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H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Oct 9, 2008 09:34 AM UTC:

Fergus: | I have tried running Winboard-F with Fairy-Max, but when I select a | variant, it frequently tells me that the variant is not supported by | Fairy-Max 4.8C. What is the latest stable version? How can I make sure | I have it installed? The latest version (now on my website) would say Fairy-Max 4.8E and in thw WinBoard 'Help->About...' menu WinBoard 4.3.15h. But none of the earier versions is particuarly unstable. The problem is merely that Fairy-Max indeed does not support all variants. You should realize that WinBoard and Fairy-Max are completely independent developments, and that Fairy-Max is merely one of the hundreds of engines that can be run under WinBoard. (Most of these play only normal Chess, of course.) I agree that the response of WinBoard, to simply exit if one requests an unsupported variant, is perhaps a bit harsh and user unfriendly. I guess this stems from the time the variant could not be changed at run time through a menu, but only on startup through a command-line option. In that case there was no way to give a new variant if the one specified in the command-line option was not supported by the engine, so no fix was possible. I will put it on my to-do list to 'grey out' the variants the engine does not support in the 'New Variant' menu. As a temporary measure I will maintain the error popup for unsupported variants, but make it a non-fatal error, and simply keep the old variant in force if the newly selected variant is unsupported by the engine. (Treat it equivalent 'pressing 'Cancel'. The version of Fairy-Max in the download only has definitions for the variants: normal, shatranj, courier, knightmate, capablanca, , falcon, cylinder, berolina, super. To play other variants with WinBoard you would have to download other engines. e.g. Pulsar by Mike Adams (losers, suicide/giveaway, 3checks, crazyhouse, atomic) ( http://www.adam16mr.org/pulsar.html ) TJchess by Tony Hecker (separate versions for crazyhouse, shogi, xiangqi, capablanca) ( http://tonyjh.com/chess/ ) SMIRF by Reinhard Scharnagl (e.g. CRC, FRC, Capablanca, Janus) ( http://www.chessbox.de/ , but needs adapter which was included in the WinBoard download ) And of course add shortcuts to start up WinBoard using those engines, or start WinBoard without the aid of any shortcut, and select the name of the engine you want (or type it) in the WinBoard startup dialog.

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Comments

Fairy-Max

. Free open source chess variant software.

💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Oct 6, 2018 05:51 AM UTC:

I do know that Android compiles of Fairy-Max are available, and that people use it for instance with Aart Bik's 'Chess for Android' app. The latter only supports normal Chess, however, and none of the other variants Fairy-Max plays. WinBoard / XBoard is certainly not available for Android; it would have to be completely rewritten for that. I am not aware of any chess-variant-capable GUIs that can work with engines for Android. I don't have an Android device myself.

lweifjwielfjewfoiwjo lwiejosldfiew wrote on Fri, Oct 5, 2018 11:00 PM UTC:

Are there any known Android Apps that use Fairy-Max as their chess engine?

Steven Streetman wrote on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 07:21 PM UTC:

Thanks. I will see what I can do.

💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 06:41 PM UTC:

Fairy-Max knows the concept of royal pieces, the capture of which means the
end of the game. You can have more of those, but in that case loss of the
first means loss of the game, so they still would not be allowed to venture
into check. From what you say, I gather your game is different. Which would
mean you cannot play it with Fairy-Max by just changing the piece
definitions in the fmax.ini file.

That of course does not mean that Fairy-Max could not be adapted to handle
the novel winning condition at the level of the C code. I have for instance
made a derivative to play Shatranj, which implements the baring rule as
winning condition, and this required just three extra code lines. To judge how
easy or difficult this would be, requires exact knowledge of the winning
condition.

Steven Streetman wrote on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 05:38 PM UTC:

H. G. Muller

Thanks for your suggestion concerning applying Fairy-Max to my chess
variant. I have just starting looking at chess variant playing software and
there are a few. Before I download it and start trying to figure it out I
have a question.

Question:
My chess variation is different in that one side (white) has one King and
the other side (black) has two Kings.  There are, consequently, very
specific rules concerning checking the black King(s) and checkmate. For
example when black has two kings in play they are immune to check but not
immune if they are simultaneously checked. So I am wondering if this
circumstance would preclude the use of Fairy-Max?

Number of ratings: 2, Average rating: Average, Number of comments: 24

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