scid vs pc usage question about Fisher Random

[chesskobra]

I am playing a correspondence game in FRC on lichess, and I like to keep a local copy of the game in scid vs pc. When the game began, I set up the initial position, and then went on adding moves as the game progressed. But now my opponent has castled, and I am not able to make the move in my local copy. I guess somewhere I have to specify that it is an FRC game. How should I do it?

[Roland Chastain]

Hello!

Unless I am mistaken, Scid vs PC doesn't look to support FRC. You will have to use another software. I know that XBoard/WinBoard supports FRC. And also ChessX.

Maybe you should specify your OS, so that other can suggest other softwares.

[chesskobra]

I use linux, and have xboard installed also. How should I do it? I simply want to create a pgn of my correspondence games, update it whenever a move is made by me or my opponent, use a gui as analysis board, move around pieces, add variations to the game, and so on. Could you explain the flow? I like xboard a lot, so if I could figure out a simple flow with it, I would be happy.

I tried the following. Using a text editor I created a file game.pgn with a single empty game (i.e., the 7 standard tags + Variant, SetUp and FEN tags, I copied the FEN of an FRC game, but no moves). There are a couple of minor issues.

When I load the file game.pgn in xboard (File -> Load Game), it says variant fisherrandom not supported by fairy-max 5.0b. Moreover, it loaded a random position, not the one in my pgn. I am not sure if that is because fairymax is a default engine in xboard. I changed the engine to stockfish and I could load the file game.pgn. So this is not a big issue, although I do not have to select any engine since I just want to use the gui as analysis board.

I made a couple of moves and saved it to the same file. I noticed that it saved a new game. I would like to just replace the empty game I had started with. Then I started xbaord again, changed the engine to SF, loaded game.pgn, and selected the new game. I could not make moves in this game. But I could do this by using the option Edit -> Edit Game. Now again I made 1-2 moves and saved in the same file. It saved it as a third game.

Thank you.

Hello!

Unless I am mistaken, Scid vs PC doesn't look to support FRC. You will have to use another software. I know that XBoard/WinBoard supports FRC. And also ChessX.

Maybe you should specify your OS, so that other can suggest other softwares.

[Roland Chastain]

I have just made a quick test with XBoard, and it works fine for me.

The steps I followed: load a new engine (an engine supporting FRC), start a new variant, choose FRC, select "edit game" mode, paste position (the FEN string).

After that I can play moves and save the game.

When I load the file game.pgn in xboard (File -> Load Game), it says variant fisherrandom not supported by fairy-max 5.0b. Moreover, it loaded a random position, not the one in my pgn. I am not sure if that is because fairymax is a default engine in xboard. I changed the engine to stockfish and I could load the file game.pgn. So this is not a big issue, although I do not have to select any engine since I just want to use the gui as analysis board.

Even if you intend to use XBoard only for game edition, you must indeed select a FRC compatible engine.