Single Comment

This is a developers-only snapshot of a program that may become a usable chess variant engine. However, there are a number of issues that need to be worked out:

• There is no documentation on how to actually use fairy max. The only way to figure out how to use the program is to read the C source.
• The C source code does not contain any license text. I would like to know under what license the program is released, and whether the terms are OSI-approved Open Source compatible (GPL, etc.)
• The program itself has no built-in help
• There is also WinBoardF, which has support for a few chess variants. However, there is no documentation about how to interface WinboardF with fairy max.

Unlike SMIRF and ChessV, there is no convenient way to use this program to actually play any chess variants (In both of those cases, it was simply a matter of selecting a variant, telling it to play white or black, and start playing). I can see most of the pieces are in place; once there is documentation about hooking up Fmax (or Joker) to WinboardF, this will probably be a playable and enjoyable variant engine.

- Sam

P.S.: I will change my rating once documentation is available to actually interface fairy max with WinboardF. I will change my rating to one even higher if a well integrated fairy max + WinboardF package is made, which doesn't require any messing around with .ini files to play fairy chess against the computer.