The console mode can be used to play a game, though it is not it's main function.
To start a new regular chess game by typing the "new" command. To start a new chess variant game, use "suicide", "atomic", "crazyhouse" or "variant" command. A move can be entered in SAN, short or long format such as "Nf3", "e1-g1", "O-O", etc. To assign a side to the engine, use the "white", "black" or "go" command. You can adjust the engine's thinking time and search depth limit per move with the "time" and "depth" commands:
time <secs>
depth <limit>
To set or toggles the automatic board display, use the "show" command. The "verbose" or "post" command will enable verbose mode and the engine will display its' search results when asked to make a move.
Other useful commands are "list", "legal", "hints", "save", "load", "fen", etc. See the Console Mode Commands Summary section for details.
In console mode, no chess clock is use and the engine will not automatically make a move after you entered yours.
Pressing the space bar during engine searches will force the search to terminate.
This is the recommend mode for using the engine. Winboard provides a graphical chess board for playing chess games and it can be used to enable KKFChess to play on chess servers. The default game type for Winboard (without the "-variant" command line argument) is normal chess. You must use the "-variant" command line item in Winboard if you wish to play variants other than regular chess. Please refer to Winboard's help file for details.
To use KKFChess under Arena, you will need to use the "New Engine" or "Manage" sub-menu item under the "Engines" menu. You can select "winboard" or "uci" as the communication protocol. Personally I prefer using "winboard" with Arena.
KKFChess can be used with Fritz 6's GUI with a winboard adaptor. Chessbase no longer support the Winboard protocol but you can download Quark and use it's Winboard adaptor for KKFChess. Please refer to Quark's home page for details.
KKFChess supports has been tested under UCI GUIs such as Deep Fritz 8 and Arena. Of course, you can still use the winboard protocols with either GUI.
Due to the way KKFChess saves the principle variations using a single PV hash table, the PVs displayed in multi-PV mode may not reflect the true PV of that position. However, the scores shown are the true scores of the search.