Software Santa
FREE and/or Open Source Desktop Software! => Free Games => Board Games => Topic started by: Software Santa on November 05, 2014, 10:58:17 PM
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Xboard - or WinBoard for Windows - is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms for MOST Systems!
Mac OS X 10.7 (or later) version is: HERE (http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=53680)
Windows or Linux Users - go directly to the Extremely detailed WinBoard Page: http://hgm.nubati.net/ (http://hgm.nubati.net/) for EXTRA Variations!!!!
XBoard
XBoard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms, including international chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese chess) and Makruk, in addition to many minor variants such as Losers Chess, Crazyhouse, Chess960 and Capablanca Chess. It displays a chessboard on the screen, accepts moves made with the mouse, and loads and saves games in Portable Game Notation (PGN). It serves as a front-end for many different chess services, including:
Chess engines that will run on your machine and play a game against you or help you analyze, such as GNU Chess, Crafty, or many others.
Chess servers on the Internet, where you can connect to play chess with people from all over the world, watch other users play, or just hang out and chat.
Correspondence chess played by electronic mail. The CMail program automates the tasks of parsing email from your opponent, playing his moves out on your board, and mailing your reply move after you've chosen it.
XBoard runs on Unix and Unix-like systems that use the X Window System.
Winboard
The project also includes a port to MicroSoft-Windows systems called WinBoard.
You can find the downloads for binaries and preconfigured installer packages of Winboard at the Winboard Forum
, where yo can also report problems, get help from other WinBoard users or discuss feature requests. Windows builds of development versions or installers for special configuartions can be found at HGM's web page
.
Development for Winboard, reporting bugs and any other requests can also be done at the same places as for XBoard (see below).
Downloading XBoard
stable version (4.8.0)
Sources of current stable version can be found on the main GNU ftp server. It can also be found on one of the mirrors of ftp.gnu.org
; please use a mirror
if possible.
Precompiled versions are available for openSUSE
and debian-sid
(if you know of other distribution that package it, please let us know).
Mac OSX Intel 10.7+ App
A preconfigured app bundle of Xboard for Mac OSX can also be found at the Winboard Forum
.
Documentation
The official manual page for XBoard
is available online, as is documentation for most GNU software
. This discusses every feature XBoard has in detail. You may also find this information on your local system by running info xboard or man xboard, or by looking at /usr/doc/xboard/, /usr/local/doc/xboard/, or similar directories on your system.
There now also exists an XBoard User Guide, which only presents the main features in a more pedestrian way. This would be an excellent starting point if you are a novice XBoard user. If you have prior experience with XBoard, but just want to know what new features have been added since the version you were used to, the pages in the What's New section would be the place to go.
A description of the Chess Engine Communication Protocol used by XBoard to communicate with Chess Engines can be found here.
WinBoard: http://hgm.nubati.net/ (http://hgm.nubati.net/)
Xboard: http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/ (http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/)
http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewforum.php?f=19 (http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewforum.php?f=19)