The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.4.0
For the ultimate WinBoard experience!
The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.4.0For the ultimate WinBoard experience! |
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Installing a Chess engine always begins with obtaining the necessary files. There are many places from which you can download Chess engines. Especially the website of WBEC offers a good overview of which engines are around, and where they can be obtained.
When downloading an engine, it usually come as a compressed archive, (e.g. a .zip file), containing the engine executabe (= application), plus the data files it needs for its operation (opening books, logos, manuals, sometimes source code). There are many compression formats around, e.g. .zip, .tar.gz, .rar, .7z. On a modern Windows system, the decompression sftware will understand most of those.
One thing one should carefully observe is if the downloaded archive contains a single folder, or large group of individual files and folders. In the first case, we would like to place this single folder in the folder on our computer that holds all our Chess engines: we would like to have a single folder for each engine, or each version of an engine there. Otherwise, things would quickly degenerate into a mess, one Chess engine using incompatible data of another, because it happened to have the same name, etc. So if the engine comes as a set of loose files inside the archive, rather than a single folder, we first want to create a new folder inside the folder that holds all our engines, and unpack the archive there. Otherwise we would have a lot of trouble collecting the just unpacked files and folders from amongst out other engine folders. Milk is a lot easier to spill on the floor than to get back into the bottle, and the same holds for files. So just to be save I always create a new folder for the engine I am downloading. If it turns out that unpacking the download gives me a single folder inside this folder, it is easy enough to eliminate one level of folders, by selecting all the contents, and dragging it to the encompassing folder. Very often it is the folder that came with the archive that I get rid off, because it has a cumbersome name.
When the files are sitting where you want them, you have to tell PSWBTM were they are. PSWBTM will transmit that information to WinBoard when it wants this engine to play. So WinBoard itself does not have to know anything of the engines, except when you also want to run the without PSWBTM, through the WinBoard startup dialog.
To install an engine in PSWBTM, you start up PSWBTM, and select "Tools -> Engine Manager" to pop up the engine-manager window. First click the "New" button on the lower-left, to signal that you are going to install a new engine. (Otherwise you run the risk to overwrite an existing engine, so that it wil disappear from te PSWBTM database.) After that, you have to complete the three text fields on the upper right.
In the upper field you have to type the name under which you want this engine to appear in the list you see on the left. You can give it any name you like, this information is only for your convenience. On the second line you must tell PSWBTM where it can find the engine application file. Simplest is to use the "Browse" button to browse to it. This pops up a file-selector dialog. What you have to do then depends on the type of engine, if it is WinBoard or UCI. First we discuss the WinBoard case.
Navigate through your file-system tree, first to your folder where all engines folders are, and then to the folder of the freshly downloaded engine in it. The file-selector dialog only shows you folders and application (.exe) files. Usually the engine applicaton is present in the folder you downloaded; sometimes it in a sub-folder "bin". Once you reach the executable, double-click it, and the file-selector dialaog will close, and leave the full name of the application in the second input field of the engine manager window.
The third line has to contain the options the engine needs on the command line that starts it. What you have to put here can vary enormously, and suffers from total absence of standardization. Some engines do not need any options on their command line, because they read all their settings from asom fixed file. (Usulally this is a .ini file that came with the download of the engine, and sits with it in the same folder.) Fairy-max is a very simple engine, and the only argument it can have is a number to specify the size of its hash table. If you omit this, Fairy-Mas uses a default value (96MB), so the option is not strictly needed. In the WinBoard Gold Pack Fairy-Max is installed with an 48MB hash table, which for Fairy-Max is indicated by the option "22". Which options you need, and what their values mean can only be learned from reading the documentation that came with the engine. Fairly common is an option to set the hash size, often called hash, -hash or /hash=.... Some engines need an option xboard or /xboard or --io-mode=xboard to work as WinBoard engines, and use their own built-in GUI otherwise. Anyway, whatever the engine needs, you have to type in this third line.
For UCI Engines you must not browse to the engine aplication, but to Polygot in stead. The latter can be found in the Polyglot15w folder of the WinBoard Gold Pack, which should also be located in the folder with all engine folders. In fact Polyglot is an engine for WinBoard, except that it does't think up the moves it sends toWinBoard by itself, but consults a UCI engine (speaking to it in UCI protocol) without WinBoard knowing anything about it. The application you need is named "polyglot.exe" in this folder. Do not confuse it with "Polyglot GUI.exe, which should also be in this folder, if you downloaded it. Double-click polyglot to leave the file-selector dialog, and get its full file name in the second input field of the engine manager.
The third line, for the engine options, now contains the options for Polyglot. The latter needs only a single option, the name of a file where is specified what it really has to do (i.e. which UCI engine it should fire up to get the moves, and what parameter settings it should use to control this engine). If you type a simple filename (without a folder-name part, i.e. without backslashes '\' in it), Polyglot will look for this file in the directory where its .exe file is located, which is just the place where we put all such files. So we type such a simple filename here, which reminds us of the engine. E.g. to install Fruit, we would type "fruit.ini" on the third line. That is not the full story yet, as we also would have to provide the fruit.ini file. Normally we would have made that file before we would install the engine in PSWBTM, (see the installing UCI engines with Polygot GUI page), but you can also do it afterwards. The WinBoard Gold pack does already contain a pre-installed fruit.ini file, though, so at the moment we can simply continue.
It is possible to add few options for WinBoard that will only be used with this engine, and not automatically with any other engine you put it with in the same tournament. (Usually you don't need that so you might skip this paragraph, but it is useful to be aware of the possibility.) E.g., you could give it a time-odds penalty if it was too strong to make the tournament interesting, and let it play with only half the time (say) of its opponents. Winboard does have the optons /firstTimeOdd=2 and /secondTimeOdds=2 for this. PSWBTM does not have a separate input field for such engine-specific WinBoard settigs, but you can enter them at the end of te engine options, on the third input line, after the word "WBopt". Everything behind this word will be interpreted as WinBoard options, which will overrule any options in the winboard.ini, or even on the command line invoking WinBoard. Because the engine will sometimes run under WinBoard as first, and sometimes as second engine, (depending on the color it plays), you have to leave it open which of the two time-odds options should be used. This is done by replacing the "first" or "second" in the option name by "%s". So for the time-odds example, you would add "WBopt /%sTimeOdds=1" to the third line. An example for Fairy-Max is pre-installed.
When you have completed all three text-input fields, you should press the button "Save" below it. After that, you could install a new engine by pressing "New", but be sure you press "Save" first, or you would lose everything you just did! If you don't ant to install any other engines, you should press "Save Changes", and then "Exit" to close the engine manager. (It is kind eough to arn you if you forget to press "Save Changes", which is just as well, as exiting without it would make you lose all engines you just installed!) The newly installed engines are then ready for selection in a tournament! (Unless it was UCI and you forgot to make the Polyglot .ini file!) Befor you press "Exit"