What GUI you use and why?

[bastiball]

OK, I remember that disaster. And took measures in the uninstaller script so that this could never happen again, always leaving the root directory of the install when there was unexpected other stuff in it.

I might give it another try. Please give me the download link to that safe WinBoard installer version. Or shall I use WinBoard AA in zip form?

I think this is it:
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.8.beta.zip

[Gabor Szots]

I think this is it:
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.8.beta.zip

I don't think so. We are talking about an installer.

[GONeill]

I think this is it:
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.8.beta.zip

I don't think so. We are talking about an installer.

That's one of the problems with Winboard. An 11 year old Beta seems to be the latest version and the web page doesn't seem to have been updated in a decade or so.

[Guenther]

I think this is it:
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.8.beta.zip

I don't think so. We are talking about an installer.

That's one of the problems with Winboard. An 11 year old Beta seems to be the latest version and the web page doesn't seem to have been updated in a decade or so.

Well I compiled a modded win version in April 2020 and made it available in 2021-12 as 4.91x, which should work out of the box,
with a few pre-installed engines as examples. No installer! IIRC it might demand to 'install' the delivered font (in case it is not available)
to use the board theme it comes with, otherwise just change the board theme to anything you want.

The mods were two digits time precision in saved to pgn time and a much higher number of engines allowed to use/display.
I don't remember more now ;-)

It's since then on my downloads site.

[hgm]

The official dowload page for WinBoard is at http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewt ... 19&t=51528 , and has a link to the complete binary install (through an installer) conatining all supporting software (UCI adapters, timeseal, a simple opening book...). The beta version mentioned above was released earlier as a single (zipped) WinBoard executable in the development leading up to this release. Which is from Oct 24, 2014, so not nearly 11 years old.

I never released any WinBoard 4.9 version. XBoard 4.9.0 and 4.9.1 were released in 2016. (See the official GNU XBoard home page at https://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/ .) I never bothered to release the corresponding WinBoard, because the new developments were almost exclusively in the XBoard front end.

Since then there have been some WinBoard developments, mainly concerning the piece graphics; in particular it was made possible to use external bitmaps with transparency, so that it became possible to use anti-aliased piece images. This beta version is available as a 'portable install', a rather minimal package with WinBoard and some indispensible support programs that only has to be unzipped. This is at http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-AA.zip . In this package WinBoard is also configured to use UCI2WB as UCI adapter rather than Polyglot. I am not 100% sure yet whether this was a good idea, but hey, it was an experimental version. And of course it is not that difficult to reconfigure it. The latest version is from Jan 31, 2021.

Like Guenther mentions, some things that work automatically in an installer would have to be done by hand if you just unzip. In particular putting (chess) fonts in the directory they belong (so I did not even include any fonts in the WinBoard-AA package), and associating file types like PGN, FEN, TRN or XOP to winboard.exe. Although the need to make such associations has deminished now that you can simply drag such files onto the winboard.exe icon to launch WinBoard on them.

I never felt much pressure to make an official release out of this, as there weren't any known WinBoard bugs that needed fixing, there were no ideas for major new features, so developments were mostly aimed at extending or improving variant support.