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Fergus:
| Software standards for integrating Game Courier with a GUI or
| a game engine would have to arise from an actual project of trying to
| integrate Game Courier with some actual piece of software, and I would
| have to work with the programmer on this,  ...

Well, so WinBoard is the GUI, and I am your man! :-)

| Furthermore, my greater interest right now is in helping a GUI gain 
| moreof the capability of Game Courier, especially in graphics and in 
| the capacity to handle more types of variants. 

It has always been my aim to develop WinBoard in this direction, and I
think I already made a very good start at this.

| Zillions of Games has  a great interface, but it is too weak for many
| games, especially Shogi-like games. 

Agreed. The level of Zillions is probaby perfect for beginners, but it is
no match for dedicated engines. And especially piece drops are a weak spot
in its search algorithm.

| My special interest is in having a strong Shogi program that can use 
| the graphics I have designed for Shogi and which can handle some of my |
Shogi variants, such as Kamikaze Mortal Shogi and the Hex Shogi games.

Building a Sogi engine is one of the things on my to-do list. I decided to
re-write my Chess engine Joker (and have actualy started working on that)
in such a way that it is more friendly to implementation of variants, e.g.
using a 10x10 board as basis (so that 8x8, 10x8, 9x9 and 9x10 can be
implemented as a subset, by filling a larger part of the internal 16x16
board with edge guards, besides the 3-wide guard band). Adding piece drops
to that would be a very good basis for a strong Shogi engine.