I recommend Arena. It's free here on Chess.com to download and try, too.
http://www.chess.com/download/view/arena-30
English language pack for the GUI, if you need it:
http://www.chess.com/download/view/arena-3-englishlng
Need something other than Winboard please?
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*reads thread .. thoroughly Confuseled .. but enjoying none the less .. (munch munch)*
Stonefaces wrote:
There'r no problems to use Houdini in Winboard, can learn a lot by workin in those files(read all files those are included also). It let in Arena Not play his Polyglot performance.bin if i enter it in the polyglot.ini and specify it in the ini box at Engines. With Stockfish it worked but it'd not read the book file i want(&correctly fill in). And for edit .bin files, then only i use the SCID, for the rest Arena isn't bad, but i don't use the arena opening books for my Houdini engines. By the way i create my self Polyglot .bin opening books now i've find out how to do it with Scid. Only to find out now how i can add Pgn files at my .bin book file, that's all guys !
What he said.....
Note that the latest WinBoard (from http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.5TM.exe ) Also has a build-in edit function for Polyglot books.. It also is more user-friendly for installing engines; you can simply use the Load Engine dialog to browse to your engine file, tick the checkbox to tell it is UCI (in case of Houdini), and that would be it. After that yyou can simply select it from the combobox.
Jun 10, 2011
0
#7
while it's true, winboard isn't exactly a "point and click" user friendly interface. i've been into engines and GUIs for a long time, and likely recommend arena because it's free and it's decently easy to use. any time you have a question, just hit the F1 key and type in your problem.
www.playwitharena.com for download. comes with some nice engines, too.
Yes, it is a beta version. I made it myself. (hgm.nubati.net is my website.)
You can find info on recent WinBoard development on http://hgm.nubati.net/news.html .
Indeed, it edits the book in the Common Engine menus. What else did you expect? The Engine books are not accessible to it; only the engine knows what they are and where to find them. They might even have a format specific for the engine (e.g. Crafty's book). With the 'Engine Menu' (I suppose you mean the 'Engine #1/2 Settings' dialogs), you communicate directly with the engine, WinBoard knows nothing about it. (And even if it did, there are two engines. So which book should it apply to, then?)
The idea is that you tell WinBoard the name of the book you want to edit (in the Common Engine dialog), and then edit it. This has nothing to do with it being a beta. It will still be that way 10 years after we released it as stable version...
That the edit button is grayed out is because you are already in Edit mode. I don't know why, but WinBoard has always done it that way. (Look, for instance, at the Comment or Tags dialogs the stable version has. If their display is read-only, (when they popped up spontaneously) the Edit button is active, and as soon as you press it, it gets grayed out, because you don't need to press it anymore. If you use the Edit Tags or Edit Comment menu item, it directly pops up the windows in editable mode, with the button grayed out. To save the edited results, you just have to press 'OK'. Again, this is by design, and has nothing to do with it being a beta version.
I agree that the need for this edit button is unclear; In fact, in the corresponding XBoard beta, I already redesigned all these dialogs to be always editable, without Edit button, and gave them a 'Save Changes' button in stead, so you can save the changes without closing the dialog. Perhaps I will do the same in a future WinBoard beta.
Note that it is not only the Load Engine dialog that is new; it also has a Tournament Options dialog that you can use to run tournaments with more than two engines. (Which can be run by multiple WinBoard instances in parallel, by just clicking the tourney file.)
Indeed, WinBoard has this problem of not being easy to downgrade to a previous version that has fewer options. You have to throw away the winboard.ini file made by the newer version, or remove the offending options from it (if you want to keep your other settings) with some text editor like NotePad.
The ini file is not overwritten during install (to prevent overwriting your saved settings from a previous version; some people have longe engine lists in there, and don't want to lose them when they upgrade).
The winboard.ini file with the saved settings (containing the offending option) is in the AppData (sometimes called Application Data) folder in your private Documents and Settings (C:/Documents and Settings//Application Data in my Win2k system). Problem, however, is that on some Windows versions this is a hidden folder. So be sure to let Windows also list hidden files/folders (Tools -> Folder-Options -> View -> Show Hidden Files and Folders in the Windows explorer).
If you cannot find it, an emergency recovery method woud be to edit the winboard.ini in your WinBoard folder, and replace the last two options /settingsFile and /saveSettingsFile to some other filename. Then a virgin settings file with that new name will be created.
Perhaps I should make the WinBoard beta less allergic to non-existing options. E.g. just cause an error popup, warning the user, but further ignore it. This won't help you to downgrade to an older version, though.
Indeed, the un-install doesn't remove the winboard.ini file in the AppData folder. I guess it should. (Not sure how I could make it do that, however, because it has a different pathname for each user, and all users that will have used WinBoard will have their own winboard.ini there, which would all have to be deleted. I don't install anything there directly; it is just WinBoard that creates it there the first time you run it and save settings. But I will look into it.)
Are you sure you looked in the correct AppData folder? Each user has its own, and there also are AppData folders for 'Administrator' and 'Default User' (on my Win2k, at least). You should look for a file, not a folder. It must be in one of those. To make absolutely sure, you could look in the winboard.ini file in the WinBoard folder (where you can get through the 'WinBoard Files' menu entry of 4.5.2). This is the 'master settings file'. The last lines of that file should be:
;
; Here we redirect the saving to another file (specific for the user)
;
/saveSettingsFile=%APPDATA%\winboard.ini
/settingsFile=%APPDATA%\winboard.ini
;
; Any setting after this will make the option overrule the saved one
;
The %APPDATA% instructs WinBoard to save and read the settings from the current user's AppData folder. Like I wrote, you could solve the problem by altering those two lines in that winboard.ini file in your WinBoard folder, winboard.ini into something else, like:
/saveSettingsFile=%APPDATA%\settings.ini
/settingsFile=%APPDATA%\settings.ini
WinBoard would then no longer use any winboard.ini file in your AppData folder to read the settings from, but a settings.ini folder in stead. (Which, because it does not exist yet on your system, will be created.) It would be better to locate the winboard.ini folder, though. It must be somewhere, otherwise WinBoard could not complain about its contents...
Jun 11, 2011
0
#12
In case none of the freeware suggested works for you (which I think is highly unlikely that none of it will) you can always buy a dirt-cheap outdated program such as Fritz 10 for $5.00 (at amazon) I've loaded Firebird, Stockfish & Houdini into Fritz 12 with the greatest of ease and I'm pretty sure the procedure is exactly the same in Fritz 10.
I have tried the graphical user interface "Winboard" to accompany my Houdini engine (since Houdini appears to be nothing but a command line thing), but honestly it feels like I need to have taken a dozen or so programming classes just to get the two working together.
Anybody know of any other, more user friendly GUI's that work well with Houdini?