

- #REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC FULL#
- #REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC SOFTWARE#
- #REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC CODE#
- #REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC MAC#
When compiled the result would be a small native OS X binary which HCE could run and would communicate via the UCI protocol properly.Ĭode: g++ engineUCI-1.0.2.cc -o engineUCI-1.0.2If you used full paths to Wine and the (permanent) location of your engine, this file should be ready to be loaded into HCE.
#REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC CODE#
The solution I found was to write a little C++ code which would make a system call to run the Win32 engine in Wine. Actually, all those engines are just text based, you can type what you want them to do if you run them on the command line and can be bothered. Fortunately all UCI needs is for data to be transmitted in and out using stdin, stdout and (kind of optionally) stderr. It needs to be a single file, so using a wineskin or cider port won't help. The process to make the engine behave is to make a very simple wrapper for it that HIARCS Chess Explorer (HCE) will recognise as a mach-o executable and which will respond to all the UCI instructions appropriately.
#REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC MAC#
Mac Ports restricts itself to /opt/local and stays there (which is a nice way of saying Mac Ports is designed better than Home Brew, it's just that Home Brew is more popular).Ĥ) One or more Win32 only UCI chess engines you want to get working.ĥ) A decent text editor, no qualms with using the command line and a rudimentary knowledge of compiling software. I used Wine installed with Mac Ports, many people swear by Home Brew, but it messes with other dev environments it shouldn't be touching so I avoid it. My dev work has been on 10.9.x (Mavericks).Ģ) The XCode SDK from Apple, including the command line tools.ģ) Wine or CrossOver. I'm not going to simply repost everything here, but a summary will help (then if it's the sort of thing you're willing to try you can go to that forum for the step-by-step instructions).ġ) A Mac running some version of OS X capable of running HIARCS (or possibly some other OS X only software), so probably 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) and above. Essentially it worked and the ongoing results of that little project are being posted to the HIARCS forum as I go. also known as reading the protocol specs and I devised a cunning plan.

Since I had Arena running under Wine before I bought HIARCS I began to wonder how difficult it would be to get those 32-bit Windows engines to play nicely on the Mac, but without using a Windows GUI.Ī crash course in the Universal Chess Interface (UCI). That said, you should never rely on just one engine for analysis, training or whatever.


The engines this thing came with (mainly Deep HIARCS 14) are pretty damn good and do a more than reasonable job of playing a "human-like" game (no easy task), rather than just being compact power-houses of pure tactics, brute-forcing their way through games and, almost incidentally, their human masters (insert pointed look at Stockfish and Houdini here). Don't get me wrong, Rebel for DOS was brilliant for its time, but a clean interface wasn't exactly something it could lay claim to.
#REVIEW OF HIARCS CHESS ENGINE MAC SOFTWARE#
I've used a lot of chess software over the years, but this is by far the cleanest and most intuitive of all the interfaces I've dealt with. My primary chess database and management software these days is Deep HIARCS Chess Explorer for Mac.
