Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Free GUI Downloads

Arena can be used for analyzing and playing games as well as in testing engines. It runs on Windows XP or higher or on Linux with Wine 1.0 or higher. Arena is compatible to Winboard protocol I, II and UCI protocol I, II. Furthermore, compatible to Chess960, DGT electronic chess board & DGT clock XP, Novag Citrine, Autoplayer, ICS (chess servers) and much more.

Tarrasch: Extremely easy to use free program for Windows. Tarrasch comes with free engines and is designed to make it as easy as possible to perform some basic chess activities: Play a game against a chess engine, with either color, from any position, with a time handicap if desired. Position set up, play through the analysis provided by the engine. Create and edit .pgn files, enter variations easily, enter and edit comments easily, promote and demote variations and even comments. Author is willing to build you a special version incorporating special features for a small fee.

Chess GUI by Big Lion Nice looking interface.  A few of many limitations: - OS : Win2000Pro and WinXP - don't stay long in menu while engines are calculating/searching - maximum of 5000 engines supported (increase MAX_ENGINES_SUPPORTED in ChsGUI_Ini.INI)

WinBoard is a pretty basic chess game that is mainly intended to play games online, using different chess engines. Winboard works more as a graphic front-end for several different chess engines included with the game, as well as for several chess game modes. These include not only player vs player or human vs computer competitions, but also games played online and even by email. WinBoard also lets you save games and resume them from the point where you left them. As for graphics, WinBoard is quite simple. The chess board is just a squared 2D window with flat pieces – no three dimensions or shadow effects. You can customize the board's size and colors in the program's options menu. Despite its graphical simplicity, WinBoard is a good choice.

Jose Features: graphical frontend to MySQL database read and write PGN (Portable Game Notations) files 2D and 3D view edit games, insert comments, variations plug-in chess engine for play and analysis; supports both XBoard and UCI protocol. Play Fischer Random Chess / Chess 960, or Shuffle Chess Opening Books ECO opening classification Position Search Create HTML and PDF files.

Chess Assistant Lite has limited functionality compared to full commercial versions. The database is limited to 1 million games. You cannot open, merge or create new databases; the Tree and CAP database come in limited versions; engines included are relatively weak, but you can add other engines. No Opening Encyclopedia. No opening book. No pictures of players.

Fritz 5.32 dates back to 1998. Use it for playing, analysis, and managing databases. Comes with the old, but strong, fritz 5.32 engine, use the program to analyze your games, study opening statistics, and organize engine matches. One of its most useful abilities is to create and search large databases in either pgn or cbv format. You'll need an opening book and must download your own database.

Chessbase Lite - Limited database - limit of 32,000 games

1 comment:

  1. Tarrasch has just had a major upgrade to version 3. It features a database capability and many other features.

    This is my personal favorite.

    David Beagan

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