** Announcing the release of XBoard and WinBoard, version 4.0.2 ** A new release of both XBoard and WinBoard is now available. Version 4.0.2 is an update to version 4.0.0 that fixes about twenty small bugs and adds several minor features. It has not been extensively tested, so please report any apparent new bugs. You can get both programs from my Chess page on the World Wide Web or from the Internet Chess Library FTP site. In addition, XBoard should soon be available from GNU FTP sites. - http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Tim_Mann/chess.html - ftp://ftp.freechess.org/pub/chess/X/xboard-4.0.2.tar.gz - ftp://ftp.freechess.org/pub/chess/Win3/winboard-4_0_2.exe (zip format) - ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/xboard-4.0.2.tar.gz XBoard is a graphical chessboard for the X Window System that can serve as a user interface for GNU Chess, Crafty, and other chess engines, for the Internet Chess Servers, and for electronic mail correspondence chess. XBoard can also be used by itself. It can read and write game files in PGN (portable game notation). WinBoard is a similar program for Microsoft Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. It includes all the major features of XBoard except email correspondence chess. Warning: WinBoard does not work on Windows 3.1 or 3.11, not even with Win32s. Report bugs in XBoard and WinBoard to . --Tim Mann === Selected change highlights in 4.0.2 === * Added five new larger piece sizes (129x129 through 87x87 pixels). * Set ICS Interaction title bar to "user@server", where "user" is the ICS handle you logged in as. * Restored the feature of soaking up the moves from a user-typed "moves", "oldmoves", or "smoves" ICS command when xboard/WinBoard is idle, but changed it so that the move list is also echoed to the screen. * Modified the xboard font searcher to be able to use scalable fonts. The new -fontSizeTolerance flag controls how closely a nonscalable font must match to be used in preference to a scalable font. * Zippy environment variables ZIPPYABORT and ZIPPYADJOURN now control whether Zippy will accept abort and adjourn requests. ZIPPYGAMESTART now allows Zippy to send a command at the start of each game. * We now determine the variant type being played on ICS, send it as a command "variant VARTYPE" to the chess engine (if in Zippy mode), and put it in the PGN tags. ZIPPYVARIANTS controls what variants Zippy will accept. * Added a small code patch from Bob Hyatt to detect when Zippy's ICS opponent is a computer and send the command "computer" to the engine. Added this command to engine-intf.txt. Thanks, Bob. === Selected change highlights in 4.0.1 === * You can now type in moves from the keyboard in WinBoard. Either select TypeInMove from Step menu, or (if you are not in ICS mode), just start typing. In ICS mode you can type moves into the ICS interaction window anyway, so I've retained the feature that typing switches you there. Not implemented in xboard. * The command sent to ICS by Zippy at the end of each game can now be customized with the ZIPPYGAMEEND environment variable. * Miscellaneous minor updates and clarifications to engine-intf.txt. In particular, documented the st and sd commands (support for command line options -searchTime and -searchDepth), warts and all. * Changed -searchDepth to be orthogonal to the various timing options. Previously it would search for an unlimited time to the given depth; now the engine is allowed to choose its search time in the normal way, but is told to cut off the search early if it reaches the given depth.