[XBoard-devel] Fw: Suggestion for Winboard/Crafty documentation

[Tim Mann]

I'm not interested in writing documentation for using Crafty with
WinBoard, and I don't know the answer to the question at the end of
this message, but maybe someone else on this list can help.

------- Forwarded Message

Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:49:44 -0600
From: Stephen Tashiro <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Suggestion for Winboard/Crafty documentation


Since I think that many would-be users of Winboard may spend hours 
trying to get Crafty to use his opening books, it would be helpful to 
publicize the following facts:

1. The book.bin and books.bin file on the Craty ftp site (both of which 
are needed in order to have Crafty play book moves) may not work with 
the Windows executable of Crafty (They don't under Windows 2000 and 
NTFS, which I have personally tired.)  Windows users may use the 
directions in the Crafty documentation to create Windows compatible 
opening book files from pgn files such as enormous.pgn  and start.pgn 
that are available on the Crafty ftp site.

2. When the Crafty is run (directly, not through Winboard) it opens a 
Command window.  It will print error messages if it cannot find the 
book.bin and books.bin file.  If you don't see these error messages then 
it found the files.

3. A winboard.ini entry (in the section /FirstChessProgramNames) like:
"C:\Chess\Crafty\crafty-20.14.exe bookpath=C:\Chess\Crafty xboard"
can work even though Crafty will look for file names with a forward 
slash in them, such as C:\Chess\Crafty/book.bin.  According the 
Wikipedia, the Windows API does recognize the forward slash as a divider 
in file names, unlike DOS.  If Crafty isn't finding files, the problem 
isn't that the names have a forward slash in them.

In the trial and error discovering these facts, I clutter up the 
Winboard directory with game and log files that I don't really want to 
save.  Is there an winboard.ini entry that would let me save games and 
logs to a different directory?




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-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/