Tim Mann's Chess Pages

Main Chess Page XBoard and WinBoard Chess Engines Extensions and Drivers GNU Chess Deep Thought Internet Chess Servers Zippy Bughouse XBoard Project History Chess Links Back to Tim Mann's Home Page

Chess Engines

Information for authors

Are you writing a chess engine that you want to have work with XBoard and/or WinBoard? Are you writing a chess user interface or other tool and want it to work with the same engines that work with XBoard and WinBoard? Here are some pointers.

First, read the Chess Engine Communication Protocol document, which describes the protocol that XBoard and WinBoard use to communicate with engines. The document linked above reflects version 2.0, implemented in the stable XBoard/WinBoard 4.2.7. Some additional feature commands and some clarifications are in development for 4.4.0 and later. See the revised draft document. The revised document might move to the GNU XBoard Project Page at some point.

Second, go to the WinBoard Forum and ask the folks there for help and advice if you need it. (The old Chess Engines group on Yahoo has fallen largely into disuse and the currently active XBoard/WinBoard developers are not monitoring it.)

Information for players

There are literally hundreds of chess engines (programs that play chess) that work with XBoard and/or WinBoard. I gave up on keeping an updated list years ago, and the old list that used to be here contained so many dead links that I have deleted it.

Some good places to find out about chess engines that you can use include Leo Dijksman's web site and the WinBoard Forum. Also see the other links on my Chess Web Sites page.