The WinBoard adapter for Zillions allows to play against chess, crazyhouse and loop chess engines using very nice Zillions-of-Games GUI. Crazyhouse is a chess variant, described here. Loop chess is a variation of crazyhouse, where promoted pieces don't turn back into pawns when captured.
To be used with Zillions and the adapter, a chess engine should support so-called "WinBoard protocol". There are more then 100 such chess engines and 2 crazyhouse engines freely available. Some of these engines play significantly better then Zillion's universal AI. I modified one crazyhouse engine (Sjeng) to make it play loop chess.
The package, you download, includes adapter itself (EngineInterface.dll), preconfigured chess, crazyhouse and loop chess ZRF files, two strong chess engines (GNU Chess 5.06, Faile) and two crazyhouse engines (Sjeng, Sunsetter).
I developed and tested the adapter with version 2.0 of Zillions. However it should work also with the older versions of Zillions.
The package contains free/GPL software created by other people. The ZRF file for crazyhouse is written by Fergus Duniho. GNU Chess 5 was created by Chua Kong Sian and Stuart Cracraft. The Faile chess engine by Adrien Regimbald. Sjeng is written by Gian-Carlo Pascutto. Sunsetter created by Georg v. Zimmermann based on work by Ben Dean-Kawamura.
Copy "Chess.zrf" to the directory, where the chess engine is installed. Ensure, that ZRF file contains correct path to the WinBoard adapter, look at the line: (engine "..\Release\EngineInterface.dll").
Create the file "start.bat" in the same directory as ZRF file, the content of this file should be command line to invoke chess engine, e.g. for GNU Chess: gnuches5.exe xboard.
If something doesn't work as expected or you get error messages, look at the file "interface.log", which located in the same directory as ZRF file. It contains the communication log between a chess engine and Zillions/WinBoard adapter.
 |
Strength and variety settings, made in Zillions GUI are ignored |
|
|
Playing from user-setup positions is not supported. However if you create the desired position from the initial position by making correct moves, you can start playing from this position against the engine. |
|
|
Arena - very nice GUI to play against chess engines, can be downloaded in package with some strong chess engines |
|
|
Aaron's Chess Engines FAQ - information about WinBoard chess engines and how to configure them. |
|
|
Leo Dijksman web pages - list of WinBoard engines, including their features ("Info Pages" lists engines, you need to select a particular engine to read information about it). |
|
|
"Chess Engine Communication Protocol - specification of WinBoard protocol by Tim Mann. |
Last updated on Oktober 25, 2003 (Andreas.Kaufmann@gmx.de)