What is XBoard?
===============
-XBoard is a graphical chessboard that can serve as a user interface
-for GNU Chess, for the Internet Chess Server, or for electronic mail
-correspondence chess. XBoard can also be used by itself. See the
-manual page xboard.man for further details; use the command "nroff
--man xboard.man | more" to read it.
+XBoard is a graphical chessboard for the X Window System. It can
+serve as a user interface for chess engines such as GNU Chess, for the
+Internet Chess Server, or for electronic mail correspondence chess.
+XBoard can also be used by itself. See the manual page xboard.txt for
+further details.
-Building XBoard
-===============
-Quick start: You can build xboard on most systems with the commands
+XBoard is free software, copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation
+and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). See the file
+COPYING for details.
+
+You can build xboard on most systems with the following commands.
- configure
+ ./configure
make
See the file INSTALL for more detailed instructions.
-See the file FAQ for answers to frequently asked questions.
+See the file FAQ.html for answers to frequently asked questions.
+
+
+What is WinBoard?
+=================
+WinBoard is a port of XBoard to run natively on Windows. It is part
+of the XBoard project and is released under the same terms as XBoard.
+
+You can build WinBoard using the free Cygwin toolchain from
+www.cygnus.com with the following commands.
+
+ cd winboard
+ make -f cygwin.mak
+
+You can build WinBoard using Microsoft Visual C with the following
+commands, or by opening the project in Visual Studio and clicking the
+build button.
+
+ cd winboard
+ nmake -f msvc.mak
+
+There is also a contributed .mak file for Borland C. It's not
+maintained and thus may need updating if you want to use it.
+
Reporting problems
==================
-Report bugs and problems with XBoard to <tim@tim-mann.org>. Please
-use the "script" program to start a typescript, run XBoard with the
--debug option, and include the typescript output in your message.
-Also tell us what kind of machine and what operating system version
-you are using. The command "uname -a" will often tell you this.
+Report bugs and problems with XBoard and WinBoard to
+<bug-xboard@gnu.org>. With XBoard, please use the "script" program
+to start a typescript, run XBoard with the -debug command line option,
+and include the typescript output in your message. With WinBoard,
+please use the /debug command line option and include the contents of
+the file WinBoard.debug. Also tell us what kind of machine and what
+operating system version you are using. On Unix, the command "uname
+-a" will tell you this. On Windows, right-click on My Computer and
+select Properties.
-Here is a sample of approximately what you should type:
+Here is a sample of approximately what you should type (on Unix):
script
uname -a
make
./xboard -debug
exit
- mail tim@tim-mann.org
+ mail bug-xboard@gnu.org
Subject: Your short description of the problem
Your detailed description of the problem
~r typescript
we will get in touch with you about merging them in to the main line
of development.
-Caveats
-=======
-XBoard depends on the Xt Intrinsics and Athena Widget Set of X11R4 or
-later. In particular, X11R3 just won't do.
-
-XBoard works best with version 4.0 or 5.0 of GNU Chess. Older
-versions may also work, but they are unsupported. The GNU Chess
-project requests that you get a current copy of GNU Chess rather than
-using older, bug-ridden versions. GNU Chess 4.0 must be compiled with
-the -DXBOARD flag for use with XBoard. Use the "make gnuchessx"
-target in GNU Chess 4.0 to do this.
-
-The Free Software Foundation would prefer to be able to distribute an
-X chessboard program covered only by the GNU General Public License
-and unencumbered by any other copyright. If you can help with this,
-please contact the FSF.
+Version 4.3.14
+==============
+
+This relaese was not made by the GNU xboard team, but by H.G.Muller.
+It mainly contains developments on WinBoard. Nevertheless, an attempt
+has been started to back-port the enormous number of improvements that
+have been made to WinBoard since the Linux and Windows developments branched
+to xboard. This is reflected by the source tree now having the same format
+as that of xboard 4.2.7, including all the xboard sources.
+
+An enormous amount of work still has to be done to make the xboard version
+fully equivalent to WinBoard, especially on user-interface side. As a modest
+beginning, the xboard source files have been patched to allow their compilation
+with the newer back-end files from WinBoard. To this end, the number of piece
+types in xboard has been increased from 6 to 22, and the WinBoard bitmaps
+have been converted to xboard source format (.bm) and are included in the
+xboard bitmaps directory. Other quick patches include the coloring of the
+board squares (for xiangqi and holdings), and some code in the user-move
+handling to suppress all moves into or out of the area between board and
+holdings in crazyhouse, and the treatment of king-captures-own-piece
+as a possibly valid move (for FRC castling). This should make it possible
+to run xboard with the new back-end files without too much inconvenience.
+
+New xboard command-line options have been added to make the added back-end
+features available. The include the new variants (as argument of the old
+-variant option), -boardWidth, -boardHeight and -holdingsSize. Be sure
+to call xboard with "-boardSize middling" or "-boardSize bulky" if you
+want to play with fairy pieces, or xboard might crash due to unavailability
+of bitmaps. Other added xboard options are:
+
+ADJUDICATION OPTIONS:
+-checkMates
+-testClaims
+-materialDraws
+-trivialDraws
+-ruleMoves
+-repeatsToDraw
+-adjudicateLossThreshold
+-firstScoreAbsolute
+-secondScoreAbsolute
+
+TIME-CONTROL OPTIONS
+-firstTimeOdds
+-secondTimeOdds
+-timeOddsMode
+-firstNPS
+-secondNPS
+
+GENERAL OPTIONS
+-matchPause
+-engineDebugOutput
+-userName
+-pgnExtendedInfo
+-pgnEventHeader
+-hideThinkingFromHuman
+
+This is all completely untested, but as the options merely switch on well-tested
+code in the back-end, there should not be too many problems with them.
+Bugs can be reported in the WinBoard forum.
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