Notices

I nearly fell off the bed I was lying on when browsing the Installable Programs on my N800 running OS2008. Scid was there! I had no idea it was being worked on for the N8xx series.

Scid, which stands for something like Shawn's Chess Internet Database is the only program that a real chess expert (like me) would be very interested in on a tablet. The problem with Eboard, which isn't yet available for OS2008 but was for OS2007, is that it lets you play online but it is just too slow for the very quick games that are popular in Internet chess hotspots such as ICC (www.chessclub.com) and FICS (www.freechess.org). These are exciting human-to-human chess sites, not the boring computer play that you can get almost anywhere. (Of course, there are other chess sites, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, but in my opinion the main good ones are the ones I listed above and a few others, such as the one associated with ChessBase.)

Anyway, back to SCID. Its job is to collect chess games for you and display them to you. This is very important for good chessplayers, because modern chess is largely a game based on research. You secretly work on new developments in the chess world (yes, there are still new developments, after centuries of play) and you need to look at examples of what is being played now or in the lines you specialize in to plan accordingly.

Scid is a great program for displaying games and organizing your collection.

The version I just happened on on my N800 is not quite right. The chessboard is cut off so that one of the rows is not totally visible. Maybe there is/will be a workaround for that. Otherwise, this very powerful tool looks great, however. I'm going to start using it right now...

Thanks to the developer that brought this to OS2008. I'm sure it must be the same one who brought Eboard (and a sample of Xboard) to us.

BTW: Scid is still under active development. I already subscribe to a SCID mailing list, and though Shawn himself appears to be inactive, new people are taking its development over, and have apparently made a version that DOES play on the Internet, and whats more, apparently allows you to CHEAT on the Internet! This is actually bad, though interesting -- it is not ethical to use a database while playing a poor human who doesn't have access to one.

The reason for this behavior is that it is easier for the developer to allow you to cheat with Scid than it is to prevent you.

This has nothing to do with the person who ported Scid to OS2008, I hasten to point out, and the version we have doesn't allow play on the Internet (I assume -- I haven't yet looked carefully at it.)

Edit: It turns out that you can change the size of the chessboard , and size 3 works pretty much perfectly for me.

great
care for a game sometime?

Look for geneven on the Free Internet Chess Server. I am frequently onlline for hours, playing anyone who comes along at 1-minute chess.

Where did you get it from? I ported it a week or so ago. But I didn't port Eboard ..

If it's my package, I'll see what I can do, give me several days.
If it's done by somebody only concentrating on this scid software, then I'll leave it to him and remove my version.

The Eboard Port (and a port of crafty engine) for OS2007/OS2008 you will find here:
http://www.v7f.eu/public/n800/chess/

Its done by a developer called Tom.

Eboard works fantastic for me. E.g. it allows full screen mode. Most time I play 5 minute games on it, connected via hsdpa or gprs and the connection is fast enough. Using the program in a wireles lan it is nearly as fast as on my ubuntu-desktop.

Thank senior member "Free" for that one. In a forum thread on chess software I asked about scid and he had it up w/in a day or so. AWESOME!

I agree. I bought the N810 in part wanting to use it w/scid to analyze games and study. Load a pgn file w/annotations, play the "guess the next move" game, and use the built in analyze function to find the flaws in my suggested but not-obviously-bad moves.

To be honest, I haven't gotten there yet, but am simply thrilled that scid is now on OS2008. The N810 is just about perfect for this type of chess analysis.

Again, all kudos to "free".

scott

Thanks!
I launched it the other day and was very impressed by the capabilities of the software in term of chess game analysis. That's a professional tool!
Unfortunatly under the window manager shipped with the nokia tablets:
* most of the windows are cut at the bottom.
* the keyboard doesn't popup to allow you to type text.

If you use another WM, you have the complete window and you can input text. I checked under OpenBox WM (which is also in my repository) and we are lucky, it fits exactly.

I still have to change some icons and stuffs for Openbox, it works but customization is not done. When it's ready, I'll make a new thread. I think restarting with another Window Manager will be easier than redeveloping scid tk-GUI part.

Scid would work GREAT rotated except that it won't go full-screen for me.

For example, I can open an xterm and make it full screen just fine. But the moment I type scid it switches to non-full screen. This is a shame, because the board can be much larger when it is rotated. I think it could go to a board size 6 from the menu, whereas in normal rotation mode it only goes to about 4 before getting cut off.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

On another topic...

By the way, on my new Centro phone I am using something called Openchess to look at Smyslov's games, and it works pretty well even though it is rather primitive. It's even fun for me to play chess with, because at its low level I can thrash it mercilessly, often getting mates in 17 moves or so. But I mainly use it for looking at games in books.

It might even be nice to have Openchess (which can be found on the sourceforge site) ported on to the tablet.

You could try using wmctrl to force it to go fullscreen.

scid was removed from the repository some time ago due to this size problems.
where are you guys getting scid from?

But this rotate stuff might help. I reinstalled my scid version, rotated the screen with size 6 and it should fit yes.

At the moment, this app is not hildonized, forget about fullscreen, it's not implemented. I'll try to see what can be easily done.

qwerty12 where do you get this wmctrl?