picochess V0.84 – Hint move

DGT e-Board Walnut Ebony

These days i’m very busy, so this post is abit late. Anyway with this text i share a few thoughts about this version with you.

As always i updated some documentation files and also picochess is deals with the situation that you maybe misconfigure your engine setting. In this case picochess will display a warning over the DGT clock display instead of silently stopping to work. Well, it shouldn’t happen cause for example if you take an image from us this engines are checked before. But maybe you want to try out an UCI engine yourself – there are many out there.

Another small update is that if you been in the menu system and suddently decide to take a short path with a queen selection the DGT clock will show you an exit message. Also i changed the voice system in a way to not speak an engine event plus a level event in a row. This can happen if you choosed an engine with level support. Internally picochess will update itself with the new engine and also lets an engine level. But i think for an user one speaking (ok engine) is enough.

There is a big community of german players for picochess (as you might know, i’m german too). And they asked me to change the move time mode. Picochess will now return to a stopped display of time after some delay shown the move. I wished to be able to change the clock to count upwards (which makes alot more sense in this mode) but the old clocks aren’t capable of counting up. If all users using the DGT-Pi clock, i wouldn’t have this problem. Anyway this is better as before, i think.

So far some features. Also this version also repairs some bugs older versions of picochess had.

First of all when you setup a position, was mirrored resulting in an illegal move. Thats fixed now. But the main problem was with “hint moves” and therefore i named the version so. Pressing the buttons lots of times in row could lead to a illegal move displayed. This bug costed me some time to find and fix but i think it also fixes alot of other hidden problems picochess had cause it was a complete rewrite of the internal queue system. Well, people (=i) do make errors and now both are fixed. Please always try to update your picochess as soon as possible.

4 Comments

    • Hi Thomas,

      are you using Windows (only!), or can you login to your picochess using a ssh client (see for example here: http://docs.picochess.org/en/latest/installation.html). The easiest way is you connect your RaspberryPi to your router by cable (lateron you can try it with wifi).
      Logon to your Raspberry Pi:
      Username: pi
      Password: picochess

      Basically you need to update the file “/opt/picochess/picochess.ini” using “nano”, and allow the autoupdate (see docu inside this file). You also need a working internet connection, so picochess can get its newest software from github. If thats all too complex for you, you can also wait abit for a new image. The version you have right now, is quiet stable – even it doesn’t have the top new features, i think its fun to use.
      After this is done, reboot picochess and it will autoupdate to the newest version (right now v0.85).
      I need to know at least if you (can) use a linux system and if you have a DGTPi or not. But i hope, this helps you abit at least.

  1. Thanxs Jürgen
    But when i want to write the file picochess.ini in ssh a get an permissend denied error in nano. Whats the matter?

    • Hi Thomas,
      you prob. not “root”. Do a “sudo su” infront of your shell commands.
      Means for example “nano /opt/picochess/picochess.ini” becomes “sudo su nano /opt/picochess/picochess.ini”.

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