Apple's Chess 2.0 Source Code Available

Petrochard writes "For all of you programmers who are big chess fans, check out Apple's release of Chess 2.0's source code. It would be cool if somebody could make a Simpson's Chess mod." Chess is based on sjeng (logic) and glChess (interface).

sjeng author wrote extreme vorbis encoder

[ubiquitin]

The gentleman who wrote sjeng also wrote prototype Vorbis 1.0 encoder that can go down to bitrates of 4kbps [sjeng.org] that he claims can give a listenable stereo stream. IMHO that's bigger news than source to Chess.app 2.0.

Transparent window?

[CODiNE]

Could somebody figure out how to re-enable the transparent effect that was in the Panther betas? It was a preference before, but now it's gone. In case some haven't seen it before, the board was floating with no background window. I don't remember if the window was transparent or actually able to be clicked-through, but it was very cool. :)

I can't figure it out myself since I'm not a coder, but I've narrowed it down to MBCFloatingBoardWindow... no idea what to do with it tho. Any pointers? :)

Little Diagrams

[paulymer5]

A friend and I were rooting through the code and decided to work with it a little. We've got grand ideas about networked chess, but haven't really done a whole lot besides draw lots of little complex diagrams. The chess code lends itself very well to lots of little complex diagrams.

But we did notice some redundency in the code, probably because of the layering in the design. The position of the pieces, for example, are stored in several places (each of which is updated with each move). All of the validation routines pratically are screaming at us to go ahead and make modifications (even bad ones), because a surprising amount of errors are caught later on.

This is absolutely not new.

[gklinger]

When Apple released its first Panther beta, I was disappointed to discover that Chess was not included. However, Xcode was so I went to Apple, downloaded the source for Chess and had it up and running in under 5 minutes without reading any documentation (guilty). Suffice it to say, I was quite impressed with Xcode but that's another story. This is news, old news.

GNU Chess

[ParryHotter]

It's interesting to note that previous versions of MacOSX shipped a version based on GNU Chess and not sjeng. Does someone know why they changed the engine for this version?