WinBoard Gold Pack

The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.5.0

For the ultimate WinBoard experience!

This install bundles the set of WinBoard and support programs, such as a tournament manager, UCI adapter, opening book, sample WinBoard and UCI engines. All pre-installed and ready to run, in order to provide an example for how things can be done. In addition the Gold-Pack installer contains components only of interest to users that fit a profile of specific interests. The Xiangqi profile supplies graphics and engines, which you probably don't want if you are not interested in Chinese Chess. Similarly, the Chess-Variants profile contains a few engines that you would only use if you are interested in games like Chess960, Crazyhouse, Loser/Suicide Chess, Gothic Chess, Shatranj, Atomic Chess, etc. New is that there now also is a Shogi profile, with an engine for shogi and mini-Shogi.

WinBoard 4.5.0 has many new features compared to WinBoard 4.4.4. Amongst these are ICS-client improvements (seek graph, dual board for bughouse, game upload), better handling ofcomments, including support for variation trees, and the possibility to play out engine PVs on the board and automatically annotate games with them. Seirawan Chess was added as a new variant. For an elaborate description of the new features, see the web page at GNU.

The core-components section includes:

WinBoard 4.5.0          A GUI for Chess, to play a game or match between two WinBoard engines
                        (Written by Tim Mann, Alessandro Scotti, HG.Muller and many, many others)
Polyglot 1.4.63b        An adapter to allow UCI engines to play under WinBoard (Fabien Letouzy)
                        Version adapted to run without cygwin1.dll by Fonzy Bleumers,
                        and to understand the WB protocol extensions by Michel van den Bergh
UCI2WB                  A variant friendly adapter for UCI engines, which besides Chess engines
                        can also handle Xiangi engines and Shogi (USI) engines.
default.bin             A small opening book used by Polyglot and WinBoard (Guenther Simon)
Fairy-Max 4.8(Q)        Example of a WinBoard engine, which plays many variants (H.G.Muller)
bitmaps                 To give the Chess board a wood or marble texture (David Dahlem)
a Chess font            as an example of how to customize the look of your Chess pieces
logos                   so WinBoard can display a logo of the engine or ICS that is playing
ini files & shortcuts   as examples of how to customize WinBoard for various tasks
a tutorial              To provide a pedestrian description of how to use what is provided

The Tournament-Manager section includes:
PSWBTM 2.0              A tournament manager, which invokes WinBoard repeatedly
                        in order toplay a complete tournament (round-robin or gauntlet)
                        It also manages a database of engines (Pradu Kannan)
Start positions         The famous Nunn and Silver opening sets, as PGN or FEN file, respectively
Most of this software is supplied without source code, but it is all open source, and links for downloading the source code are given below.

Tutorial

The Gold Pack comes with a tutorial of how to use the components together with WinBoard to run UCI engines, run automated tournaments, customize you WinBoard look, etc. If you are completely new to WinBoard, it is highly recommended you read the Tutorial for Novice Users first.

Using the Components of this Package:

Configuring UCI engines through WinBoard

Making Shortcuts to run WinBoard

Changing the Look of Board and Pieces

Running an Engine with PSWBTM

Running a Tournament with PSWBTM

Installing new engines in PSWBTM

Configuring PSWBTM

More Detailed Information

WinBoard Protocol Description

What is new in WinBoard 4.4.0?

Frequently-Asked Questions

WinBoard and Xiangqi

Copyright of WinBoard

Copyright of the Software in this Package

GNU Public License

Links for Downloading Source Files and Additional Data

WinBoard Forum

WinBoard Source Code

Polyglot Source Code

PSWBTM Home Page

PSWBTM 2.0 Source Code

A good Source of Chess Fonts

Dave Dahlem's Engine Logos

Graham Bank's Engine Logos