Re: [Bug-XBoard] Chinese Chess on xboard

[H.G. Muller]

Do you already have an engine in mind? Both UCI and UCCI Xiangqi engines exist. Most are closed source, but many are free. But alas, only available as Windows binary. Elephant Eye is an intermediately strong open-source UCCI engine that can be compiled for Linux.

The way to run UCCI engines is use the uci2wb adapter (obtainable from the git repository at  hgm.nubati.net), with an -x flag. So you would have something like

xboard -fcp "uci2wb -x eleeye"

assuming that uci2wb and eleeye are in your search path (e.g. in /usr/games/). If not you would have to specify the directory, e.g.

xboard -fcp "./uci2wb -x ./eleeye EleeyeDirectory"  -fd uci2wbDirectory

I guess you could run Windows binaries by invoking wine (using two levels of quoting)

xboard -fcp {uci2wb -x "wine someWindowsXQengine"}

but I have never tried that. I remember Kou was a pretty strong free XQ engine. For UCI engines you would not have to use the -x flag with uci2wb.

If you plan to run many different UCCI engines you can configure XBoard to make the -fUCCI flag work. To this end you must run XBoard once as

xboard -uxiAdapter {uci2wb -x "%fcp" "%fd"}

and after that you can use

xboard -fcp anyUCCIengine -fUCCI

to automatically invoke uci2wb (which must be in the system's search path, or you should have given the full pathname in the -uxiAdapter command.
Regards,
H.G.

Loic Duros schreef op 11/6/2014 6:55 PM:

Hi:

I'd like to run the newest version of xboard with a Chinese Chess engine. Is there a step by step guide on how to do this? Also, I noticed from the page when the chinese chess engines are available that the most powerful one is "closed-sourced" (so nonfree?) as it is stated in the page linked from gnu.org/s/xboard. What is the recommended free engine for chinese chess?

Apologies if this has been discussed previously, but I haven't found it (yet) in the archives.

Thanks,

Loic

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