The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.3.15For the ultimate WinBoard experience! |
![]() |
The most convenient way to run invoke WinBoard is usually through PSWBTM, as this combines an easy way to select the engine with a large choice of engines. A viable alternative for things you do very often (e.g. play on FICS, or play your own engine on ICC) is to use a shortcut. Such a shortcut hardly offers any flexibility, as it always starts WinBoard with exactly the same combination of options. But it does allow you to start this combination with a single mouse click, which can be convenient for something you do frequently. And the WinBoard menus offer you a possibility to tailor some settings later.
If you browse to the WinBoard directory of the Gold Pack (~\WinBoard), starting from "My Computer" on the desk top, You will see a number of black-knight icons. Except for the one marked "winboard" these are all shortcuts (recognizable from the small arrof in their lower left). They were defined as examples for how shortcuts can be used to ease some common tasks.
A good example to look how this works at is the Xiangqi Game Viewer. Double-click this, and you will see WinBoard come up in Xiangqi mode (Chinese Chess), without an engine. (HoiXiangqi and TJxiangqi are WB engines that play Xiangqi, btw.) Only the WinBoard main window will be there. Compare this to what you get when you click the winboard icon itself (i.e. not a shotcut): this will pop up the start-up dialog first, where you would have to tick that you want to use WinBoard to view or edit games only, after which it would come up in the default mode, with game history, engine output and evaluation graph all popped up. (Unless you changed this default after downloading the Gold Pack.) So to get into the desired mode pre-programmed in the "Xiangqi Game Viewer" shortcut, you would first have to close these auxiiary windows (in the "Mode" menu), and then use the "File -> New Variant..." menu to select Xiangqi. So the shortcut does save quite some effort.
To see how the shortcut manages this, right-click it, and select "Properties". You will see the command line that calls up WinBoard in the "target" field of the popup you get. This line is so long that it does not nearly fit, so you will only see the last part, and will have to click the text and move the cursor to the left with the arrow keys to scroll through the rest. To save you that trouble, we give you the line here:
~\WinBoard\winboard.exe /ncp /engineOutputUp=false /moveHistoryUp=false /evalGraphUp=false /variant=xiangqi /saveSettingsOnExit=falsewhere the twiddle stands for the path where you installed the Gold Pack. (Windows XP adapts this automatically, first time you use the shortcut.) From left to right, the options tell WinBoard that there is no Chess program (so it skips the startup dialog), that the three auxiliary windows are not up, that the variant is Xiangqi, and that all this should not be copied to the wiboard.ini file.
OK, that is pretty nasty, and if you want to do something more complicated (e.g. specify a Chess engine and a Chess server on top of this), it gets much worse. Very quickly you run into the problem that the target field of the shortcut refuses to accept more characters, as Windows imposes a rather tight limit on this. Fortunately WinBoard allows you to put "command-line options" in a file as well. Then you only have to give the name of that file on the command line, preceded with an '@' sign. That allows us to do things in a less cumbersome way.
So next look to the "Gothic Chess" shortcut, and double-click it to see what it does. It should bring up WinBoard + evaluation-graph window, in Gothic-Chess mode with Fairy-Max as engine. If you select "Mode -> "Two Machines", Fairy-Max should start to play itself. How is it done? In this case the shortct only contains the line
~\WinBoard\winboard.exe @Gothic.ini(Unfortunately, Windows XP dos not seem to display options that start with '@' in the target field of the shortcut Properties menu, but it is really there.) The actual options are all in the file Gothic.ini, which you also see in the WinBoard folder.
Now open this Gothic.ini file with a text editor, e.g. NotePad. (Usually double-clicking it is enough, if not, a window pops up in which you have to select NotPad.) You will see the arguments there (top to bottom) to tell WinBoard we want to run an engine, play Gothic Chess, use Fairy-Max in its own folder as both first and second engine, close the engine-output and move-history auxiliary windows, and do not copy those settings to the winboard.ini file for the next time. This way of doing things gives us a much better overview of the settings, especially since we can use comment lines (starting with a semicolon ';') in the options file to explain them.
We therefore recommend to use options files for defining shortcuts, and have given several more examples of those in the WinBoard folder, plus the shortcuts that use them. There is nothing against distributing the options over multiple options files. For instance, the "wood.ini" file shows how to set the options to make a wooden board, the "ChessMark.ini" shows how to use a font for defining the piece symbols. The "FancyLook WinBoard" shortcut uses them both, by containing the line
~\WinBoard\winboard.exe @ChessMark.ini @wood.iniin its target field.
As an exercise, let us make a shortcut for playing Fairy-Max on a wooden board. We start with making a copy of the FairyMaxICC.ini file (right-click -> copy, right-click the background, -> paste). Change the name of the copy that appears into "Fairy.ini". (If the .ini was not shown in the name before, also don't type it in the new name either!) Now open the copy with NotePad, to change the settings. Delete the line
/variant=gothicas we want to make a shortcut for normal Chess now. Then delete the lines that set the /engineOutputUp and /moveHistoyUp to false, so the similar lines in winboard.ini (which were setting these options to true in the original settings of the WinBoard Gold Pack) again take force. Then save the modified text.
Now right-click the "winboard" knight icon (which is not a shortcut), and select "Make Shortcut" from the popup menu. Change the name of the newly appearing shortcut to "WoodMax" (say). Then right-click this shortcut, and select "Propeties". The text in the "target" field of the popup will now just be the name of the winboard.exe. Click this text at the end to put the cursor there (posibly with help of the arrow keys). Then add to this line " @wood.ini @Fairy.ini", so the line becomes:
~\WinBoard\winboard.exe @wood.ini @Fairy.iniand click "OK". This completes the process. If you double-click the WoodMax icon, WinBoard should now pop up with a wooden board, in normal-Chess mode with the normal built-in piece symbols, Fairy-Max as engine, and all auxiliary windows open.
This is pretty much all that can be said about how to mak shortcuts; the main problem is to figure out what the options are that do what you want done. Looking in the winboard.ini file often can provide inspiration, and when all else fails, as a final resort, you can read the manual!
; ; Start up Fairy-Max for a game of Gothic Chess ; first specify Human-engine and the variant ; /chessProgram=true /variant=gothic ; ; ; identify the engine to run ; /firstChessProgram="fmax" /firstDirectory="../Fairy-Max" /secondChessProgram="fmax" /secondDirectory="../Fairy-Max" ; ; ; because board is wide, close auxiliary windows to save some space ; /engineOutputUp=false /moveHistoryUp=false ; ; ; prevent this from automatically becoming standard setting ; /saveSettingsOnExit=false