bionic (6) hachu.6.gz

NAME

       hachu - xboard-compatible engine for Chu Shogi and other variants

SYNOPSIS

       hachu

DESCRIPTION

       hachu is a program that plays several shogi and chess variants, currently sho shogi, chu shogi, dai
       shogi, makruk and shatranj.  In the future it might play more, and still larger shogi variants, in
       particular tenjiku shogi.

       HaChu uses the xboard/winboard chess-engine protocol to communicate.  It thus can use XBoard as a
       graphical interface for the variants also supported by the latter.  Only XBoard 4.8 and later support chu
       shogi, but sho shogi should already work under XBoard 4.7, and Makruk and Shatranj under much older
       versions.  Dai shogi is not supported by XBoard yet.

       See xboard(6) for instructions about how to use hachu through xboard.  To start up quickly, you just need
       the command: xboard -fcp hachu.  You can then use XBoard's New Variant dialog to select the variant you
       want to play.  To play chu shogi, it is essential that XBoard's 'show target squares' option is switched
       on; otherwise the two-step lion moves can not be entered.

       Normally XBoard will use western-style chess symbols to represent the pieces.  But HaChu comes with a set
       of piece images in the shape of the Japenese kanji for the names of the chu-shogi pieces.  These can be
       used in XBoard to get an oriental-style board display.  A settings file for configuring XBoard to use
       these pieces is also included with HaChu, so that you can use the command xboard @chu to start XBoard
       with HaChu for oriental-style chu-shogi.

OPTIONS

       INTERACTIVE OPTIONS
               HaChu supports some options that can only be set interactively, though XBoard's engine settings
               menu dialog.  These include an option for solving tsume problems (checkmate problems where the
               winning side is only allowed to play checking moves).  There are also options to adapt it to
               various versions of the chu-shogi rules: whether you can only promote on entering the promotion
               zone, or whether moves inside or out of the zone (after one move delay) can also be used for
               promotion, and whether repeats should be strictly forbidden, or only avoided like other losing
               moves.

AVAILABILITY

       At http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi the source code can be obtained.

SEE ALSO

       xboard(6)

       game rules: http://hgm.nubati.net/rules

       XBoard: http://hgm.nubati.net

STANDARDS

       WinBoard, xboard(6) interface ("Chess Engine Communication Protocol")

AUTHOR

       H.G.Muller <h.g.muller@hccnet.nl>.

       This manual page was generated with pod2man(1).