Enter Your Reply

I made a lot of progess with the Lasker server. I now have a version that supports (next to normal Chess) the unspeakable variant and Knightmate. I will leave it running on my laptop overnight (which will amount to approximately 6:00 pm to 2:00 am EST), so that people interested in it can try it out (by logging in as 'guest'). You might have to login twice, and play yourself, though; there will probably not be many visitors. The server works just like FICS. To start a knightmate game of 5 min + 3sec/move you would have to type: match unrated 5 3 knightmate 1 where is the name ('handle') of someone else logged in at that time. (You can see who is logged in by the 'who' command.) Don't bother to challenge 'admin', as that is me, and I will be sleeping! :-) You can substitute 'knightmate' with the 6-letter name of the variant whose mentioning is not allowed on this website, to play that. You can play through an ASCII client like 'telnet', but the ASCII board styles (selectable by 'style N', N=1-8) are not yet fully adapted to 10x8 boards. (You will see all pieces, but any auxiliary board lines will be too short, and the files will be labelled incorrectly.) The IP address of the server is 80.100.28.169 and the port is 5000. So to connect by telnet from the command lne you would have to type: telnet 80.100.28.169 5000 To play graphically, you should download the WinBoard client I adapted for understanding the ICS protocol extension to non-8x8 boards. You can download this from http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/ICSclient.zip unpack and save the 'ICSclient' folder in it into your C:/Program Files/ folder. There are shortcuts in there to connect to the server. Just click them, and you will see WinBoard appear with an window were you can communicate in text with the server. You have to login, and issue and accept challenges through that window. Once you start a game, WinBoard will kick in, and you will see the moves of your opponent in its board display, and can enter moves there by dragging and dropping the pieces, until the game ends. With 'observe ' you can view ongoing games between others in the WinBoard display.