MPChess 1.2.2 - Copyright 2013-2025 Victor Matei Petrescu


Quick start: click on "wchess_w.exe" or "wchess_f.exe" if you use Window$, or
"chess_p3" or "chess_k8" if you use GNU/Linux.

During the game:

To make a move, type the coordinates of the start and destination squares,
like this:

e2e4
e2e3
e1g1 (this is castling)

To exit, type "exit".

If not work, read below.

All files here, except for "SDL.dll" (see www.libsdl.org) and "src/COPYING",
are available  under the GNU GPL license, version 3 or later (www.gnu.org).
See "src/COPYING" for details.

The recommendations below are for GNU/Linux, but compilation should be easy on
any system for which a version of SDL (www.libsdl.org) is available.


1. INSTALLATION
2. PLAYING


1. INSTALLATION

The program uses the "SDL" or "SDL 2" library, available at www.libsdl.org.
SDL 2 is not 100% compatible with SDL 1.2, so, according to which one you have
installed, you can compile the program by typing:

./comp

or:

./comp2

... after entering directory "mpchess-1.2.2", with command "cd". If it doesn't
work, try:

chmod 755 comp

You may (probably not) have to replace "sdl-config" in "comp" or "sdl2-config"
in "comp2" with the corresponding complete path, depending on where SDL is
installed.


2. PLAYING

After compilation, type:

./chess

The program searches (L+2)/2 moves ahead (assuming that a move means that both
sides move a piece), where L is the difficulty level. Positions are evaluated
only by adding the values of the pieces left on the board. Any factors related
to where the pieces are, such as mobility, doubled pawns, isolated pawns etc.
are not considered. The computer should figure those by itself and giving it
any clues would spoil the game. To add variety to the game, the possible moves
are randomly shuffled before every search. On level 2, the difficulty is
comparable to the lowest level of some old chess games for ZX Spectrum (not
all, some of those games play better). ZX Spectrum was a computer from 1982.
The interface is also inspired by those games.

To increase the difficulty, you can make modifications at lines 127...129 in
'src/chess.c' to allow values larger than 4 to be selected. In theory, the
difficulty can be increased to any level, with the only condition of having
infinite time available (4 is already a little slow - a move takes over a
minute on Pentium II, 400 MHz).

Version 1.2.2 is to fix some crashes on newer systems, so all the executable
versions except for "chess_k8" are the same as in version 1.2.1.
