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Falcon Chess. Game on an 8x10 board with a new piece: The Falcon. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Aug 7, 2008 06:11 PM UTC:
George:

I am close to releasing a new version of the WinBoard Chess GUI, which I expect to become widely distributed amongst Windows and Linux users. Most of the people no doubt will only be interested in playing 'normal' Chess, but I planned to include Fairy-Max with the distribution, as it can both play normal and many variants. The distribution package would look a lot like the experimental version that can be downloaded from the link I gave in the post below.

In this new WinBoard I included some support for Falcon Chess in the menus: people can click 'Falcon' as one of the options in the variant menu, and will then be able to use WinBoard as Graphical User Interface for an engine that could actually play it, provided they use one of the wildcard pieces supplied by WinBoard to represent the Falcons. I suppose you have no objection against this, and as WinBoard itself does not play the game, but only acts as a display, it probably does not fall under the patent anyway. As it would only be useful to use WinBoard this way if you did have a Falcon-Chess-playing engine, and the user can communicate with such an engine only through WinBoard, I make WinBoard pop up a licensing message, mentioning your name and the patent number. (Similar to what I make WinBoard do in Gothic Chess.)

Fairy-Max, in the download below, does include Falcon Chess as a pre-defined variant, in its fmax.ini file, and when programmed by this preset, actually does play the game (as you could watch in the broadcast). Can I leave this in, or would you prefer me to take out the Falcon-Chess game definition?

Please let me know ASAP, I hope to be able to releas this weekend.