GNU Chess 5.0.7 on WinBoard 4.2.7 |
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| Developer(s) | Tim Mann |
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| Stable release | 4.5.3 / October 1, 2011 |
| Operating system | X11, Windows |
| Type | Computer chess |
| License | GPL |
| Website | XBoard |
XBoard (on GNU/Linux) and WinBoard (on Microsoft Windows) are free graphical user interface clients.[1] Originally developed by Tim Mann, these programs are compatible with various chess engines[2] that support the Chess Engine Communication Protocol such as GNU Chess. It also supports Internet Chess Servers,[3] e-mail chess,[4] and the playing of saved games.[5]
Recently WinBoard / XBoard has been enhanced a great deal, and the Chess Engine Communication Protocol was extended to meet the needs of modern engines (which have features such as hash tables, multi-processing and end-game tables, which could not be controlled through the old protocol).
XBoard has always been supportive of Chess variants, such as Suicide Chess or Crazyhouse, acting as a client for Internet Chess Servers that offered such variants. This support has now been extended to all of the World's major Chess variants: xiangqi (Chinese Chess), shogi (Japanese Chess), makruk (Thai Chess) and many Western variants on boards of deviating sizes (e.g. Capablanca Chess). It offers a Westernized representation for these games, but the almost limitless configurability of WinBoard does allow a high-quality traditional oriental representation of these games.[6]
Another computer chess protocol is the Universal Chess Interface (UCI).
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The Timeseal program was an add-on for XBoard/WinBoard (though it supported other interfaces as well). It was designed to solve the problem of network latency introduced in short (blitz/lightning) games. Timeseal would record the actual amount of time the player spent making the move and send that to the chess server. Without it, network latency time would be added, giving a significant advantage to users on faster connections.
Timeseal introduced a security hole with XBoard/WinBoard. It kept track of how much time the player spent on a move, and it was running on the player's machine. Thus it could send back an incorrect value. Not surprisingly, this was eventually exploited. A variant of Timeseal appeared that applied a 0.5 multiplier to a player's move. So if a player took four seconds to move, Timeseal would report that they only took two seconds.