HaChu (and xboard themes) packaging

Yann Dirson ydirson at free.fr
Thu Feb 27 22:08:10 UTC 2014


Hi H.G.,

I'm updating the hachu package to include the latest fix, install the
confs and themes, and add menu entries to make the games more visible.

I was wondering which variants should be made prominent in the package
description.  I have undersood that Dai is not playable with XBoard,
that Tenjuki is not finished and too large as well.

For more classical variants:
* "xboard -fcp hachu" starts with normal chess, but first move issued
  is buggy
* Shatranj seems OK
* While "-fcp hachu -scp hachu" allows to play Markuk, just "-fcp
  hachu" causes two-player to start a game against Fairymax, and
  something gets bad: 1st move is shown but the board gets immediately
  restored to initial state, and no other move is ever made.

I also note that the "New variant" dialog lists "shogi (9x9)" as
selectable, but complains that only 9x9+0 is supported by the engine,
I suppose that's a small XBoard bug ?

It's also possible to select other variants when starting with @chu,
and the theme somtimes applies in a strange fashion (eg. chess and
similar gets the knight drawn in red, and for Sho it makes things
quite confusing :).

I'm planning to update the description as follows, please tell me if I
got anything wrong:

 It currently plays the following games:
  * Sho Shogi, the immediate ancestor of modern Shogi
  * Chu Shogi, the most widely played large-board variant (12x12 board),
    featuring the famous Lion piece
  * Dai Shogi, a variant on 15x15 board (no GUI support yet)
  * Tenjiku Shogi, a 16x16 variant with even more exotic pieces (unfinished,
    no GUI support yet)
  * More widespread chess variants: Chess, Shatranj, Makruk
 .
 Most games (excluding Dai and Tenjiku) can be played through the
 XBoard GUI (version 4.8 and later).



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