XBoard Version 1.3

Copyright 1991 by Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, Massachusetts.

All Rights Reserved

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that
both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
supporting documentation, and that the name of Digital not be
used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the
software without specific, written prior permission.

DIGITAL DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING
ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL
DIGITAL BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR
ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION,
ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS
SOFTWARE.

XBoard is an X11/R4-based user interface for GNU Chess.  It uses the R4 Athena
widgets and Xt Intrinsics to provide an interactive referee for managing
a chess game between a user and a computer opponent or between two computers.
You can also use XBoard without a chess program to play through games in files
or to play through games manually (force mode).  In this case, moves aren't
validated by XBoard.  XBoard manages a digital chess clock for each player
and resets the clocks if time control is achieved within a given number of
moves.  A game can be started with the initial chess position, with a series
of moves from a game file or with a position from a position file.  The "match"
shell script runs a series of games between two machines, alternating sides.
The man page xboard.1 describes the features of XBoard.

XBoard was written by Dan Sears and Chris Sears.  XBoard borrows its colors,
icon and piece bitmaps from xchess which was written and copyrighted by
Wayne Christopher.  We thank him for his work on XChess.


CAVEATS

XBoard depends on the Xt Intrinsics and Athena widget set.  XBoard uses R4
features.  In particular, R3 just won't do and the Athena widgets included
with the DEC and SUN releases won't do either.  The Athena widgets are either
missing in the DEC standard distribution or in the wrong (R3) place in SUN
OpenWindows.

XBoard works best with the version 3.1+ of gnuchess posted in volume 19 of
comp.sources.misc.  This release of gnuchess was dated: Mon Apr 15 10:20 1991
by Mike McGann and the first patch is necessary for XBoard to work properly.
GNU Chess must be compiled with the -DCHESSTOOL option for use with XBoard.

gnuchess version 3.1+ is available on gatekeeper.dec.com
in /pub/comp.sources.misc/volume19/gnuchess

If you *do not* have the GNU Chess version 3.1+ then you *must* add the
following to your .Xdefaults file:

XBoard*whiteString:                     white\n
XBoard*blackString:                     black\n


CHANGES

Version 1.1 -- Mon Jan  7 14:46:03 PST 1991

  - Fixed a bug in HandleUserMove() where the user could make a move while the
    machine was thinking.  The fix detects and ignores these moves.  onMove
    was not being used and was removed.

  - Substantially rewrote and simplified the clock code.  If a game was paused
    and then resumed, the clocks were out of sync.

  - Konstantinos Konstantinides added the -searchTime option.

  - Rewrote TwoMachinesPlay mode.

  - Rewrote DisplayClocks().

  - Hal Peterson contributed a new Imakefile.

  - Added a declaration, xtVersion, which will quickly break on R3 Intrinsics.

  - For people who don't like or use chess clocks a clockMode switch
    has been added.  It is on by default.  It can be turned off in the
    .Xdefaults file with

        XBoard.clockMode:    False

  - Detect if the visual doesn't support color.  If so, run in monoMode.
    An alternative would be to detect grayscale visual and use a collection
    of gray user interface colors.

  - Works with gcc now.  gcc complained about casting float constants
    as XtPointers.

  - Added keyboard equivalents.  Added an iconify keystroke, C or c.

  - Added StrStr() because many systems don't have this ANSI function.

  - Substantially rewrote and simplified the Two Machine code.

  - The bitmaps have been pushed into the bitmaps directory.

  - Fixed a bug where a player could play after a game had been finished.

  - Fixed a bug where hint didn't work.  The local version of gnuchessr
    had been hacked.  The fix was to clone stderr and stdout for gnuchessr.

  - Kayvan Sylvan contributed a patch for ESIX.
    It seems that select() on pipes is broken on his system.  We declined
    to incorporate his patch though, because it was a work-around for
    something that was broken on one system, and selfishly, that system
    was not my own.  Nevertheless, it is likely that other System V users
    on PC's may need to use this patch and it is is included as the file
    ESIX.patch.  To use it, type

        patch xboard.c ESIX.patch

  - Any button restarts a paused game.

  - Warning messages get displayed in the message box.

  - getlogin() does not work in all cases.
    It was replaced by getpwuid(getuid())->pw_name).

  - For systems with smaller screens, XBoard can use smaller pieces,
    and a smaller board.  -bigSizeMode False uses a smaller set of pieces.
    These are scaled versions of the large pieces.  They look ok but could
    be improved.

  - -iconic doesn't work properly.  If XBoard is opened iconic then
    iconifying it later with a keystroke doesn't work.  I think
    this is an Xt bug.

  - the remoteShell resource was added for HP-UX systems
    and other systems where the remoteShell isn't rsh.

  - older non-ANSI versions of Sun compilers complain vociferously.

  - Roger Dubar, Konstantinos Konstantinides, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht,
    Paul Scowen, Mvh Smidt and Kayvan Sylvan all helped immensely during
    beta-testing.

Version 1.2 -- Tue Jun 11 17:14:12 PDT 1991

  - Added a lex parser for algebraic games.  It should be easy to use the parser
    for other interfaces such as the Microsoft Windows version.
    It parses comments of the form [anything] and ! to the end of a line.

  - Corrected the queening code.  XBoard was sending the wrong syntax.
    It was sending for example h8(Q) when it should have been sending h8q.
    Thanks to Paul Vaughan and Mike McGann for pointing this out.

  - Moved the man page from xboard.1 to xboard.man.  This makes imake man page
    installs work correctly.  Thanks to Richard K. Lloyd for pointing this out.

  - Changed the forwards/backwards/readgamefile code to allow a play to step
    back and forth in a game.  If he steps all the way to the beginning
    he has to restart the game.  If he gets into a mated position, same problem.

  - Modified the code to use the R4 routines rather than R3 compatibility.

  - Added a PopUp dialog for getting file names.

  - If the first character of the file is not `1' then the first line
    of a game or position file is displayed as the name in a label widget.

  - Minor hacks to work with R5 alpha.  Had to add an event handler to the
    boardWidget to get translations to work.  This may go away with the real R5.
    Added <Message>WM_PROTOCOLS: QuitProc() for R5 ICCCM compatibility.

  - If the DisplayWidth or DisplayHeight is less than 800, use small size mode.
    Also the size of the name widget was reduced from 500 pixels to 400 pixels
    because in small size mode there was a gap on the right.
    Changed the default font from fixed to helvetica_oblique14 to:
        -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
    helvetica_oblique14 is a font alias not on all R4 systems.
    Curiously enough, the 17 point is not available on 75dpi systems
    and the 18 point font is not available on 100dpi systems.
    Thanks to Richard K. Lloyd for pointing these out.

  - Fixed a compiler warning for gcc and an error for the IBM RT compilers.
    This is the VOID_PROC macro in xboard.h.  Thanks to David Jensen for this.

  - -iconic doesn't work at all now.  The Iconify() does work.  This was
    a tradeoff and it is really an Xt bug.

  - fixed a problem with the new version of gnuchessr where xboard wasn't
    getting gnuchessr error messages for illegal moves.  The problem seems
    to be fixed *without* any gnuchess changes but this is likely to be
    highly system dependant.  There should be a new line on line 246 of nondsp.c

        printz ("Illegal move (no matching move generated)");

    The xboard fix was to set non-blocking i/o on the read pipe for gnuchessr

        fcntl(from_prog[0], F_SETFL, O_NDELAY);

  - The bitmap file names were changed so that none exceeded 14 characters.
    This is necessary for R5.

  - Added the CHESSDIR environment variable.  Game and position files are
    found in this directory.  If this variable is not declared, then the
    current directory is used.  File names starting with / are treated
    specially.

  - Fixed a bug where saving a long game, resetting and saving a short game
    resulted in appending the end of the long game to the short one.
    If a game is just being played out and there is no reason for gnuchessr
    to be used, ignore pipe signals.  This allows people to use xboard
    as a chess board without need for gnuchess.  Also, trivially bad moves
    such as e2e2 are not passed on to gnuchessr but instead ignored out of
    hand.  This allows people using xboard as a chessboard with gnuchessr
    to pick a piece up, think and put it back down without making a move.
    Thanks to Jeff Kenton for pointing these out.

  - Fixed a bug where the checkmate message wasn't being parsed and xboard
    kept playing.  Also, the message was added to game file if saved.
    Thanks to Scott Hemhill for pointing this out.

  - enumerations are not really integers on some C compilers.  I added casting.
    The new version of gnuchess expects the "go" command for two machine
    and machine plays white cases.  The whiteString resource is for
    compatibility with previous gnuchess versions which get confused by go.
    Thanks to Martin D. for catching these.

  - There was an off by one error with the clock resetting code.  Also,
    the clock display highliting was wrong.  Thanks to Bill Shauck for
    pointing these out.

  - Changed the protocol that xboard uses to work with the new version of
    gnuchessr.

  - For version 1.2, Jeff Kenton, Richard LLoyd, David Jensen, Martin D.,
    Bill Schmidt, Scott Hemphill, Paul Vaughan and Bill Shauck all found
    a lot of bugs that we put into xboard just to see if they were paying
    attention.  They were.

Thu Jun 20 15:04:06 PDT 1991

  Minor fixes to the 1.2 release

  - Multiple uses of the get positition file button got confused
    on the second click.

  - Long game file comments cause core dumps on HP systems.

  - Parsed comments as [ ..............text follows ] into d7d5

  - New-line wasn't always being added to forward move strings sent to gnuchess.

  - Put easy back into the initString.  This DISABLES easy mode which by
    default is ON.

  - Can't do a backward move when it isn't your turn because gnuchess
    gets confused.  Similar bug for forward move.  Do a bunch of moves,
    back up move and go forward.  These get filtered out now.

Thu Jun 27 15:06:25 PDT 1991

  - Bug in my forward move fix.  Didn't work for playgamefile mode.

  - Remove comment popups during a reset.

Sat Oct  5 11:27:11 PDT 1991

  - PATCHLEVEL 6 verseion 1.3

  - Changed default chess program name from gnuchessr to gnuchessx
    per Mike McGann change Mon Aug 1 10:20 1991

  - Placed in R5 contrib.
