Tim Mann's Chess Pages

Main Chess Page XBoard and WinBoard Frequently Asked Questions Chess Engines Extensions and Drivers GNU Chess Crafty Deep Thought Internet Chess Servers Zippy Bughouse Links and Web Tools Back to Tim Mann's Home Page

Chess Web Sites

My Web pages are here to provide original content, not a long list of links to other sites. I have neither the time nor the interest to maintain a large collection of links, or to trade links with other pages. But here are a few starting points you may find useful.

Pages primarily about XBoard and WinBoard

• A Tribute to WinBoard, by Ed Collins
• WinBoard and Chess Engines: Frequently Asked Questions, by Aaron Tay
• WBEC Ridderkerk, an ongoing tournament between WinBoard engines, with a comprehensive list of WinBoard engines, by Leo Dijksman.
• WinBoard Engines Newsticker, by Thomas Mayer
• Frank's Chess Page by Frank Quisinsky (in German and English)
• How to use Crafty with WinBoard, by Mark Yatras
• WinBoard Setup Page, by Mogens Larsen
• Information about WinBoard by Volker Pittlik (in German)
• Dboard (formerly called Deluxe), an extension to XBoard by Christoph Bauer.

Computer chess pages

• Shane Hudson has a Web page where you can get his free chess database, called Scid. Scid runs on both Unix (including Linux) and Windows.
• Arena is a free graphical user interface that works with WinBoard-compatible chess engines. It's for Windows only.
• A free chess database called Jose is now available. It has a database (using MySQL), 2-D and 3-D board views, and can plug in XBoard-compatible engines. It runs on both Windows and Linux.
• Many commercial chess programs for Windows can now use WinBoard-compatible chess engines too, including Chessmaster 8000 and 9000. With the exception of the Chessmaster folks, the commercial chess software vendors generally never attempt to communicate with me, so I don't have much idea what they're doing and can't provide information here. If you'd like to learn more, Aaron Tay keeps a listing of WinBoard engines that work in commercial GUIs.
• DJ Delorie runs a Web site that lets you play a game against GNU Chess using your Web browser as the graphical interface.
• Keith Fuller has a Web page from which you can get the latest version of pgnRead, his PGN viewer for Windows.
• The Computer Chess Programming page is a great starting point if you're interested in learning how to write your own chess engine.
• Another good place to look is the International Computer Games Association home page. (Formerly the International Computer Chess Association.)

General chess pages

• The Internet Chess Club links page is a good place to start.
• Try an AltaVista query on chess to find even more places to go.
• Steve Pribut maintains the FAQs for rec.games.chess.*.
• Mark Crowther's The Week In Chess began as a weekly posting to rec.games.chess.*, and has now grown into a Web site where you can download hundreds of new tournament games each week.

Chess FTP Sites

FTP sites are rather old hat these days, but there are still a few with chess files that you can download.

• The Free Internet Chess Server provides an FTP site called the Internet Chess Library.
• The University of Pittsburgh Chess Club keeps an archive of material from the FIDOnet Filebone (among other things).
• The Internet Chess Club has a small FTP site for graphical interfaces and its netlag-compensating program timestamp.

Chess Discussion Groups

Here are some good places to talk about computer chess.

• Volker Pittlik runs a Web message board called the WinBoard Forum. This is the main place to talk about WinBoard, xboard, and chess engines that work with them.
• There is a mailing list for authors of chess engines that work with XBoard and WinBoard, hosted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chess-engines. Others can join, but you probably won't find the list interesting unless you write software that speaks the chess engine communication protocol used by XBoard and WinBoard. You can join by sending mail to chess-engines-subscribe@groups.yahoo.com, or go to the Web site. You can also read the list on the Web site if you prefer not to receive it by mail. The list is partially moderated, to block spam and offtopic posts.
• The Usenet newsgroup rec.games.chess.computer is devoted to computer chess. Historically, it was also the site of a lot of ugly, off-topic flame wars. This led to the founding of the Computer Chess Club message board.
• The Computer Chess Club is a Web message board for discussion of computer chess. It's moderated in an attempt to prevent flame wars. Membership is free. It's much more active than the Usenet computer chess group.
• There is a Crafty mailing list. To subscribe, send email to majordomo@cis.uab.edu, with "subscribe crafty-list" in the body. The list is moderated to filter out spam and flames.
• The WinBoard Info forum run by Ed Seid seems to be dormant.

Linking to PGN

Note: this information is here for historical reasons. The idea of linking to PGN files as a special MIME type and using a PGN viewer as a helper application never really took off.

Your Web browser can use XBoard or WinBoard as its helper application for viewing PGN files at Web sites. Follow the instructions in the XBoard FAQ, and then use the following links to test whether you have it working.

• Bobby Fischer's 60 Memorable Games
• My win against POTZY in an ICC simul
• I win with 1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 f5?!

If you want to put links like this on your own Web site, here are a couple of ways to do it.

1. Add pgn to the list of file extensions that your Web server automatically maps to MIME types, mapping it to application/x-chess-pgn. Details of how to do this vary depending on exactly which Web server you are running; see your server's documentation.
2. Alternatively, you can write a CGI script that supplies the MIME type. This method lets you leave the server configuration unchanged. In addition, you can serve the same file as either text or PGN by linking to it either directly or through the CGI script. Feel free to copy and adapt the perl script I wrote for this purpose.