Algebraic Notation in Engine Output (Winboard/XBoard)

[Roland Chastain]

OTOH, not being able to find the default pieces still points to a defective install, and it does seem useful to warn the user for that.

Yes, it's true. Is it possible to solve the problem, without installing XBoard?

If you have another XBoard, it is a bit strange that it doesn't find the default pieces installed for that one. Probably the other one is from the official repo, so that it installes in /usr/ instead of /usr/local/ ?

It is in /usr/games/.

Another very unessential question, isn't there a typo in "Fairy-Max 4.8O" (in XBoard window title)? Shouldn't it be "0"?

[hgm]

Well, I suppose that solving the problem by definition counts as installing XBoard. The 'make install' does nothing else as move the binary to a bin directory that should already be in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin/), and all the data files to the location XBoard expects them. Which is /usr/local/share/games/xboard/... for an install from source. I am not sure why you are hesitant to install. If it is because you want the command 'xboard' given on the command line to execute the binary from the repository (in /usr/games/) rather than the one installed from source (in /usr/local/bin/, which is normally searched first), you could do a 'sudo make install' and then just remove /usr/local/bin/xboard. Or you could move all the data files, in particular the default piece theme, to /usr/local/share/games/xboard/themes/.

In principle you could also build XBoard giving a parameter datadir=... to the Makefile, which would change the location where the XBoard binary expects the data files. But I have never tried that.

[Roland Chastain]

Thank you for all these informations.

[OliverBr]

Polyglot translates PVs to SAN.

You can make WinBoard/XBoard translate PVs to SAN through the options -fSAN / -sSAN on the command line (or -fSAN added as additional GUI option on the engine's line in the Engine List). I see that the XBoard Load New Engine dialogs don't offer a text entry for 'Special GUI options', as WinBoard does.

For XBoard engines that already print the PV as SAN, using the option would just waste CPU time in the GUI.

There is an other issue when using option "-fSAN" while playing positions of a test-suites. When using this option many correct moves are considered wrong (not all, though), even now they look identical like in the epd-file. I have to remove the "-fSAN" option in order to work it well.

This is the command to play such test-suite:

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./XBoard -epd -lpf ../tests/ecmgcp.epd -lpi -1 -mg 183

Position 170 as example, Bxh7+ is found very quick and easily by the engine, but Xboard considers it wrong when using "-fSAN" Option:

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4rrk1/2q1bppp/p2p4/1p1Pn3/3B1R2/P2B2Q1/1PP3PP/5R1K w - - bm Bxh7+