Playing chess in Linux? It works!

Playing chess in Linux? It works!

[Mario Lang]

Hello.

Just wanted to inform you that there is a text-mode
chessboard application for Linux which works at least
with braille display quite well right now.

The program is called emacs-chess, and is written on top
of Emacs.  It can be used to play against various
chess-playing programs like crafty or gnuchess, and you
can also use it to play chess on the Internet via one
of the Free Internet Chess Servers.

There are alot of other funny features, like chess-link.el which allows
you to link to chess engines and let them play against themselves.

PGN capabilities are also in place.  Have a look, and
tell the author if you like it!

http://emacs-chess.sourceforge.net

-- 
CYa,
  Mario

Re: Playing chess in Linux? It works!

[Janina Sajka]

Hmmm, don't know about emacs-chess. I do know that GNU Chess works very 
well.



On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Mario Lang wrote:

> 
> Hello.
> 
> Just wanted to inform you that there is a text-mode
> chessboard application for Linux which works at least
> with braille display quite well right now.
> 
> The program is called emacs-chess, and is written on top
> of Emacs.  It can be used to play against various
> chess-playing programs like crafty or gnuchess, and you
> can also use it to play chess on the Internet via one
> of the Free Internet Chess Servers.
> 
> There are alot of other funny features, like chess-link.el which allows
> you to link to chess engines and let them play against themselves.
> 
> PGN capabilities are also in place.  Have a look, and
> tell the author if you like it!
> 
> http://emacs-chess.sourceforge.net
> 
> 

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina@afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org

Re: Playing chess in Linux? It works!

[Mario Lang]

Janina Sajka <janina@afb.net> writes:

> Hmmm, don't know about emacs-chess. I do know that GNU Chess works very 
> well.

well, gnuchess is a chess-engine.  emacs-chess is
a chessboard interface.  So it's more general, you can use
it to play against other humans on the internet for example.

gnuchess can't do that for you.

P.S.: if anyone wanna play, I'm mlang on freechess.org:5000

> On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Mario Lang wrote:
>> 
>> Just wanted to inform you that there is a text-mode
>> chessboard application for Linux which works at least
>> with braille display quite well right now.
>> 
>> The program is called emacs-chess, and is written on top
>> of Emacs.  It can be used to play against various
>> chess-playing programs like crafty or gnuchess, and you
>> can also use it to play chess on the Internet via one
>> of the Free Internet Chess Servers.
>> 
>> There are alot of other funny features, like chess-link.el which allows
>> you to link to chess engines and let them play against themselves.
>> 
>> PGN capabilities are also in place.  Have a look, and
>> tell the author if you like it!
>> 
>> http://emacs-chess.sourceforge.net

-- 
CYa,
  Mario

Re: Playing chess in Linux? It works!

[Boris Daix]

Mario Lang <mlang@teleweb.at> writes:

> Janina Sajka <janina@afb.net> writes:
>
>> Hmmm, don't know about emacs-chess. I do know that GNU Chess works very 
>> well.
>
> well, gnuchess is a chess-engine.  emacs-chess is
> a chessboard interface.  So it's more general, you can use
> it to play against other humans on the internet for example.
>
> gnuchess can't do that for you.
>
> P.S.: if anyone wanna play, I'm mlang on freechess.org:5000

I'd love but I'm behind firewall... :-( but I hope it will be ported
into official Debian packages list soon... !

>
>> On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Mario Lang wrote:
>>> 
>>> Just wanted to inform you that there is a text-mode
>>> chessboard application for Linux which works at least
>>> with braille display quite well right now.
>>> 
>>> The program is called emacs-chess, and is written on top
>>> of Emacs.  It can be used to play against various
>>> chess-playing programs like crafty or gnuchess, and you
>>> can also use it to play chess on the Internet via one
>>> of the Free Internet Chess Servers.
>>> 
>>> There are alot of other funny features, like chess-link.el which allows
>>> you to link to chess engines and let them play against themselves.
>>> 
>>> PGN capabilities are also in place.  Have a look, and
>>> tell the author if you like it!
>>> 
>>> http://emacs-chess.sourceforge.net
>
> -- 
> CYa,
>   Mario
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list@redhat.com
> https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

-- 
Boris Daix

	"Feel free to be free, or not to be..."

Re: Playing chess in Linux? It works!

[Mario Lang]

I wrote:

>> P.S.: if anyone wanna play, I'm mlang on freechess.org:5000

Boris Daix <Boris.Daix@insa-lyon.fr> replied:

> I'd love but I'm behind firewall... :-( but I hope it will be ported
> into official Debian packages list soon... !

Oh, you caught me there :).  I already promised to do the packaging,
and I promise again, I'll do it as soon as I find
a bit more time.

Since then, emacs-chess is really simple to install, you just need to
download from emacs-chess.sourceforge.net the tar-ball, extract it
somehwere in your home-directory, run make and add something like the
following to your .emacs:

;;; Chess.el
(let ((chessdir (expand-file-name
		 "~/emacs/lisp/chess")))
  (when (file-directory-p chessdir)
    (add-to-list 'load-path chessdir)
    (setq chess-sound-directory (concat chessdir "/sounds"))))
(when (load "chess-auto" t)
  (setq
   chess-default-display 'chess-plain
   chess-ics-server-list '(("freechess.org" 5000 "myname"))
   chess-plain-black-square-char 43
   chess-plain-draw-border t
   chess-plain-white-square-char 45
   chess-plain-spacing 0))

Now do M-x chess RET to start-up a game agsinst crafty if
everything went fine.  If you want to call another chess module,
prefix with C-u, so for internet chess servers, do
C-u M-x chess RET ics RET

There are different modules, look in the sources or see the info manual.

Note: I've contributed to chess-plain especially for braille display usage.
You can for instance configure each individual piece character
through variable `chess-plain-piece-chars'.  This includes the
white and black pieces.
There is also `chess-plain-upcase-indicates' which can be set to
'color or 'square-color.  Be creative :)

AFAIK there is no emacspeak support for emacs-chess yet, but it should
be really trivial to add, as text-properties label each
square.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario