Chess & OS/2

There are probably many many "free"chess programs available that can be compiled for OS/2. Here I concentrate only on those which may be used either in a VIO session and/or with xboard.

Crafty

Crafty is a chess program that can be used as a backend chess engine with XBoard.
Its sources and books can be found on ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt.

  1. I did not manage to get one version of crafty working flawlessly in a VIO session and with XBoard :-(
    This binary is only intended to work with XBoard, though I made progress on this topic recently. Be sure t try it also in a VIO session!

  2. I do not longer bundled the small book to this package. See the supplied documentation where/how to get the book files to enhance Crafty's strength.

Phalanx

Phalanx is a quite new unknown chess program. It's quite portable and builds out of the box. You may look at ftp://ftp.math.muni.cz/pub/math/people/Dobes/ for the most recent source distribution.

GNUChess

The most famous free chess program is of course GNUChess. It's major drawbacks nowadays are a difficult configuration&compilation (compared to its opponents) and a lack of current development.
It's source can be found on every mirror of the GNU ftp site

Downloads

All archives contains only binary distributions. Look in the sections above where to get the source. OTOH I always ship the whole documentation and necessary data files to enable at least playing simple matches without time consuming tasks of generating those opening books.
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