/newsettings.ini" as 'command-line parameters', and specify a Nickname (to prevent it will appear in the menu or selection list as 'polyglot'), and NOT tick the UCI checkbox (as Polyglot is a WB engine!).

I admit this is not very elegant. I guess a better method would be to have WinBoard use the 'nickname' the user specifies in the Load Engine dialog to derive a filename from, that it would then pass to Polyglot as engine settings file. Rather than let Polyglot derive the name of this file from the engine name (as it does by default).

It might even be possible to configure the existing WinBoard and Polyglot versions to do this; I would have to experiment a bit to make sure of this. In the worst case it would need a small change in Polyglot.

Thanks for the advice on running multiple copies of the same engine. If I ever get this bigger "crash" problem solved, I'll probably work on the smaller problem.

I completely uninstalled the old 4.7.3 version of Winboard; Even the ini files in my roaming folder, both admin and limited user. I then installed Winboard 4.8.0b and reinstalled engines.

Unfortunately, I still get the "winboard no longer working" popup, both during FRC and normal tournaments. It never stops in the middle of a game; It always stops after a game is finished.

I didn't install Winboard in the normal "C:\Program Files (x86)" folder; I installed it in a custom folder named "C:\Program Files (32-bit custom folder)". Also, I run Winboard as a limited user. Do either of those factors matter?

Maybe I have a setting wrong somewhere, I don't know. I did record a debug file for both an FRC and normal tournament, if that becomes necessary. The saga continues...

There's one clue that I've noticed. With a four-engine tournament, if I set the "Games per Match / Pairing" setting to 2, I'll get the "winboard no longer working" popup after 4 games. However, if I set the "Games per Match / Pairing" setting to 1, I'll get the popup message after 2 games. I don't know what that means, though.

Just for fun, here are some results from the weak engine FRC tournament in ChessGUI. The elo values were calculated using Bayeselo. Note that I arbitrarily assigned a reference elo of 1000 to the Hamsters engine. (In Firefox, you can right-click on the image, then choose "View image".)

How does that work? Do the engines have "caps" for certain characteristics?

Yeah, at the lower levels, the engine usually limits the nodes/second searched and also introduces some randomness in the evaluation function. Of course, every programmer will do it a bit differently.

Interesting...