7. Limitations and known bugs

Under some circumstances, your ICS password may be echoed when you log on.

If you are connecting to the ICS by running telnet on an Internet provider or firewall host, you may find that each line you type is echoed back an extra time after you hit Enter. If your Internet provider is a Unix system, you can probably turn its echo off by typing stty -echo after you log in, and/or typing ^EEnter (Ctrl+E followed by the Enter key) to the telnet program after you have logged into ICS. It is a good idea to do this if you can, because the extra echo can occasionally confuse XBoard's parsing routines.

The game parser recognizes only algebraic notation.

The internal move legality tester does not look at the game history, so in some cases it misses illegal castling or en passant captures. It permits castling with the king on the d file because this is possible in some "wild 1" games on ICS. It does not check piece drops in bughouse and crazyhouse to see if you actually hold the piece you are trying to drop. However, if you attempt an illegal move when using a chess engine or chess server, XBoard will accept the error message that comes back, undo the move, and let you try another.

Fischer Random castling is not understood. You can probably play Fischer Random successfully on ICS by typing castling moves into the ICS Interaction window, but they will not be animated correctly, and saved games will not be loaded correctly if castling occurs.

FEN positions saved by XBoard never include correct information about whether castling is legal or how many half-moves have been made since the last irreversible move, and sometimes may not correctly indicate when en passant capture is available.

The mate detector does not understand that non-contact mate is not really mate in bughouse and crazyhouse. The only problem this causes while playing is minor: a `#' (mate indicator) character will show up after a non-contact mating move in the move list; XBoard will not assume the game is over at that point. However, if you are editing a game, Edit Game mode will be terminated by a non-contact mate.

The menus may not work if your keyboard is in Caps Lock or Num Lock mode. This seems to be a problem with the Athena menu widget, not an XBoard bug.

Also see the ToDo file included with the distribution for many other possible bugs, limitations, and ideas for improvement that have been suggested.