NAME¶
hachu - xboard-compatible engine for Chu Shogi and other variants
SYNOPSIS¶
hachu
DESCRIPTION¶
hachu is a program that plays several shogi and chess variants, currently
sho shogi, chu shogi, dai shogi, makruk and shatranj. In the future it might
play more, and still larger shogi variants, in particular tenjiku shogi.
HaChu uses the xboard/winboard chess-engine protocol to communicate. It thus can
use XBoard as a graphical interface for the variants also supported by the
latter. Only XBoard 4.8 and later support chu shogi, but sho shogi should
already work under XBoard 4.7, and Makruk and Shatranj under much older
versions. Dai shogi is not supported by XBoard yet.
See
xboard(6) for instructions about how to use
hachu through
xboard. To start up quickly, you just need the command:
xboard -fcp
hachu. You can then use XBoard's New Variant dialog to select the variant
you want to play. To play chu shogi, it is essential that XBoard's 'show
target squares' option is switched on; otherwise the two-step lion moves can
not be entered.
Normally XBoard will use western-style chess symbols to represent the pieces.
But HaChu comes with a set of piece images in the shape of the Japenese kanji
for the names of the chu-shogi pieces. These can be used in XBoard to get an
oriental-style board display. A settings file for configuring XBoard to use
these pieces is also included with HaChu, so that you can use the command
xboard @chu to start XBoard with HaChu for
oriental-style chu-shogi.
OPTIONS¶
- INTERACTIVE OPTIONS
- HaChu supports some options that can only be set interactively, though
XBoard's engine settings menu dialog. These include an option for solving
tsume problems (checkmate problems where the winning side is only allowed
to play checking moves). There are also options to adapt it to various
versions of the chu-shogi rules: whether you can only promote on entering
the promotion zone, or whether moves inside or out of the zone (after one
move delay) can also be used for promotion, and whether repeats should be
strictly forbidden, or only avoided like other losing moves.
AVAILABILITY¶
At
http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi the source code can be obtained.
SEE ALSO¶
xboard(6)
game rules:
http://hgm.nubati.net/rules
XBoard:
http://hgm.nubati.net
STANDARDS¶
WinBoard,
xboard(6) interface ("Chess Engine Communication
Protocol")
AUTHOR¶
H.G.Muller <h.g.muller@hccnet.nl>.
This manual page was generated with
pod2man(1).