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Old 09-07-2010, 01:40 AM   #5
Mohammad Reza
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Mohammad Reza began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 15
Karma: 10
Join Date: Feb 2010
Device: IREX-DR800SG
Quote:
Originally Posted by Iņigo View Post
I tried to port a chess program to DR800 some months ago, but with no luck.

Linux chess programs usually consist in 2 parts, the backend (engine) and the frontend (user interface).

- backend:
gnuchess v5.07: successfully compiled, not so difficult
crafty v23.2: crafty is a popular and powerful engine, but it needs some advanced CPU's registers and instructions not available in ARM CPUs.

- frontend:
Some alternatives here:
xboard: the canonical gnuchess frontend, it uses old Xaw/Xmu/Xat widgets, which I was able to compile, but they are too old to make screen refreshes easy to add
eboard: powerful, but uses gnomecanvas (already ported to DR) but screen refreshes are hard
gnome-chess: interesting option but uses some gnome libraries (libgnome[ui], libbonobo[ui]...) so porting would be not easy

And then I stopped...

IMO the way would be to work on eboard and port all that gnomecanvas stuff to support refreshes. Btw, we/you could use gnomecanvas or goocanvas (more modern), as I successfully compiled both for DR devices. Tell me if you want them.

Iņigo


so the problem is not the engine. even if we want to use crafty, I think there would be a translator for converting some not supported instructions to ARM instructions (although it's a guess)

Iņigo, I think you are far far a head of me . Instead of using DR1000 virtual machine for DR800, I wanted to install the whole SDK and simulator on UBUNTU 10.4 myself !!! and guess what => I stopped there

although I am looking for a new free time to start over

anyway, nice work Iņigo
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