Winboard Forum

I was scouring the net looking for the GUI of my dreams... All I wanted was a GUI with these things:
1. A board.
2. Pieces.

In the beginning, I didn't even know what a chess engine is, or what is a chess GUI. I had Chessmaster 11... I bought it, and I really liked it... Until one day, my friend told me of Rybka (My friend is a Chessmaster 11 owner, too! [Copied mine ]). I was like, "Okay, but we have CM11, what could be better" (you know, reviews, top-selling chess program, etc..). My friend told me that Rybka can beat CM11, it was a surprise.

So I wanted to buy this Rybka thing, and I did, along with Aquarium (Aquarium is a GUI designed specially for Rybka). At first look at Aquarium, I kinda had a sense *I wasted my money on this piece of crap*. Rybka plays really tough, but Aquarium is too complicated.

Here starts my WB story...
As I said, scouring the net for a simple GUI that can display a chess board with pieces, I found WinBoard. I downloaded, installed, and played a few games with it, "THE GUI OF MY DREAMS!!"...

So now after 2 weeks of experience in the chess GUI stuff, I knew that chess engines are either UCI or WB. Okay, so now all I wanted was Winboard + Crafty = GUI of my dreams, all I wanted was to play chess, without a 1.5GB CM11, without a 3GB Aquarium, just a 0.5MB Crafty and 5MB of WinBoard. However, I found the my dreams are... lost?

I don't want to sound angry, I am not... Just sharing my 'opinion' of WinBoard (or is it a review? )

Here's what I think of WB after all
1. Very simple and straight forward.
2. Has a nice look and you can use chess fonts with it as well, which a great thing.
3. Really fast and resource friendly which leaves lots of CPU to the engine.
4. Plain chess is all what it is about.

However, I also can't ignore these.
1. You have to be a rocket scientist to add an engine to WinBoard.
2. Let alone UCI engines.
3. Winboard + Crafty - All other engines out = Unknown Argument (If I remember correctly )

Well, just thought I'd share my WB story.

PS: I am not criticizing WB, never ever!!

If adding an engine seems like rocket sciense, you are probably doing it the wrong way.

The easy way is to
1) Click 'Tournament Manager' from the WinBoard start menu,
2) Click Tools-> Engine Manager
3) Click 'Browse'
4) Navigate to the engine folder and click the exe (only exes will be shown)
5) Type a 'Name' for the engine by which you want it to appear in the engine list (for selecting it) and PGN
6) Click 'Save'
7) Click 'Save Changes'

You are then ready to run the engine by clicking 'Launch Engine' (after selecting it from the list left), or to enter it in tournaments. Or you are ready to enter it in any new tournament you re setting up, after clicking 'Exit'. (I am not sure why you are required to confirm the change twice, by (6) and (7), but even an unnecessary extra click hardly qualifies as 'rocket science'.) Step (5) might seem a bit of a burdon, but exe files often have weird names, and you might want to enter the same engine several times in the list, with other settings, and sometimes different versions of the same engine have the same name for the .exe, so it is in general very useful to be able to give it a name you are comfortable with.

If it is a UCI engine, you have indeed to do something extra:
8) Type "WBopt /%sIsUCI true" (without the quotes) in the parameter field before you do (6).

I agree this is a pain (although again hardly rocket science), and I am pushing for future versions of PSWBTM to have a simple checkbox 'UCI' for this, which you can tick or untick. You are then ready to run the UCI engine. If you are not happy with the default settings, you can change them (after 'Launch Engine') from the WinBoard Engine #1 Settings menu.

I don't see how this could be much simplified, in any GUI. It seems unavoidable that if you want to install a new engine, you have to somehow point out where it is. Apart from saving one or two trivial clicks ((6) or (7), and perhaps putting 'Engine Manager' directly on the main menu bar, rather than hiding it in a 'Tools' meny), and having the UCI checkbox, all steps seem really necessary.

Well, I agree I was doing it wrong... And yes it will be nice indeed to have a simple checkbox for UCI engines


Hmm... Well, thanks to your reply, WB is the GUI of my dreams for its simplicity.

Thanks!