PyInbetween: connecting UCI engines with commands like ssh

[FelixKling]

Hi everyone,

I just released a simple tool for connecting chess engines via an arbitrary command (like remote engines using ssh), supporting filtering and setting options with a config file.
Maybe someone could give it a try, it is meant to replace the old "inbetween.exe" that is around for quite some time.

You can download it from https://codeberg.org/FelixKling/py_inbetween

[Roland Chastain]

Hi!

Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

By the way, I am working on a similar project:

https://gitlab.com/rchastain/substitute
forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=81201

Is it possible to use directly the Python script, or is mandatory to compile it? How do you compile it?

What I would like to do is a multiplatform Wb2UCI adapter. For now I am experimenting. I have two projects, one in Pascal and another in C.

[hgm]

I always use connect.exe for that. Which can be launched both as a server on the host machine, and run as a client to connect to it in a transparent way.

I thought that for running engines remotely through ssh you could simply make ssh (with the proper arguments) the engine command.

[FelixKling]

Interesting, I also found https://gitlab.com/matt-plays-chess/ssh-engine/, which does something similar.
No, of course, you don't need to compile it, but I used pyinstaller to create executables, because most users won't want to install Python + dependencies (pyyaml).

I don't know about connect.exe, but the point is that you want to be able to modify the communication between GUI and engine. For instance, Chessbase does not like changes of the id name string, sets the processors according to the "local" number of CPUs (not the remote computer's) and setting the endgame tablebases path for a Linux machine in Chessbase GUI sounds difficult, too. So basically yes, you just need the connection command, but there are some details for practical usage.