Release of Monchester 1.0.2 will be in couple of weeks, so it can be even more stable and constant-strength sparring partner for engines starting from scratch, best to take for spin after playtesting against Ram 2.0 and NEG 1.3b reveals no more bugs and/or becomes too easy. Its Lichess blitz rating has stabilized, hovering around ~1550, standard rating deviances falling in the range with most players.
Besides even more robustness, likely additions for 1.0.2 will be:
- XBoard analysis mode support to experiment with cross-platform input status polling snippets given earlier by HGM and thus have some feature testing before forward-merging it for Monchester 2.0.
- Slightly more humane behaviour in 3-piece endgames (implies avoiding checkmate for longer or giving it faster).
- There is one unresolved report about CECP engine autodetection not working in Arena for Monchester -- should I discover or receive input to remedy that situation, this will also be addressed in 1.0.2.