eboard is a chess board interface for playing and studying chess.
eboard is a graphical client to internet chess servers, an interface to computer chess engines and a tool for visualization, analysis and study of chess games.
Requirements:
· GTK+ version 2.0.x
for quick compilation / installation instructions, see the INSTALL file.
Currently it supports the following protocols / engines:
- Generic XBoard protocol v2-compliant engines
Almost full support. Engines that behave on the edge of protocol may fail. Works with GNU Chess 5.
- Particular Engine Support (most of them comply with the XBoard protocol, but eboard supports additional features):
- GNU Chess 4
- Crafty
- Sjeng (multi-variant engine)
See the eboard site for links to get them.
- Crafty
Full support.
Tested with 18.9 thru 18.14, won't work with versions earlier than 18.x Crafty is *NOT* distributed with eboard, see Documentation/Crafty.txt for information on installing Crafty and the game books.
- Direct play across a network - one eboard connects to another eboard over a TCP/IP network (like the Internet).
- FICS
Support most features.
Current status is:
It will allow you to play regular, suicide, losers, atomic, crazyhouse and bughouse chess games. Wild variants are supported (tested with Fischer Random and Wild/5, but weird castlings are not directly supported and you may have to type in the castling moves by hand)
It will observe games.
It will examine games (but the move list may not be retrieved correctly)
Supports premove and drag-and-drop.
Nice, customizable, colorization of FICS output. bsetup mode not supported by the interface yet (but you can enter bsetup and add pieces with FICS commands)
Known issues: simuls are not yet supported. If you set nowrap on on FICS (this is not the default), some very long lines (like 'in 1') can make eboard crash. Just don't mess with that FICS variable and you'll be fine.
FICS is a no-charge service, operating since 1995, and over these years it has fostered the building of a huge community of chess enthusiasts. It's a great place to play chess and to make friends. Besides regular chess, it supports bughouse, crazyhouse, suicide, losers and several wild variants (in wild rules are the same as regular chess but the starting position isn't)
FICS recently introduced thematic games - you don't get the initial moves but rather an ECO code. You can play and watch those with eboard, but PGN saving and game browsing (moving back and forth while watching) are still quite nuts. This should get fixed soon.
For timeseal support see Documentation/FICS-Timeseal.txt
For information on getting an account to play at FICS, visit FICS at http://www.freechess.org
If you have problems with firewalls, the best approach is to use a third-party TCP port-forwarding tool. I have a nice experience with portfwd (http://portfwd.sourceforge.net), but many other packages like this exist.
For automatic login scripts for FICS see Documentation/Scripts.txt
What's New in This Release:
· This release adds text timestamping, adds non-ASCII character filtering, fixes seek graph formatting, and improves the text searching interface.
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