scidvspc-hkvc

SCID vs. PC is a Chess Toolkit Shane's Chess Information Database is a powerful Chess Toolkit, with which one can create huge databases, run chess engines, and play casual games against the computer or online with the Free Internet Chess Server. It was originally written by Shane Hudson, and has received strong contribution from Pascal Georges and others.

Scid vs. PC began with bug-fixes for the computer-versus-player features of Scid (hence the name), but has evolved into a solid alternative with many new features and interfaces. The project is authored by Stevenaaus and numerous contributors

** Source

https://sourceforge.net/p/scidvspc/code/HEAD/tarball

svn checkout http://svn.code.sf.net/p/scidvspc/code/ scidvspc-code

** Environment

TCL_LIBRARY, TK_LIBRARY and TCLLIBPATH env variables need to point to the tcltk from the snap. Layout mechanism of snapcraft/snap used to ensure that tcltk from snap maps to the standard expected paths on the runtime system.

** Home

The AppWorkingDir is user's $HOME/snap/scidvspc-hkvc/<revision>

$SNAP_USER_DATA points to this AppWorkingDir.

** ToRun

type scidvspc-hkvc.scidvspc in a console/terminal

The default stockfish version from ubuntu is made available in $SNAP/usr/games/ Additionally stockfish avx2 version is also provided in the same location.

** Sound

Snap doesnt auto connect the alsa interface to snaps. The user is required to explicitly connect the snap's alsa plug to the system's alsa interface.

For this run the below

sudo snap connect scidvspc-hkvc:alsa

NOTE> If there is a issue with sound folders setup, cross verify that the sounds folder under options->sounds is set to

/snap/scidvspc-hkvc/current/usr/local/share/scid/sounds

** Network FICS Ping

One needs to run

sudo snap connect scidvspc-hkvc:network-observe

to allow the snap to use ping (FICS server), else it will give a error dialog, when connecting to FICS.

** Source for this snap packaging

the dev snap directory used by snapcraft to generate this snap package is in $SNAP/usr/share/doc/scidvspc-hkvc/

You will also find this among my https://github.com/hanishkvc repositories.

NOTE: due to a issue with underlying sound helper of tcl, you may get audio for every alternate sound move announcement.

** Version

Custom overriding of pull wrt scidvspc svn based source is implemented to overcome a issue noticed with latest snapcraft wrt svn repositories.

This snap includes some of my patches, which arent upstreamed or not of interest to upstream, so the svn version of scidvspc to build on is fixed here in the snapcraft.yaml, to ensure that these out of upstream patches apply properly, to a verified version. However one can try to change to a newer version and cross check if the out of upstream patches work ok with them or not.

The revision of the upstream is picked from the same mentioned in the version string.

** In this Release

Sound, Figurines font, tDom, Network (FICS), Online tablebases, ...

Visualisation of analysis engines' PVs on analysis boards.

Allow user set 1st AnalysisEngine to be used as a coach wrt play-uci.

Check Changelog for details including previous releases

** NOTE

This is just a experimental snap packaging of ScidVsPC by HanishKVC, along with some additions and patches (some of which have been upstreamed).