
Sjeng

This document describes the issues related to running the
Sjeng chess engine together with eboard.

Felipe Bergo <bergo@seul.org>

1. What is Sjeng ?
2. Getting Sjeng
3. Compiling and Installing
4. Running

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1. What is Sjeng ?

Sjeng is a chess engine developed by Gian-Carlo Pascutto, based
on previous work by Adrien Regimbald. It is Free Software that
can be distributed and modified under the terms of the GNU
General Public License (the same license eboard is under)

The greatest feature of Sjeng is that it can play some chess
variants besides regular chess. As of this writing (Sjeng 9.1),
it supports crazyhouse, bughouse, suicide, giveaway and
losers. eboard allows you to play all of them except bughouse.
Help about variants will be available in the eboard
web site soon, but you can look for help in the ICC pages
at <http://www.chessclub.com>.


2. Getting Sjeng

The Sjeng homepage is at <http://sjeng.sourceforge.net>, and
the FTP directory with source tarballs is at
<ftp://sjeng.sourceforge.net/pub/sjeng>
I'm also keeping a Sjeng tarball in eboard's public FTP
directory, <ftp://eboard.sourceforge.net/pub/eboard/engines>.

3. Compiling and Installing

Sjeng is quite standard to compile and install, from the
toplevel directory you run

./configure
make
(become root)
make install

It provides reasonable documentation, in fact it is the
best distribution of a chess engine I have found so
far. Cheers to Gian-Carlo.


4. Running

To play againt Sjeng use the
Peer -> Play against Engine -> Sjeng command in
eboard. Select the desired variant in the Variant
notebook pane.
Sjeng tries to open a book file from the directory
it is run from. The default directory will
be ~/.eboard/eng-out, but you can change this in
the dialog box. See Sjeng's documentation for
information on building book files for the
different variants.

