How can I interface my own chess program to XBoard or WinBoard?
This is a non-trivial task. XBoard and WinBoard were not designed with a clean interface for talking to chess programs; they were written to work with an existing version of GNU Chess that expects to be talking to a person. Your program has to emulate GNU Chess’s rather idiosyncratic command structure to work with XBoard and WinBoard. We are gradually cleaning up, improving, and documenting the interface as newer versions of XBoard and WinBoard come out, however. For documentation, see the file engine-intf.html, included in both distributions or available from my chess Web page, http://www.tim-mann.org/chess.html. The version of engine-intf.html on my Web page is often more up-to-date than those in the XBoard/WinBoard distributions.
This is a non-trivial task. XBoard and WinBoard were not designed with a clean interface for talking to chess programs; they were written to work with an existing version of GNU Chess that expects to be talking to a person. Your program has to emulate GNU Chess’s rather idiosyncratic command structure to work with XBoard and WinBoard. We are gradually cleaning up, improving, and documenting the interface as newer versions of XBoard and WinBoard come out, however. For documentation, see the file engine-intf.html, included in both distributions or available from my chess Web page, http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Tim_Mann/chess.html . The version of engine-intf.html on my Web page is often more up-to-date than those in the XBoard/WinBoard distributions.
