eboard is a chess board interface for ICS (Internet Chess Servers) and chess engines.
for quick compilation / installation instructions, see the INSTALL file.
Currently it supports the following protocols / engines:
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Generic XBoard protocol v2-compliant engines Almost full support. Engines that behave on the edge of protocol may fail. Works with GNU Chess 5.
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Particular Engine Support (most of them comply with the XBoard protocol, but eboard supports additional features):
- GNU Chess 4
- Crafty
- Sjeng (multi-variant engine)
See the eboard site for links to get them.
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Crafty Full support. Tested with 18.9 thru 18.14, won't work with versions earlier than 18.x Crafty is NOT distributed with eboard, see Documentation/Crafty.txt for information on installing Crafty and the game books.
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Direct play across a network - one eboard connects to another eboard over a TCP/IP network (like the Internet).
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FICS Support most features. Current status is: It will allow you to play regular, suicide, losers, atomic, crazyhouse and bughouse chess games. Wild variants are supported (tested with Fischer Random and Wild/5, but weird castlings are not directly supported and you may have to type in the castling moves by hand) It will observe games. It will examine games (but the move list may not be retrieved correctly) Supports premove and drag-and-drop. Nice, customizable, colorization of FICS output. bsetup mode not supported by the interface yet (but you can enter bsetup and add pieces with FICS commands)
Known issues: simuls are not yet supported. If you set nowrap on on FICS (this is not the default), some very long lines (like 'in 1') can make eboard crash. Just don't mess with that FICS variable and you'll be fine.
FICS is a no-charge service, operating since 1995, and over these years it has fostered the building of a huge community of chess enthusiasts. It's a great place to play chess and to make friends. Besides regular chess, it supports bughouse, crazyhouse, suicide, losers and several wild variants (in wild rules are the same as regular chess but the starting position isn't)
FICS recently introduced thematic games - you don't get the initial moves but rather an ECO code. You can play and watch those with eboard, but PGN saving and game browsing (moving back and forth while watching) are still quite nuts. This should get fixed soon.
For timeseal support see Documentation/FICS-Timeseal.txt For information on getting an account to play at FICS, visit FICS at http://www.freechess.org
If you have problems with firewalls, the best approach is to use a third-party TCP port-forwarding tool. I have a nice experience with portfwd (http://portfwd.sourceforge.net), but many other packages like this exist.
For automatic login scripts for FICS see Documentation/Scripts.txt
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Scroll locking on text pane: if you scroll up in the text pane, it won't auto-scroll to the bottom when new output comes from the server.
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Input history. The Up and Down arrow keys work like the bash history in the text entry box.
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The board can be resized on the fly.
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The piece set can be changed on the fly.
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Scripting
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PGN reading/writing
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Seek Graph (FICS)
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Multiple text panes (Windows|Detached Console)
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National Language Support (portuguese, german, spanish, czech and italian so far)
To change the language, make sure you performed 'make install' and set the environment variable LANGUAGE to the language code (de for German, pt_BR for brazilian Portuguese, es for Spanish, etc.) Under bash (the most common shell on Linux), it can be done with
export LANGUAGE=de
(eboard checks the LC_MESSAGES, LC_ALL, LANGUAGE and LANG environment variables for language settings, in this order)
To compile/install it (as root):
./configure
make
make install
For further instructions see the INSTALL file. You'll need:
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the GTK+ library, version 2.2.0
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the C++ standard library (libstdc++)
eboard is developed by Felipe Bergo .
The eboard web site is at
There is an alternative mirror for the source at
ftp://ftp.seul.org/pub/chess/eboard
and the project page (for bug reports, mailing list, CVS access) is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eboard
Have fun!
You can use, modify and redistribute eboard under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. The license is included in the COPYING file.