Previous Next
Previous Next |
My involvement with Xiangqi is centered around WinBoard / XBoard. I am a lover of all Chess variants, and Xiangqi is the obvously most important of those, greatly exceeding even western Chess in popularity. Like it or not, the game as defined by FIDE is only a minor Chess variant on a World scale.
So when I adapted WinBoard to support more variants, Xiangqi was definitely amongst those. Naturally, one thing led to another, and having a GUI for Xiangqi which could display the board in a form that someone raised as a player of western Chess (like me) could easily recognize (namely the westernized representation used by WinBoard), it prompted me to also write engines for it. So I adapted my minimalist Chess engine micro-Max (of which a generalize version Fairy-Max, capable of playing variants, already existed) to play Xiangqi, and I started to write a more elaborate engine named HaQiKi D from scratch.
And as the number of native WinBoard Xiangqi engines is not too big, (although it was non-zero even before WB supported Xiangqi!) I needed adapters to other protocol to have opponents for my engines. So I made adapters that allow engines using the UCCI protocol, UCI protocol, as well as Qianhong plugins, to run under WinBoard.
In additions I also included Xiangqi amongst the variants of my modified version of the Lasker-2.2.3 ICS software, which aims to provide a range of variants to its users. WinBoard is a popular client for this Internet Chess Server, and I adapted the 'FICS' protocol it uses to support variants requiring a deviating bord size.
The following lists all Xiangqi projects I am somehow involved in, and also is an index of my Xiangqi pages on this website.
| WinBoard 4.5 | A GUI that supports all major Chess variants in a unified way | download |
| Capablanca-2.2.3 | An Internet Chess Server supporting Chess variants (based on Lasker-2.2.3) | download |
| MaxQi | My minimalist XQ engine, derived from micro-Max, aimed at being the World's smallest. | download |
| HaQiKi D | My 'serious' XQ engine, using WB protocol (closed source) | download |
| QH2WB | An adapter for running Qianhong plugins under WinBoard | download |
| UCCI2WB | An adapter for running UCCI engines under WB (based on Huang Chen's UCCI2QH) | download |
| XQWLight | Huang Chen's model stand-alone XQ program converted by me to a native WB engine | download |
| HOXChess | both MaxQi and an early version of HaQiKi D are available (in source!) as HOXChess plugins | |
| Other Xiangqi Engines | An overview of UCCI and Qianghong engines, and how to run them under WinBoard |
Previous Next