kak@hico2.UUCP (Kris A. Kugel) (05/26/91)
[ARRRGH, I need to fix the way postnews handles articles cross-posted to moderated groups!] I'm trying to obtain some documentation on how chesstool (or Xchess) talks to gnuchess. Another person and I are trying to put togeather a nice chess front end for a system not running sunview or xwindows. We were figuring on using gnuchess for the backend for this, but I can't find a specification for how gnuchess and chesstool talk to each other, and any experiments with gnuchessr don't seem to match what the X program code seems to be looking for. I can handle the pipes/exec/signals, but I need to know how the programs communicate after that. By adding the -DSUNTOOLS flag when I make gnuchessr, I've gotten something LIKE what I'd expect for output to be used by chesstool. But I still don't know how to get the code to, say, switch sides: If I use "black", like the help command (which works) claims, gnuchess mearly responds with some illegal move, like moving a rook that can't move. I'm assuming that SOMEWHERE there is a specification on what chess tool is expecting from its exec'd logic program. I'd assume that SOMEWHERE there is a specification that says what gnuchessr (with -DSUNTOOLS) allows as input. I'd assume that these two should be very similar. I don't remember this being in the chesstool manual (back when I had access to a Sun workstation). Does anybody know either how chesstool recognizes moves from an external program, or what gnuchessr accepts as input? (probably best to respond by email) Kris A. Kugel ( 908 ) 842-2707 uunet!westmark!hico2!kak (maybe) {daver,ditka,zorch}!hico2!kak internet: kak@hico2.westmark.com from inside at&t: att!hico2!kak