Direct download of Chess for Android

aartbik · Post by **aartbik** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 6:08 pm

Because not all Android devices support the Android Market yet, I have made Chess for Android also available as direct download on my website. A list of UCI engines (ARM binaries) that can be imported in Chess for Android (including a UCI client program that can connect to a remote chess server) can be found at UCI engines for Android.
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Aart

aartbik · Post by **aartbik** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:30 pm

I just released version 2.8 of Chess for Android, available from the Android Market or as direct download.

New features include:

(1) full PGN support (clipboard import/export, file load/save),
(2) improved layout for xlarge screen sizes (api 9 and up)
(3) bug fix in draw detection after FEN import

To load a game from a file in PGN format, long press the notation window, select "Load Game from SD", and navigate to the file. This opens another window with all the actual games in that file. Simply scroll and select to the desired game. Very large PGN files may take a while to download (or even run out of memory), but the idea here is that future versions will be able to navigate quickly between successive games. I have tried to make the PGN parser reasonably robust (it accepts sloppy SAN for instance), but certain non-standard constructs are rejected. Please let me know if you encounter bugs though.
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Aart

Bidibulle · Post by **Bidibulle** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 5:48 am

Hi,
Thanks for your great work.
Would it be possible to have the options in the settings:

Make a sound (a piece sound would be great, but just a beep would also be Okay) after the move: it give a physical feedback with the tactile screen and when playing at 30 sec/move or 1min/move, you don't have to watch the screen constantly to see whether the engine has played or not.

Show/hide evaluation and/or the 1st line during a game

Thanks again.

Bidibulle · Post by **Bidibulle** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 7:13 am

The only problem I have, is that I can't change the settings in the engine menu (stockfish and robo):
Hash table: I can change, no problem
TB cache: I can't change the value (off by default) (nalimov tb installed in sdcard/tb)
limit Elo: I can't change the value (off by default)

I don't know if it's a known bug or related to the engines features.
HTC desire, android 2.2

aartbik · Post by **aartbik** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 2:45 pm

Bidibulle wrote:The only problem I have, is that I can't change the settings in the engine menu (stockfish and robo)

Options or option values that are unsupported by the selected UCI engines are greyed out and cannot be selected. In this case, tablebases and limit ELO are unsupported by stockfish/robbo. If you download other engines, you will see that some of these support Nalimov/Gaviota/Scorpio tablebases and/or the Limit ELO option.

Thanks for your other suggestions.

aartbik · Post by **aartbik** » Fri Apr 15, 2011 7:28 pm

Version 2.8.2. of Chess for Android adds support for setting up UCI engines with parallel search (multi-core Android devices are becoming more widespread).
For a screenshot of the new UCI option setup window, see this posting.