WinBoard 4.5.0 beta: testers wanted

[hgm]

Due to a foul up the sources of XBoard/WinBoard development brach ("master") at GNU Savannah have been completely broken for some time. Last night's commits should have fixed this, though, and we want to release it as 4.5.0 soon. In view of the recent trouble, some more testing would be a good idea.

I prepared a pre-configured WinBoard binary package for beta testing, which should be unzipped as C:\WinBoard-4.5.0\, (so that all included shortcuts will work), and contains a few sample engines, Polyglot and other auxiliary programs. I hope some people would like to give it a try. It can be downloaded from:

http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.5.beta.zip

[hgm]

Note that a description of the new features (compared to 4.4.x) can be found at:

http://hgm.nubati.net/news.4.5.0.html

[Peter Marriott]

Thanks!

I really like the option for an automatic first white or black move.
Would it be possible to set a fixed time per move with the engine playing on the internet?

[hgm]

When playing on the internet, the Internet Chess Server determines the time control, and WinBoard just displays what the server says. And I don't believe tat there are any servers that support fixed time per move.

[Jim Ablett]

I think it's astounding the amount of time and effort Harm has put it updating and improving Winboard.
The work involved in just creating that 'new features' web page alone as me shaking my head in amazement.

http://hgm.nubati.net/news.4.5.0.html

Jim.

[Mithu]

I hope some people would like to give it a try.

I like the new Winboard... Thank you Mr.Muller.

And a neat thing I noticed is that the windows are easily movable/dock-able.

But the icing on the cake is the eval graph window which follows the board window faithfully, and also when the board is re-sized.

All in all a NEAT JOB.

[hgm]

When making screenshots I ran into a terrible bug, though: it seems to crash everytime I load a game file with more than one game in it.

I am trying to debug that now.

[bhandelman]

I think it's astounding the amount of time and effort Harm has put it updating and improving Winboard.
The work involved in just creating that 'new features' web page alone as me shaking my head in amazement.

http://hgm.nubati.net/news.4.5.0.html

Jim.

I agree 100%. The amount of work and effort put into Winboard has been great. Adding Xiangqi alone made me give it another shot after nearly 10 years of not using it. I'm glad I did, so many of the new features have been great. I am very excited about the change to how comments are handled, I will be messing with it quite a bit when I get home.

[hgm]

OK, I traced the change that broke it, and undid it. Now the gamelist seems to work as ever. (Something still smells rotten though: the change in itself could not have possibly caused an error. A way too large array must have been hiding an error, catching some out-of-bound accesses elsewhere in an unused part, so that making it smaller caused stack smashing. But for now I keep the array at its too large size.)

The fixed version is at the same link, distinguishable from the previous one because the version number of WinBoard is now 4.20101111.

[Michel]

Actually the gamelist never completely worked for me. For large gamefiles (containing the 1000's of games) the gamelist seems to be always truncated.

This is xboard.