H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Feb 29, 2020 12:37 PM UTC:
I am sad to say that there still seems to be a problem with the ChessV.Engine.exe WinBoard engine, which I failed to catch and report before, even though I should have realized something was amiss by the long time it took to load ChessV. When I run this engine from the command line, it nicely prints "feature done=1" at the end of a long list of features (ending with the variants feature), in response to "protover 2". But when I run it under WinBoard it does not do that. So that WinBoard, after a timeout (which fortunately occurs after 10 sec, as ChessV did not start with feature done=0), WinBoard qualifies it as a WB v1 engine, which apparently sets the variants list to just the current variant, 'normal'. (This is arguably a WinBoard bug, but it was a hack to make WB v1 engines dedicated to a specific variant, such as TSCP-G work.)
This doesn't seem just a failure to flush the feature done=1 when running under a GUI; in the WinBoard debug log the "feature done=1" never appears, but after sending the engine a move, before it starts thinking, it resends the option definition for "Weakening" instead.
Btw, the syntax of that option definition is wrong (which causes it to be rejected by WinBoard): the closing quote should be at the very end, not immediately after the option name, like
feature option="Weakening -slider 0 0 15"
[Edit] And from the command line it doesn't seem to respond to the 'quit' command.
I am sad to say that there still seems to be a problem with the ChessV.Engine.exe WinBoard engine, which I failed to catch and report before, even though I should have realized something was amiss by the long time it took to load ChessV. When I run this engine from the command line, it nicely prints "feature done=1" at the end of a long list of features (ending with the variants feature), in response to "protover 2". But when I run it under WinBoard it does not do that. So that WinBoard, after a timeout (which fortunately occurs after 10 sec, as ChessV did not start with feature done=0), WinBoard qualifies it as a WB v1 engine, which apparently sets the variants list to just the current variant, 'normal'. (This is arguably a WinBoard bug, but it was a hack to make WB v1 engines dedicated to a specific variant, such as TSCP-G work.)
This doesn't seem just a failure to flush the feature done=1 when running under a GUI; in the WinBoard debug log the "feature done=1" never appears, but after sending the engine a move, before it starts thinking, it resends the option definition for "Weakening" instead.
Btw, the syntax of that option definition is wrong (which causes it to be rejected by WinBoard): the closing quote should be at the very end, not immediately after the option name, like
[Edit] And from the command line it doesn't seem to respond to the 'quit' command.