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Thanks, Sam.  ChessV, thankfully, is not dead.  It had just been so long
since the last release, that I wanted to take the time to make sure that
the next release was a major step forward.  Yeah, the 0.8x versions had a
nasty bug that resulted is the occasional really bad move.  That has been
fixed, along with a dozen or so other miscellaneous bugs.

In addition to supporting the rules for Schoolbook, if you look in the
openings directory, you will see a small opening book.  Although it only
has a few lines of play in it, each move was calculated extremely deeply
using several very powerful computers I have at work.  A few days worth of
CPU time went into it, although, that being said, it is just a start ... 
(In addition to Schoolbook, a similar effort has gone into making opening
books for other 10x8 variants, primarily Grotesque, Ladorean, and
Univers.)

A note about opening books:  The opening books are just text files, and
while the format should be pretty self-explanatory, it occurs to me that
there is one thing that hasn't been documented and is worth noting.  Some
moves in the opening books are preceeded with a question-mark.  The
question-mark denotes an inferior move, and the computer will not make
that move.  The point of including it is so that if the human makes that
move, the computer will know the correct response.

Regarding porting to other operating systems:  I am very interested in
seeing ChessV ported to other platforms, primarily Linux.  This has always
interested me, but I have very little knowledge about other platforms. 
Still, I made a few design decisions specifically for the purpose of
making such a port easier.  For one thing, I did not use Microsoft
Foundation Classes, or any other Windows-centric class library.  ChessV
uses only standard Win32 calls, and I called as few different functions as
possible.  Sound, animation, and other bells-and-wistles were deliberately
left out to make the code more portable.  Also, all calls to Windows
functions are preceeded with :: (which is unnecessary because these
functions are global anyway, but I did it so that if you someone searches
for ' ::' it will turn up all calls to Windows functions in one shot.) 
Finally, I wrote some classes to be a thin wrapper encapsulating some of
the Windows graphics objects, like pens and brushes, so that the code
would only need to be modified in one place, but I must admit that I
didn't do nearly as much of this as I would like.
So, yes, I would be happy for any help you could provide to make ChessV
more portable.  I do not know much (if anything) about MingW32, though... 
Does it only allow one to port console applications, or does it emulate
some of the GUI functions as well?

Thanks again for the positive feedback!
Greg