Dabbaba 0.98 with Winboard support available

[Jim Ablett]

Chess Engine: Dabbaba 0.98wb JA (winboard version)
Author : Jens B‘k Nielsen
Website : http://www.jens-musik.dk/dabbaba.htm


Dabbaba 0.98wb JA
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1. Winboard protocol 2 support.
2. Added 'resign' function.
3. New logo.


Instructions:
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Just install as a standard winboard chess engine.
No extra command line switches needed.

Info:
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Here is Dabbaba 0.98wb by Jens B'K Nielsen.
Dabbaba (Arabic meaning 'war machine') is now a winboard chess engine.
Originally written in 1993, the last update/release of original (dos) Dabbaba was Nov 06 1998.

Dabbaba original also supports variants, but they are not
to my knowledge variants supported by winboard, so my winboard
version is 'standard chess' only. (also I'm not that interested
in variants, and it would be a lot more work to implement!)
I estimate it's strength around Tscp level.

Things still to do:
------------------
1. Enable ponder. Original Dabbaba supports ponder, but it is disabled in
this version until I can make work with winboard.
2. Fix the 'force command'. I've found it hard to implement the winboard
'force' command so for now it is disabled. That means using chess gui
opening books won't work at the moment.
3. Clean the pv output up. There's a lot of unneeded stuff being spat out.
4. Make time allocation more accurate.

Available from my homepage.

Have fun,
Jim Ablett.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Just a little correction master Jim:
Dabbaba means Tank in arabic

[Dann Corbit]

Thanks for all the effort you put into this.
It not only makes for a nice trip down memory lane, but it also preserves the history of these engines. Even old engines have interesting ideas in them also.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Thanks for all the effort you put into this.
It not only makes for a nice trip down memory lane, but it also preserves the history of these engines. Even old engines have interesting ideas in them also.

I agree all the way long

[ArmoredGuns]

Hi Jim,

Thanks alot for these engines, but I have one suggestion though. Can you please fix the NPS counter when Dabbaba is under Fritz GUI (using wb2uci)?

This also happens with Chenard, it displays a wrong NPS number.

It's very interesting to see how many positions per second they can calculate on today's hardware compared to what they used in their origin days (Pentium II 233Mhz for Dabbaba).

[Jim Ablett]

New version of Dabbaba available on my homepage.

what's new:

1. Experimental variant support (currently 'Knightmate+Fairy')
You will need to use HG Muller's 'Winboard-F' gui for this.
2. Improved time-allocation.
3. Adjustments to evaluation.

Jim.

[swami]

Thanks a lot, Jim for all the good work, What is its strength?

[Jim Ablett]

Thanks a lot, Jim for all the good work, What is its strength?

It's another TSCP class engine, though it does sometimes have moments of brilliance, or perhaps luck is a better word.

Dabbaba can now also play Knightmate chess against Fairy-Max using Winboard-F which is great fun to watch.
Knightmate is the variant where you start with a Knight on the King square, and Kings on the Knight squares
which can be captured and the object is to mate the Knight.

Jim.

[hgm]

Because of this, I alreay discovered a bug in WinBoard_F in Knightmate: it did not recognize the moves e1c1 and e1g1 of th Unicorn as castlings, and hence did not move the Rook in the display. After that, you played with an invisible Rook!

The winboard.exe that fixes this is at

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/alpha.tst

[Jim Ablett]

Because of this, I alreay discovered a bug in WinBoard_F in Knightmate: it did not recognize the moves e1c1 and e1g1 of th Unicorn as castlings, and hence did not move the Rook in the display. After that, you played with an invisible Rook!

The winboard.exe that fixes this is at

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/alpha.tst

That's great Harm. I think Fairy-Max is very happy now to have a non-human to play Knightmate against.
Actually Fairy-Max is bit too strong for Dabbaba at this and wins most games.
Just an extra note to anyone downloading 'alpha.tst' and not knowing what to do with it - rename the extension from .tst to .exe.
Now if only I could get Dababba to play Gothic, that would be something...!

Jim.