Stellios' GNU Xboard Patches

Some background, I had an old chess program on windows that had the option of showing legal moves by highlighting the squares that a piece can legally move to. It also had another option of showing threatened pieces, by showing the threatened pieces squares in red. Well, I thought these would make great features for GNU Xboard so I wrote these two patches.

The patches are for stable release GNU xboard-4.2.7 which is available from here

This patch highlights squares in blue where a piece can legally move once you pick the piece up and unhighlights them when you put the piece down.

Highlighted squares screenshots

This patch highlights the piece's square in red when the piece is threatened. This is both for the player's and opponent's pieces. This is useful for beginners to make it more apparent which pieces is being threatened, and which one of their pieces is threatened.

Threatened pieces screenshots

Download the patches,

To apply a patch -

	tar -zxvf xboard-4.2.7.tar.gz
	cp patchfile.patch xboard-4.2.7
	cd xboard-4.2.7
	patch -p0 < patchfile.patch
	./configure && make && ./xboard

From the Options menu select "Show Legal Moves" or "Show Threatened Pieces" to toggle on. By default the features are turned off.

Notes: There seems to be a problem with xboard in finding "gnuchessx" or "gnuchess". To fix the problem create symlinks like ..

 /usr/bin/gnuchessx -> /usr/bin/gnuchess

 /usr/bin/gnuchess -> /usr/bin/gnuchessx

I am also unsure why xboard takes around 5 seconds to start up on version 4.2.7 but not on 4.2.6

Any feedback stelliosk at optushome.com.au

Have Fun!

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