New Version Of Zknights Chess Board

[qx773]

After I suggested to Udo Berger that he make the jog dial let the human player review previous moves, he implemented that feature.  He replied that when the move history list box has the focus, you can use the jog dial to move back and forth in the history list.  With the new version, the history list box has the focus by default.  You can also use the up and down keys.  The chess board and various compatible chess engines are available for download from:

http://free.pages.at/uberger/zaurus/zknights_en.html

[maystorm]

This doesn't work for loaded PGN games, right? Only for games currently in progress?

[qx773]

Correct.  That is something that I also noticed.  It would be handy to be able to go back and forward in the moves list to review stored PGN games.  That would be a nice feature for the next version of the program.

[maystorm]

Yes, would be a nice nice-to-have feature.

However, I'm currently struggling with another problem: I don't seem to be able to pass time settings to the phalanx engine, e.g.: Although I've set "40 moves per 120 minutes"  when starting a new match in zknights it wouldn't get passed to phalanx (as one can check by issuing a "ps ax --cols 1000" from a terminal console). znkights only adds the "-e" option to the list of arguments defined in Phalanx/engine.conf;  however, the "-e" option (Easy level) is only meant to simulate human blunders but doesn't really define the playing strength. The default level in phalanx is - I think - 10 seconds per move which may be to easy for advanced players.

I can work around this problem by editing engine.conf and manually adding " 40 120" at the end of the Arguments line (and maybe additionally "-p+" to enable pondering) before starting a new match but I would like zknights to pass this option automatically when it starts the phalanx engine.

Is there anything I'm missing?

[qx773]

I recommend that you contact Udo Berger via email and communicate your concerns to him.  His email address can be found in the Help / About zKnights menu.  I do not want to explicitly post his email address here, because it could then be picked up by web crawlers used by spammers.

[maystorm]

Okay, going to do that. Thanx.

[maystorm]

Small update:

Udo was so kind as to make a fix regarding the time options!

zknights now properly passes either "Number of moves per time frame" (eg. 40 moves within 120 min.) or "Average time per single move" (eg. 45 seconds per move) to the Phalanx chess engine. For both alternatives to work the "Easy Level" option which is still supported must be set to 'Strong'. If the slider is set to a lower level, then the Phalanx engine falls back to its standard behaviour of 10 seconds per move but drops in an intentional blunder move once in a while.

You can grab the new zknights version 0.6.1.2 as usual from Udo's Zaurus pages:

http://free.pages.at/uberger/zaurus/

Thanx Udo!