H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, May 1, 2019 09:37 PM UTC:
XBoard supports Maka Dai Dai with its 19x19 board and 50 piece types? Holy crap!
Well, it depends on what is meant by 'support'. Problem is that 50 is just the number of unpromoted piece types, and that there also are a lot of promoted types (although many promote to Gold, and some not at all). The standard edition of XBoard comes with SVG images for 66 piece types, and falls just short of the mark. In the development version I have increased the number of piece types, but not the number of supplied SVG images. The additional piece types thus can only be used when external piece images are supplied by the user. (WinBoard already used that strategy for a long time, as it has fewer than 66 built-in bitmaps.) The idea was that only Shogi variants have such a large number of pieces, and that people that want to play those would want to use traditional kanji pieces rather than XBoard's default pictograms, and thus would have to supply external piece images anyway. And I added special support for kanji pieces, through a general -inscriptions option, which can define an arbitrary UTF-8 string, the characters (or pairs of characters) of which will be printed on top of the corresponding pieces (upside-down for black). So all that has to be supplied is 5 or 6 SVG images of blank Shogi tiles in various sizes, and with the aid of those XBoard can be configured for any Shogi variant.
fig 1 - XBoard using kanji-inscribed Shogi-tile images.
The piece IDs and the way the pieces promote would come from the -pieceToCharTable option, or the 'setup' command received from the engine, and likewise the initial position (and board size) from the -fen option, a PGN tag, or the 'setup' command. And the way the pieces move would come from the -men option, a PGN "VariantMen" tag or the 'piece' commands received from the engine.
I must admit I did not really try that for Maka Dai Dai Shogi; just for my own shrunken (13x13) version of it, Macadamia Shogi. Which can be done with the default pictogram pieces, already in XBoard 4.9.
For WinBoard there is the 'Alien Edition'; this really does have Maka Dai Dai Shogi as a standard variant, and contains built-in kanji and move tables for all variants up to Tai Shogi, and in two of the 18 board sizes generates mnemonic piece images from the move table. This doesn't support the dressed-letter IDs, though, so FENs do not work there.
fig 2 - part of the board of the WinBoard Alien Edition set for 'variant maka' (board size 'Petite').
fig 3 - The WinBoard Alien Edition configured for Macadamia Shogi (board size 'Mediocre').
Well, it depends on what is meant by 'support'. Problem is that 50 is just the number of unpromoted piece types, and that there also are a lot of promoted types (although many promote to Gold, and some not at all). The standard edition of XBoard comes with SVG images for 66 piece types, and falls just short of the mark. In the development version I have increased the number of piece types, but not the number of supplied SVG images. The additional piece types thus can only be used when external piece images are supplied by the user. (WinBoard already used that strategy for a long time, as it has fewer than 66 built-in bitmaps.) The idea was that only Shogi variants have such a large number of pieces, and that people that want to play those would want to use traditional kanji pieces rather than XBoard's default pictograms, and thus would have to supply external piece images anyway. And I added special support for kanji pieces, through a general -inscriptions option, which can define an arbitrary UTF-8 string, the characters (or pairs of characters) of which will be printed on top of the corresponding pieces (upside-down for black). So all that has to be supplied is 5 or 6 SVG images of blank Shogi tiles in various sizes, and with the aid of those XBoard can be configured for any Shogi variant.
fig 1 - XBoard using kanji-inscribed Shogi-tile images.
The piece IDs and the way the pieces promote would come from the -pieceToCharTable option, or the 'setup' command received from the engine, and likewise the initial position (and board size) from the -fen option, a PGN tag, or the 'setup' command. And the way the pieces move would come from the -men option, a PGN "VariantMen" tag or the 'piece' commands received from the engine.
I must admit I did not really try that for Maka Dai Dai Shogi; just for my own shrunken (13x13) version of it, Macadamia Shogi. Which can be done with the default pictogram pieces, already in XBoard 4.9.
For WinBoard there is the 'Alien Edition'; this really does have Maka Dai Dai Shogi as a standard variant, and contains built-in kanji and move tables for all variants up to Tai Shogi, and in two of the 18 board sizes generates mnemonic piece images from the move table. This doesn't support the dressed-letter IDs, though, so FENs do not work there.
fig 2 - part of the board of the WinBoard Alien Edition set for 'variant maka' (board size 'Petite').
fig 3 - The WinBoard Alien Edition configured for Macadamia Shogi (board size 'Mediocre').