WinBoard is partly based on xboard, a chessboard program for Unix and the X Window System. Tim Mann has been responsible for all versions of WinBoard, and for xboard versions 1.3 and beyond. H.G.Muller is responsible for version 4.3.
Mark Williams added many features to WinBoard 4.1.0, including copy/paste, premove, icsAlarm, autoFlipView, training mode, auto raise, and blindfold. Hugh Fischer added piece animation to xboard, and Henrik Gram added it to WinBoard. Frank McIngvale contributed many xboard user interface improvements and improved Crafty support. Jochen Wiedmann ported xboard to the Amiga, creating AmyBoard, and converted the documentation to texinfo. Elmar Bartel contributed the new piece bitmaps for version 3.2. Evan Welsh wrote CMail. John Chanak contributed the initial implementation of ICS mode. The default color scheme was adapted from Wayne Christopher's XChess program. Chris Sears and Dan Sears wrote the original xboard. They were responsible for xboard versions 1.0 through 1.2. Alessandro Scotti added many elements to the user interface, including the board textures and font-based rendering, the evaluation-graph, move-history and engine-output window. He was also responsible for adding the UCI support. H.G. Muller made WinBoard castling- and e.p.-aware, added variant support with adjustable board sizes, the Crazyhouse holdings, and the fairy pieces. In addition he added most of the adjudication options, made WinBoard ore robust in dealing with buggy and crashing engines, and extended time control with a time-odds and node-count-based modes.
Send bug reports to <bug-xboard@gnu.org>. Please run WinBoard with the /debug option and include the output from the resulting WinBoard.debug file in your message.
The WinBoard 4.3.xx line is being developed by H.G. Muller independently of the GNU Savannah xboard project. Bug reports on this version, and suggestions for improvements and additions, are best posted in the WinBoard forum, development section (www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/).
Michel van den Bergh provided the code for reading Polyglot opening books.
Arun Persaud worked with H.G. Muller to combine all the features of the never-released WinBoard 4.2.8 of the Savannah project (mainly by Daniel Mehrmann), and the never-released 4.3.16 into a unified WinBoard 4.4, which is now available both from the Savannah web site and the WinBoard forum.