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chessengine

A MAME plugin that turns emulated dedicated chess computers into UCI (or XBoard) chess engines. It is the plugin picochess uses for its retro engines: about 430 machines from Fidelity, Mephisto, Novag, Saitek, SciSys and others, each playing with its original ROM.

This version is ported to MAME 0.289.

How it works

The plugin reads UCI commands on stdin and keeps its own copy of the board. For each machine an interface file in interfaces/ translates between UCI and the machine's hardware:

  • the player's move is entered by pressing the squares on the emulated sensor board, or keys on keypad machines
  • the machine's move is read from its board LEDs, LCD or display, or from RAM
  • positions (FEN), game histories, levels, promotions and live search info go through the machine's own setup modes, keys or memory

At machine reset init.lua loads interfaces/<system>.lua, or the parent set's file when a clone has none of its own.

Usage

Put this repository in MAME's plugins/ folder as plugins/chessengine (MAME also needs its standard plugins/boot.lua). Then start a machine with the plugin:

mame <system> -plugin chessengine -video none

and talk UCI to it on stdin/stdout (uci, isready, ucinewgame, position ..., go, stop, quit). Levels and machine options appear as UCI options. picochess does all of this through the scripts and .uci level files in mame_for_picochess.

The ROMs are not included.

kblitz (Kasparov Blitz) needs MAME 0.290, or 0.289 with the ioport.cpp fix for analog set_value overrides, to turn its dials.

Machines

docs/MACHINES.md lists every machine: whether it supports position setup, history replay, live info and pondering, its levels and Elo, its known limits, and the commits that changed it. It also describes the init.lua changes made during the 0.289 port and the hooks an interface can provide.

The same overview as an interactive page, with search and filters: MAME Chess Machines.

Writing an interface

An interface is a Lua file that returns a table of functions. The main hooks are setup_machine, start_play, is_selected and select_piece (reading and entering moves), set_pos (FEN setup), edit_game (history replay), the promotion functions, setlevel/get_options/set_option, and optionally show_info, game_over, resigned and the ignore_late_go flag. See docs/MACHINES.md for what each one does, and the interfaces of similar machines for examples. Interfaces run in a sandbox with machine, emu, send_input, the sb_* sensor-board helpers, pairs, ipairs, string and math, but no table, os or io.

Credits

  • Sandro Ronco wrote the plugin and the first interfaces.
  • Franz Huber updated them for his CB-Emu program (MessChess and MessNew) and added many interfaces.
  • Guido Marquardt extended the interfaces' functionality for his Mysticum project.
  • Randy Reade updated the plugin and the interfaces for MAME 0.289, working with Claude (Anthropic).

Licence: BSD 3-Clause.