Please allow illegal positions for illustrations

jimratliff · Post by **jimratliff** » Sun Mar 02, 2014 4:40 am

Now that you've added the drawing tools (thanks!), that opens up HIARCS to be a chess-illustration creator for teaching applications.

In many, many endgame teaching applications (e.g., pawn endings), you want to be able to make a chess-position diagram that doesn't have any kings to mess up the argument. (See for example discussion of "key squares" in Karsten Müller and Frank Lamprecht, "Secrets of Pawn Endings," page 17.)

Currently, HIARCS doesn't allow the creation of these diagrams because without kings the position is illegal, and the HIARCS "Set up position" dialog won't accept illegal positions.

If you could put a checkbox in the dialog to not check for legality, then HIARCS would be a more full-featured program in this respect.

Post by **Mark Uniacke** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:38 am

Interesting, is there any chess software that allows illegal positions?

Simon · Post by **Simon** » Mon Mar 17, 2014 11:45 pm

WinBoard has an option to allow illegal positions.

jimratliff · Post by **jimratliff** » Mon May 09, 2016 11:13 pm

ChessBase 13 allows illegal positions. Here's what they say:

For a variety of reasons, it can be useful to have access to illegal positions to illustrate a concept, such as a pawn structure without kings. Previously ChessBase would not permit this, but ChessBase 13 now supports the input and saving of illegal positions. Naturally, it will give you a warning when you do, to prevent this happening by accident.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/chessbase- ... ed-to-know