Hi Derek, your proposal will not be forgotten, but it has to wait until
there would be some more serious donations from other people. Indeed I
worked on that idea already conceptually. But there are some obstacles.
E.g. the row nr could be encoded as a marked bit within a single byte, but
only as long as using not more than 8 rows. So a 10x10 board would qualify
a lot of procedures as no longer usable then and would demand for an
appropriate rewrite of a lot of code.
Additionally I am still missing a matching 10x10 variant compatibly
including the rules of traditional chess.