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Fergus: | I have tried running Winboard-F with Fairy-Max, but when I select a | variant, it frequently tells me that the variant is not supported by | Fairy-Max 4.8C. What is the latest stable version? How can I make sure | I have it installed? The latest version (now on my website) would say Fairy-Max 4.8E and in thw WinBoard 'Help->About...' menu WinBoard 4.3.15h. But none of the earier versions is particuarly unstable. The problem is merely that Fairy-Max indeed does not support all variants. You should realize that WinBoard and Fairy-Max are completely independent developments, and that Fairy-Max is merely one of the hundreds of engines that can be run under WinBoard. (Most of these play only normal Chess, of course.) I agree that the response of WinBoard, to simply exit if one requests an unsupported variant, is perhaps a bit harsh and user unfriendly. I guess this stems from the time the variant could not be changed at run time through a menu, but only on startup through a command-line option. In that case there was no way to give a new variant if the one specified in the command-line option was not supported by the engine, so no fix was possible. I will put it on my to-do list to 'grey out' the variants the engine does not support in the 'New Variant' menu. As a temporary measure I will maintain the error popup for unsupported variants, but make it a non-fatal error, and simply keep the old variant in force if the newly selected variant is unsupported by the engine. (Treat it equivalent 'pressing 'Cancel'. The version of Fairy-Max in the download only has definitions for the variants: normal, shatranj, courier, knightmate, capablanca, , falcon, cylinder, berolina, super. To play other variants with WinBoard you would have to download other engines. e.g. Pulsar by Mike Adams (losers, suicide/giveaway, 3checks, crazyhouse, atomic) ( http://www.adam16mr.org/pulsar.html ) TJchess by Tony Hecker (separate versions for crazyhouse, shogi, xiangqi, capablanca) ( http://tonyjh.com/chess/ ) SMIRF by Reinhard Scharnagl (e.g. CRC, FRC, Capablanca, Janus) ( http://www.chessbox.de/ , but needs adapter which was included in the WinBoard download ) And of course add shortcuts to start up WinBoard using those engines, or start WinBoard without the aid of any shortcut, and select the name of the engine you want (or type it) in the WinBoard startup dialog.