Here's the readme, with what it does and what's new :
And a screenshot:Bitboards' Little Helper is a small tool designed to help chess engines programmers with bitboards.
You can:
- edit each individual bit of the board
- edit a whole rank or column (by clicking its number or letter)
- clear/set/invert the whole board
- copy a bitboard into another one (hence using a bitboard as a backup of the otehr one)
- execute boolean operations between the two first bitboards
- edit, copy and paste from/to the conversion textfields
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:
--------
2011-05-12 : Second version
Changes:
- added two bitboards, for a total of 3, the 3rd one displaying the results of operations on the other ones
- added boolean operations : and, and not, or, xor
- the conversion labels have been replaced with textfields that you can edit and copy/paste from/to
- added two more "modes" for the lsb/msb orientation of your bitboards
- slightly changed the name
2011-05-11 : First version
Hopefully it will prove as useful to you as it is for me.
You can download it here: http://julien.marcel.free.fr/public/BLH_Win.rar
Now for some replies to the previous thread:
Nope, I added your two modes: the one you mistakenly described, and the one you really use. As it was too late to remove the mistaken one now that I had coded it all, I decided to let it into BLH (as the second mode). Your mode will be the third one.Giorgio Medeot wrote:Edit: Oh, well, it seems I will have to beat my laziness, in the end, as I put the LSB on a8...
1) sadly, Windows' themes doesn't allow to change the color of the buttons. I think I could bypass this limitation by deriving my own button class, but that would be too much a big job for such a small project.sje wrote: 1) The buttons on the board display could use color instead of 0/1 digit labels. Say, dark gray for on/1 and light gray for off/0. OR maybe use both digit and color at the same time.
2) Have three bitboard displays and an operator button array. The user can set the entries in the first two bitboards, select an operator button (or/and/xor/comp-and/shift/etc.), and then see the result in the third bitboard.
2) done.
I toyed a bit with this idea, as this screenshot shows :sje wrote:Also, although this would require a lot of work, the application could accept a FEN string and allow the user to select bitboard displays of various occupancy and attack bitboards.
but I wasn't satisfied with how bloated my "small" tool would become, plus it really didn't match my needs. That wouldn't be too much work, actually, as I yet have a fen parser in Prédateur and could also copy/paste its move generator code. Still, I just removed this functionality to go back to my own vision of the ideal tool.