UCI or not engines

[Dan-the-K]

Can an engine be UCI and not-UCI?

Following is an excerpt from my Winboard.ini specifications:

/firstChessProgramNames={

;UCI
"fmax 22" /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Fairy-Max" /fNoOwnBookUCI
"fmax" /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Fairy-Max" /variant=normal ;elo=2000

;UCI
"Ruffian_105.exe" /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Arena\Engines\Ruffian" /fUCI
"Ruffian_105.exe" /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Arena\Engines\Ruffian"

;UCI
Ruffian /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Arena\Engines\Ruffian" /fUCI ;elo=2663
Ruffian /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Arena\Engines\Ruffian"

;UCI
"Sjeng.exe" /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Sjeng"
"Sjeng.exe" /fd="C:\Chess Programs\Sjeng" /fUCI
}

Are these correct? All of these work fine when selected. How could engines, such as Fairy-Max, Ruffian and Sjeng be UCI and not UCI?

[H.G.Muller]

Fairy-Max is not installed as UCI here. The option /fNoOwnBookUCI jsut has a misleading (and cumbersome) name. I switche on use of an external book for the engine. There was a time when the probing of such an external book was done by the Polyglot adapter, and hence would only work for UCI engines, as WB engines would run without adapter. But nowadays WB probes the book itself. To remove part of the confusion, I introduced a new name /firstXBook, for this option. But the old name has to keep working, of course, for backward compatibility.

I don't know about the other engines. There really are engines that support both UCI and WB. The GUI starts by sending the engine either the word "uci" or "xboard", depending on the protocol it expects the engine to to use, and an engine can decide on that which mode of communication to use.

[Roger Brown]

Can an engine be UCI and not-UCI?

Are these correct? All of these work fine when selected. How could engines, such as Fairy-Max, Ruffian and Sjeng be UCI and not UCI?

Hello Dan-the-K,

H.G. has spoken to his engine (Fairy-Max) already.

The other engines in your post support both UCI and Winboard protocols.

Other engines that do the same include Gandalf, BigLion and Ktulu.

I hope this helps.

Later.