═══ 1. About UChess ═══ UChess is a Pentium optimized OS/2 32 bit Chess Program by Roger Uzun (uzun@crash.cts.com). UChess is based on gnuchess 4PL73 with several enhancements designed to strengthen its play. Both UChess and its source are freely distributable, in accordance to the gnu license. NOTE TO WARP USERS: Make sure your WORKPLACE SHELL PALETTE AWARENESS is set OFF in the system settings notebook, on the screen page, if you are using a 256 color desktop. To move your pieces simply use the mouse or type in your moves in either shortened algabraic notation (Nf3) or long form (g1f3) followed by the enter key. In the Time control menu, you can turn off Deep thinking to disallow the computer to think about its next move during your turn. The machine will play a stronger game if you allow it to think during your move. Startup options : If the pgm seems to swap too much on your system you can use the following arguments: UChess mini UChess micro UChess Max The larger the tables, the stronger the play ═══ 2. Help Menu ═══ Use the choices on the Help pull-down to display: Help index Displays the index of help menu. General Help Displays some information about using UChess. Using Help Provides detailed information on the kinds of help available and how to use help. ═══ 3. Using Help ═══ Use this choice to obtain information on how to use the Help facility. *--------------------------------------------------------------*\ ═══ 4. General Help ═══ To move your pieces simply use the mouse or type in your moves in either shortened algabraic notation (Nf3) or long form (g1f3) followed by the enter key. You can type "beep" followed by the enter key to toggle the beep sound. In the Time control menu, you can turn off Deep thinking to disallow the computer to think about its next move during your turn. The machine will play a stronger game if you allow it to think during your move. *--------------------------------------------------------------*\ ═══ 5. Index ═══ Use this choice to display the help index. The help index lists the titles of the help information that is available. ═══ 6. Product Information ═══ This dialog displays information about UChess such as version number and authors name. ═══ 7. Skill Levels ═══ Here you can choose to start the game with a material advantage. ═══ 8. Time Controls ═══ This Menu Selection allows you to set the chess clocks and various strength parameters. You can choose to play a timed game, each side required to play moves in minutes, or you can choose to have the computer search each of its moves to a fixed ply or depth. The computer plays stronger if given more time, and/or deeper search depths. This dialog also allows you to choose deep thinking (on/off). Deep thinking on means that the computer will ponder its next move while it is your turn, turning it off means the computer will remain inactive during your move. The computer plays stronger with deep thinking on. You can also choose to allow the computer to use its opening book or not. The opening book allows the computer to start with some of its favorite moves, without having to waste its time thinking about the opening portion of the game. ═══ 9. Players ═══ This menu item allows you to choose who will play the game. You can choose to play white, with the computer playing as black. Or you can play as black with the computer playing as white. Or you can choose to have the computer play against itself. In order to halt autoplay mode, simply click on the board with the left mouse button, or press any key when the boards window is active. Note if it is the computers turn next, it will immediately begin considering its next move, when it gets out of autoplay mode. In addition you can choose to have the computer simply act as a referee, and play against another human opponent, the computer playing neither side. ═══ 10. Hint ═══ This menu item allows you to ask the computer what it believes is a reasonable choice for your next move. The choice will appear on the upper right hand box. ═══ 11. Move Now ═══ This menu item allows you to force the computer to make his next move immediately and cease thinking. On slower machines or while examining complex positions, the computer may take a while to respond. ═══ 12. Undo Last ply ═══ This menu item allows you to take back the last ply, or 1/2 move. This implicitly swaps sides, so to take back a full move, and retain your color, choose this option twice. ═══ 13. Edit Board ═══ This menu item places you in edit mode, allowing you to place/remove any pieces on the board. You must have 1 black and 1 white king in any setup. To exit edit mode, press the 'x' key. To clear the board of all pieces, use the key. To place the pieces on the board, use the mouse and the left mouse button. To choose which piece you want, simply type in the chess letter of that piece, lower case for White, upper case for Black. Type to choose "no piece" e.g. to remove pieces from the board. The chesspiece letters are p,n,b,r,q,k for Pawn Knight, Bishop, Rook, Queen, King. ═══ 14. Calc nominal Pgm rating ═══ This menu item will destroy any current game in process. What it does is to measure the time it takes for UChess to calculate the first move, as white, to a depth of 6 ply. This gives you a rough idea of how fast your machine is, and how strong its chess rating may be. A Pentium 90 machine takes about 2.75 seconds to calculate this move. ═══ 15. Test CPU Speed ═══ This menu item will not destroy the current game. It measures the nodes/sec that the host computer can calculate for various aspects of the chess engine. The number is highly dependent upon the current board configuration, how many pieces are on the board, how many ways to check the king there are, etc etc. ═══ 16. Toggle Beep ═══ This menu item will turn on/off the beep sound when the computer completes a move. The new beep state can be seen in the message window on the lower right screen corner. ═══ 17. Toggle Verbose ═══ This menu item will toggle "Verbose" mode, which causes the computers thought process to appear on the lower right hand corner of the screen, in the message window. ═══ 18. Problems with UChess ═══ If you are having troubles with UChess's performance on your machine, it may be because if excessive swapping. You can force UChess to use less memory on startup by passing the following arguments into the program: UChess micro : This forces a very small memory model (default for <8M machines) UChess mini : This forces a small memory model (default for 8M machines) UChess MAX : This allows UChess to use oversized tables for computers with a lot of free RAM.