Milady, by Yves Lejeail
Milady is a Winboard chess engine written in visual basic .net 2003 language. It was written from scratch (please look Milady_History.html for more info on history versions)
At this time (11th June 2006), it is under the gnu licence as I have no idea of what is better to choose for code protection. The sources may be downloaded on WBEC website
Milady 1.8.1 Copyright 2005-2006 Yves Lejeail
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Milady have different possibilities which can be enabled via the Milady.cfg file which is located in the directory of installation. I describe the config file line by line since it
could be helpful to find a bug in case the configuration has been changed.
- never remove the 2 first lines which are necessary for the programme to run though not used !
- choose one and only one of the Console, Arena, or Winboard interfaces (better to have Arena 1.99 beta)
- create a new book from pgn files. For that, remove the quote and any blank before the Book word. There must be a Milady.pgn file which contains the games. This file must be formated with a programme like pgntrim5 : comments must be removed, and a constant number of moves/line is required. Present book was made with top players games (presently rated>2700) when they were rated >2500, since 2000 up to 2005
- can modify personalities, I mean playing style (I recommend to keep default though). Just replace Personnalite = Default by Personnalite = Fischer or any other possibilities
available (Petrossian, Tarrasch, PilierBar). It is possible to edit the personnalities in the Personnalites.txt file
- can test move generation using the Perft method. For that, remove the quote and any blank before the Perft word in the Milady.cfg. Any FEN position can be added in the TestPerft.fen file with the text editor
- can search checkmates problems. For that, remove the quote and any blank before the EchecsEtMats word in the Milady.cfg. Any FEN position can be added in the TestMats.fen file with the text editor
- can search combinations problems (same feature as checkmates). For that, remove the quote and any blank before the Combinaisons word in the Milady.cfg. Any FEN position can be added in the TestCombinaisons.fen file with the text editor
- never remove the ***** characters which are necessary for Milady to begin to do something
Click on setup, and follow the steps to installation. After that you should use Arena or Winboard to play with Milady.
You should have windows 98 or higher to play with Milady. The programme requires MS Framework 1.1 fr to work