What is XBoard?
===============
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.

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
	make

See the file INSTALL for more detailed instructions.

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 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 (on Unix):

    script
    uname -a
    ./configure
    make
    ./xboard -debug
    exit
    mail bug-xboard@gnu.org
    Subject: Your short description of the problem
    Your detailed description of the problem
    ~r typescript
    .

If you improve XBoard, please send a message about your changes, and
we will get in touch with you about merging them in to the main line
of development.

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.