WinBoard 4.7 is the follow-up line of WinBoard 4.6, which ended with version 4.6.2. A special version of WinBoard is available for visually impaired people, for working with the JAWS or NVDA screen readers, but for now the old 4.5.2 is the latest JAWS version available. (See the post below or click here to get there.) WinBoard 4.7.0 has many new features added compared to its predecessors. WinBoard 4.7.3 is the latest bugfix release of the 4.7 series.
WinBoard 4.7 can be downloaded as an installer package from here. This installer contains all essential support programs, such as Polyglot and timeseal, pre-installed and ready to run. It contains two demo engines, a native WinBoard engine (Fairy-Max 4.8) and a UCI engine (Fruit 2.1). The 4.7 installer also contains adapters for running Xiangqi UCI and UCCI engines, and Shogi USI engines, and optional engines for these and other Chess variants.
New features of WinBoard 4.7 are the possibility to exclude moves from interactive analysis, create opening books from files with games, and improved graphics options which can be organized as themes by means of a new dialog. It has also been made possible to start WinBoard by simply dragging files of various types (games, positions, tournaments, settings) on top of it; WinBoard will then start in the mode required to process files of the given type (as game viewer, playing the for the tournament, or with the specified settings). There exists a somewhat older experimental "Alien Edition", and as development goes on, new experimental versions will become available in the future.
Download WinBoard 4.7.3 installer (2.5MB)
Download experimental WinBoard executable (500 kB), (with support for some non-Chesslike games, such as Checkers and Amazons, see here).
Old versions:
WinBoard 4.6 downloads.
WinBoard 4.5 downloads.
WinBoard 4.4 downloads.
This installer also contains optional sections for using WinBoard as a Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) GUI, and engines for Shogi (Japanese Chess), and for general Chess Variant aficionados. For more information about the Xiangqi capabilities of WinBoard, look here. The variants section provides engines for in total more than 20 widely different Chess Variants (most of them through the Fairy-Max and Pulsar engines), ranging from Chess960 and Gothic Chess to Crazyhouse, Losers and Atomic. For the exact rules of these games, see http://www.chessvariants.org .
The source code for WinBoard 4.7.3 and previous versions can be obtained from the GNU website. Use the tar ball that is tagged 4.7.3 (xboard-4.7.3.tar.gz). Most unzippers should understand this format (e.g. 7Zip).
What is New?
An elaborate description of the new features can be found on the GNU web pages. There you can also find a (new) User Guide summarizing the features of XBoard, which, apart from the screenshots, should largely apply to WinBoard as well.
Note that the UCI support built in this WinBoard version can only be fully exploited with the most recent Polyglot versions (which are of course included in the 4.7.1 installer pack). The source code of these are now collected in an on-line git repository, hosted at http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi . Note that the Polyglot included with WinBoard 4.7.3 was obtained by compiling the 2.0.1 version in the "learn" branch of that repository. Older Polyglots would not support exclusion of moves from analysis.
XBoard 4.7.3
Version 4.7.3 also includes a new XBoard which supports the same new features as WinBoard. The front-end of XBoard 4.7 has been completely rewritten. It is now based on the Cairo graphics library, using png and (resizable) svg image files rather than the xpm and bm image formats used in previous versions. Also new is that an experimental port to the more modern GTK widget set (in stead of the very old Athena widget set) can be built from the same code base. To enhance ease of operation, a new mime type (xop) is defined for files containing XBoard command-line options, so that XBoard can be started with those options by double-clicking such a file. Binary packages for various Linux distributions should be available from the build server. (Consult the XBoard home page how to get there.) People using other Unix / Linux distributions can install from source. The sources are kept at the GNU XBoard website.
WinBoard / XBoard source code
XBoard 4.7.0 Load Engine dialog