I was very surprised to see that, contrary to Delphi and FreePascal, C++ has no representation of binary numbers, which doesn't help when you manipulate bitboards.
So I put together in twenty minutes a crude tool to help me in the process by letting me edit bitboards and convert them into hex and dec representations.
As it might be of use to other programmers, and as I don't remember I ever saw such a tool, I decided to put it in the public domain. Here it is.
(The large window is due to the fact that I designed it on OSX, where the default police was bigger).
You can download it here: http://julien.marcel.free.fr/public/BbHelper.rarBitboards Helper is a small and crude tool designed to help chess engines programmers with bitboards.
You can:
- edit each individual bit of the board
- edit a whole rank or column
- clear/set/invert the whole board
The corresponding value in binary, hexadecimal and decimal notations is updated in real time.
This tool is free of charge and may be freely distributed, providing you keep this readme file intact and in the archive.
Feel free to contact me for any suggestion of improvement at jul_marcel at hotmail dot com.
/Julien MARCEL
History:
2011-05-11 : First version