Zillions of Games and WinBoard

[hgm]

I don't have Zillions of Games, but I heard rumour that there exists an adapter for it that allows it to play under WinBoard. Now that WinBoard_F allows WinBoard to handle many more variants than before (variants which Zillions can all play, presumably), I am curious to know if this WinBoard adapter would be automatically capable of letting Zillions play these additional variants under WinBoard as well.

Is there anyone who knows something about this?

[Eizenhammer]

I don't have Zillions of Games, but I heard rumour that there exists an adapter for it that allows it to play under WinBoard. Now that WinBoard_F allows WinBoard to handle many more variants than before (variants which Zillions can all play, presumably), I am curious to know if this WinBoard adapter would be automatically capable of letting Zillions play these additional variants under WinBoard as well.

Is there anyone who knows something about this?

Hello,

Do you mean this
http://www.geocities.com/andreas_kaufma ... dapter.htm
adapter?
I have not tried it, just a quick hint.

regards
Peter

[hgm]

OK, thanks for the link.

This adapter seems to do exactly the opposite of what I was looking for: using Zillions as GUI with a WinBoard engine. I wanted to use WinBoard as a GUI and Zillions as an engine, to make Zillions play other WB engines.

Perhaps this adapter can make Zillions play against WB engines (rather than act as a GUI for them) as well, without the help of WinBoard. That would solve my problem, if the adapter also understood 10x8 Chess.

I guess I just misunderstood, and that the thing I was originally looking for does not exst.

[mjlef]

Hi,

I am a co-author of Zillions of Games. Zillions supports DLLs as engine "drop ins". So it can use an external engine to calculate moves, to be displayed in the Windows GUI. Unfortunately, it does not work the other way (outputting calculated moves to an external program). It would be possible for us to write something to do that, but I do not know if there would be a big enough demand to do that.

Mark

[hgm]

OK, thanks.

Well, never mind, then. I only asked because I thought the thing already existed, but what existed was apparently the reverse from what I expected.

So there is apparently no way to engage Zillions in automatic play against other engines that happen to play the same game as Zillions was configured for. I am not sure there would be any demand for it either, I don't even have a Zillions. If it existed, I would have been interested to have someone play a couple of hundred Gothic Chess games of Zillions against some other engines, for setting up a rating list.

[mjlef]

Zillions does support DIrectX play, and even play via the Internet (such as through MSN Messenger). You you made your program speak DirectPlay, it could feed moves to Zillions and get back moves that way. The basic move string format is identical to the save game format. Some people use the ZSG (Zillions Save Game) format to exchange games (correspondance games), so another idea would be to use a freeware program to feed key presses to Zillions to load a game, start it thinking, save the game then repeat.

Of course, game play will never be as good as a well written stand alone program.

Mark

[hgm]

OK, thanks for the suggestions.

And don't worry: There are plenty of stand-alone programs that are not so well written. In normal Chess stand-alone programs have ratings all the way from 0 to nearly 3000.